The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Feb 11, 2011 — Danish cinematographer Henning Bendtsen—whose career stretched from the 1940s to 1991, with his final film, Lars von Trier’s Europa—has died at the age of eighty-five. Bendtsen is best known, perhaps, for the transcendent images he created with director Carl Theodor...
Short Takes
Feb 2, 2011 — In a monster profile in this week’s New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski delves into the good-naturedly grotesque universe of Mexican horror auteur Guillermo del Toro (Cronos). Painting del Toro as a descendant of both such beast-obsessed fanboys as Famous Monsters of...
Features
Feb 2, 2011 — These tributes first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. They are posted here by permission of the authors. The photographs appear courtesy of Colleen Murphy. Colleen Murphy After we decided to...
Interviews
Feb 2, 2011 — This interview was published in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the Toronto International Film Festival. The photograph appears courtesy of Colleen Murphy. We met on March...
Jan 24, 2011 — A character-driven tale of driven characters whose professional triangle trumps their romantic one, Broadcast News (1987) takes place after the fall of the Equal Rights Amendment and before the fall of the Berlin Wall—a time when gender wars and cold...
Short Takes
Jan 20, 2011 — It’s been two decades since Richard Linklater’s Slacker shook up American independent film and helped define a generation. This week, on the eve of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, journalist Mark Savlov sat down with Linklater and writer John Pierson...
Jan 18, 2011 — By 1963, when he started filming Shock Corridor on a rented soundstage, Samuel Fuller had come ruefully and puckishly to view himself as a “Lindy,” a diminutive for Charles Lindbergh designating a prostitute who, like the famous aviator, operates solo,...
Essays
Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...
Short Takes
Jan 10, 2011 — Stage-bound is not a term one is apt to associate with the minimalist, resolutely un-dialogue-driven movie worlds of Michelangelo Antonioni. But that hasn’t deterred Ivo van Hove (the artistic director of the Netherlands’ most acclaimed theater company) from adapting three...
Production Notes
Jan 10, 2011 — I was deeply saddened by today’s news of the passing of Peter Yates, whom I had the honor to meet while producing Criterion’s DVD for his great seventies crime picture The Friends of Eddie Coyle. His death marks the loss...