The Criterion Collection
Dec 11, 2009 — This expansive tribute to the iconic Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai was first published on the Criterion Collection’s website in fall 2005, around the time of the Criterion releases of two films starring Nakadai: Kurosawa’s Ran and the less well-known samurai...
Nov 30, 2009 — The following essay was originally written for Criterion’s website in 2005, on the occasion of the DVD release of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. We have posted it here to coincide with BFI Southbank’s ongoing Hein Heckroth exhibition...
Sep 22, 2009 — Abandoning the cinematic conventions and references that informed his previous works, Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive crime drama reaches new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention.
Jun 24, 2009 — The following tribute to Sacha Vierny by Alain Resnais (pictured together above, Resnais left) was published in the October 2001 issue of Positif. It is based on an interview conducted by François Thomas and was translated for Criterion by Nicholas...
Jun 19, 2009 — Forty-six years ago, Last Year at Marienbad opened in London. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet came over for the press screening, and I chatted to them in the lobby of the now defunct Cameo-Poly art house on London’s Upper Regent Street. Resnais...
Jun 16, 2009 — In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,”...
May 25, 2009 — Reported from the set of Eddie Coyle by New Journalism trailblazer Grover Lewis, this article is a profile of Robert Mitchum that features extensive, idiosyncratic monologues by Mitchum himself.
May 13, 2009 — It doesn’t really come as a surprise that Chris Marker is a devoted inhabitant of the virtual world Second Life. After all, one could call the playful French filmmaker and multimedia artist’s kitty—and alter ego—Guillaume-en-Egypt a trailblazing avatar (when asked...
Apr 21, 2009 — Fifty years ago today . . . Godard wrote this New Wave battle cry for the April 22, 1959, issue of the French journal Arts, on the news of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows being selected to represent France at...
Apr 16, 2009 — Next week, we release a definitive, three-disc set of the short documentaries of Jean Painlevé (1902–89), the pioneering French scientist-educator-filmmaker (and sometime Dadaist) whose mesmerizing studies of marine life, especially, have been attracting wide audiences and new fans for decades...