The Criterion Collection
Jun 3, 2009 — We’ve pieced together comments from production designer Donald Burt and property master Hope Parrish of working with the supermeticulous and precise David Fincher on perfecting the atmosphere and historical accuracy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. You can click...
May 6, 2009 — Donald Richie recently came through the United States on his eighty-fifth-birthday tour, and along the way he stopped in Berkeley for a conversation with longtime friend, Telluride codirector, and Mishima producer Tom Luddy. Those who have heard Donald’s Criterion interviews...
Apr 9, 2009 — The first time I “met” Max was in May of 1959, when Bergman’s stunning production of Urfaust came to London for just one week in the World Theatre Season. Groupie of all things Swedish that I was, I waited outside...
Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.
Nov 16, 2008 — Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop-art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the children...
Essays
Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...
Sep 29, 2008 — After Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963, some thirty-two diaries were discovered. They were from 1933 to 1963, and though a few years were missing, they offer a commentary on the life of the director and reveal...
Mar 17, 2008 — Francesco Rosi’s film is a painstakingly documented reconstruction of the nefarious relationships between the Mafia, banditry, and economic and political power in Sicily between 1943 and 1950.
Oct 15, 2007 — One of Spain’s most acclaimed and prolific directors, Carlos Saura emerged as an artist in the late 1950s under Franco’s dictatorship and immediately made his mark as an incisive, if necessarily allusive, social and political commentator.
Sep 17, 2007 — G. W. Pabst’s adaptation of the play by Bertolt Brecht transforms the original without betraying it, softening its cynicism with humanity and integrating elements of psychoanalysis.