japan

May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...

Apr 17, 2017 — The illustrious résumé of Tatsuya Nakadai doubles as a snapshot of Japanese cinema in its golden age. Starting in the 1950s, the wildly prolific actor made a career out of shape-shifting, amassing credits in a wide range of films that...

Apr 4, 2017 — Through an alchemy of stylistic flair and creative restlessness, Seijun Suzuki was able to transcend the by-the-numbers material he was assigned as a director at Japan’s oldest film studio, Nikkatsu, to become one of the most electrifying genre auteurs of...

Mar 23, 2017 — With a monumental body of work spanning nearly six decades, thirty feature films, and a staggering array of styles and genres, Akira Kurosawa has been a cornerstone of our collection since we released Seven Samurai as our second Criterion edition...

Feb 24, 2017 — Did You See This? In an excerpt from his new book This Young Monster, Charlie Fox considers the “fearsome lucidity” of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: “There were no signs of a drooling id let loose or canny subterfuge between his public...

Feb 24, 2017 — Cinema lost one of its most venerated maestros of excess last week with the passing of director Seijun Suzuki, whose signature films from the 1960s exploded the conventions of the Japanese studio system. While honing his craft in dozens of...

Feb 23, 2017 — The week before Get Out opened to groundbreaking box-office success, we spoke with the director about the fine line between comedy and horror.

Jan 27, 2017 — Did You See This? In a new interview with Film Comment, Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak discusses his collaborations with Krzysztof Kieślowski and his transition to working on Hollywood films like Gattaca and Black Hawk Down. “After the unexpected explosion of...

Jan 26, 2017 — Repertory PicksThis Saturday, as part of its monthlong series celebrating the career of legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center will screen Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1952 The Life of Oharu on 35 mm. Adapted from poet-novelist Ihara Saikaku’s...

Jan 6, 2017 — Did You See This? With Alain Resnais’s Muriel, or The Time of Return now streaming on FilmStruck, Leo Robson explores how this radical meditation on memory “invites broader questions about what happens when we return to a movie: Is rewatching...