The Criterion Collection
Dec 7, 2010 — This exploration of how technology alters its users was not only prophetic but a personal artistic breakthrough for David Cronenberg.
Dec 7, 2010 — Guillermo del Toro understands the power of fairy tales. Not the prettified romances of Charles Perrault, who tamed the Brothers Grimm for French drawing rooms, or the charming animal fables of Aesop, or the reassuring moral lessons Disney made of...
Dec 2, 2010 — Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1968) opens in a shiny space: nuns breeze past; a woman in a white uniform clacks through, bearing towels; a baby cries. People wait. The feeling is “hospital.” A second woman in white delivers towels, and we...
Essays
Nov 23, 2010 — Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended.
Essays
Nov 23, 2010 — An overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice.—“Porpoise Song”Where there is choice, there is misery.—SwamiHow’s about some more steam?—Sonny Liston The final episode of the television show The Monkees aired March 25, 1968. Cowritten and directed by Micky Dolenz,...
Nov 18, 2010 — In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of the sadistic preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)....
Nov 8, 2010 — To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes...
Features
Oct 26, 2010 — For several decades now, William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964) have been major touchstones for me—not only separately but also in some mysterious relation to each other. I even managed to find a way of discussing these...
In Theaters
Oct 22, 2010 — Hot on the heels of the hit theatrical run of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s cult sensation House, Janus Films is premiering another unsung Japanese horror movie with a feline twist. Kuroneko (Black Cat), a chilling 1968 ghost story directed by the incredible...
Though remembered now primarily for his intense, spare 1960s gangster films, this French master had a startlingly varied career, encompassing wartime dramas and psychosexual character studies.