The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 21, 2007 — In January 1948, British film producer Sir Alexander Korda, head of British-Lion and London Film Productions, commissioned novelist Graham Greene to write and research “an original postwar continental story to be based on either or both of the following territories:...
Essays
May 21, 2007 — “The Harry Lime Theme” has never gone out of print since its release, and it’s been recorded by over four hundred artists, from the Beatles to Guy Lombardo.
Mar 26, 2007 — Across five films, the Swedish director defined his guiding themes and cinematic style.
Jan 22, 2007 — Spencer Gordon Bennet’s eclectic science fiction–adventure movie bundles a serious patriotic message within its retelling of the Odysseus myth.
Oct 23, 2006 — The New Zealand director’s debut feature is a bridge between her tentative, probing film school works and her subsequent female character studies.
Jun 19, 2006 — This essay originally appeared in the fanzine PHOTON (issue #22), in 1972. Stop-motion animation has been attracting a growing number of enthusiasts for about the last ten years, and though it seems the majority of these people must out of...
Apr 24, 2006 — M ade in 1965 and still considered by many to be Marco Bellocchio’s masterpiece, Fists in the Pocket foreshadows the years of student protest in a family tragedy bordering on horror. This seminal first feature catapulted the twenty-six-year-old Bellocchio to...
Apr 17, 2006 — Another movie, another cause célèbre: this mysterious film by Orson Welles has been dismissed as a disaster and hailed as a masterpiece.
Mar 27, 2006 — The Italian drama marked the first full blossoming of director Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini’s ongoing collaboration.
Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.