Passions

Oct 16, 2014 — This past August, on the occasion of Volker Schlöndorff’s being selected for a Silver Medallion award by the Telluride Film Festival, Criterion’s Peter Becker talked with the German filmmaker about his long career. A short version of the conversation was...

Jul 23, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s miraculous, melancholy musical is the rare film to use pastiche and artifice to go straight for the heart.

Jun 20, 2014 — Peter Weir’s sun-dappled, sexually charged nightmare about a disappearance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia still unnerves due to its radical lack of resolution.

May 13, 2014 — Few national cinemas have confronted the issue of preparedness for war with the creative vigor of England’s. Thorold Dickinson’s The Next of Kin (1942), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942, from a story by Graham Greene), and, of course,...

Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...

Dec 16, 2013 — A melodramatic investigation of family and class, Kim Ki-young’s film exorcises some demons of 1960s South Korean society.

Dec 13, 2013 — Metin Erksan’s shocking and sensuous tale of greed and rural life was part of a vibrant Turkish cinema of the fifties and sixties.

Dec 12, 2013 — A beloved filmmaker in India, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak digs into his region’s traumatic history in this epic melodrama.

Sep 24, 2013 — Marketed as a movie of volcanic passion, Roberto Rossellini’s first film with Ingrid Bergman is rather a pragmatic take on the negotiations of matrimony.

Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.