The Criterion Collection
Jun 1, 2015 — A legionnaire turned fruit seller misses out on Germany’s economic miracle in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s breakthrough melodrama.
Jan 15, 2009 — I have never seen New York look so beautifully grand as it did during my trip to Paris this New Year’s. Maybe I should explain. It was my great fortune to be visiting the City of Light while the intensely...
Oct 12, 2007 — From an interview with Ang Lee in the Northwest Asia Weekly: NWAW: Two years ago, you recorded an introduction for the Criterion Collection DVD of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a film that had a tremendous impact on you as...
Jun 21, 2004 — Indefatigably productive, ingenious, exasperating, narcissistically didactic, slyly self-promoting, abject, generous, exploitative, devoted to the wretched of the earth with honest fervor and deluded romanticism: Pier Paolo Pasolini can easily exhaust the adjective-prone, as man and artist, his person and his...
Essays
Sep 8, 1998 — In David Lean’s Summertime, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine Hepburn—an aging, repressed Ohio “working girl” on vacation in Venice—the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello Mastroianni,...
Dec 16, 1991 — Lady for a Day represented a watershed in the career of Frank Capra. The young director had been laboring at Columbia Pictures’ Poverty Row Studio, churning out 18 films in less than six years. He had moved from low-budget programmers...
The writer and director of His Three Daughters shares his deep love for Charles Laughton, talks about how Aki Kaurismäki blends fantasy and reality in La vie de bohème, and praises La Ciénaga and Girlfriends as cinematic miracles.
The comedian, actor, and director talks about loving the relatable weirdness of Grey Gardens and the compulsive passion of Crumb; praises Miranda July’s singular, offbeat voice; and shares how The 400 Blows (a Natasha Lyonne recommendation) evokes empathy for the...
The actor and director praises Midnight Cowboy as “a miracle of a movie,” calls James Stewart his favorite actor, and talks about discovering John Cassavetes’s films in his teenage years.