The Criterion Collection
Sneak Peeks
Mar 31, 2016 — Since its initial release more than half a century ago, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves has been lauded as one of cinema’s greatest achievements. Loosely adapted from a novel by Luigi Bartolini, the film centers on a father’s quest—with his...
Sneak Peeks
Mar 9, 2016 — As late, beloved French auteur Jacques Rivette came of age in the early 1950s, a thriving film culture in Paris was developing around the journal Cahiers du cinéma, for which Rivette wrote (and was later editor in chief). Rivette soon...
Short Takes
Oct 9, 2015 — Agnès Varda keeps popping up in the most unexpected places.
May 1, 2015 — In his first feature, Jean-Pierre Melville found subtly radical ways to adapt Vercors's underground French novel about quiet resistance against the German occupation.
Sneak Peeks
Apr 28, 2015 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le silence de la mer is undoubtedly one of the most assured film debuts of all time; an adaptation of an underground novel by Jean Bruller, written (under the pseudonym Vercors) during the Nazi occupation of France, the...
Features
Jun 12, 2014 — The filmmaker’s latest offering at the film festival reaffirms the author’s faith in him.
Short Takes
May 6, 2013 — The films of Max Ophuls, whose birthday we celebrate today, are luxuriously cinematic. His camera glides and tracks and cranes; we viewers swoon. But, as Molly Haskell has written, “the roving camera and the visual glissandos are never virtuoso flourishes...
Essays
Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...
Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.
Jul 24, 2012 — Trained as a musician, Jean Grémillon became one of French cinema’s most lyrical artists. His most beloved films were made during World War II.