The Criterion Collection
Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....
Essays
Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first feature is the kind of uncanny, equivocally realist movie you might hope to duck into in a strange city, stumbling across it in a low-rent theater while escaping a bad date or a debt collector.
Essays
May 21, 2007 — Carol Reed’s masterpiece dives deep into the life and mind of screenwriter Graham Greene, one of Britain’s greatest postwar novelist.
Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.
Nov 6, 2006 — The circumstances of our first encounters with movies are often as memorable as the movies themselves. Sometimes the juxtaposition of movie and circumstance seems merely accidental; but there are those films that change us enough that we can identify the...
Essays
May 22, 2006 — Luis Buñuel’s merciless satire concerns the smallness of our vision of progress and our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning.
Essays
Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s World War II–era drama follows a young collaborationist in rural France and asks how people with no interest in politics become active participants in brutal torture.
Nov 7, 2005 — Often appearing on lists of the ten greatest films of all time, called one of the most beautiful films ever made, or the most masterful work of Japanese cinema, Ugetsu comes to us awash in superlatives. No less acclaimed has...
Essays
Jun 27, 2005 — Like his earlier adaptations of Terence Rattigan plays, Anthony Asquith’s late work is bereft of heavy-handed directorial flourishes.
Mar 13, 2004 — With uncharacteristic warmth and affection for human frailty, Ingmar Bergman raises the question of how love can possibly last forever.