The Big One

Apr 19, 2009 — Big and Little Edie fans have been coming in droves to take advantage of our Grey Gardens $5-off sale. To such an extent, indeed, that we’ve temporarily sold out of our two-disc box set, including both the original film and...

Dec 16, 2008 — More than a year ago, Peter and I were in the midst of discussions about how we wanted to launch the Criterion cinematheque. Over time, those discussions expanded to include every department at Criterion. We wanted to have a single...

Oct 14, 2008 — Okay, quiz time. What does the music video for Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” have to do with the Criterion Collection? Give up? Well, it was shot by none other than ace director of photography Christopher Doyle, whose work is being brought...

Aug 18, 2008 — One of the most awarded films in Japanese history, Keisuke Kinoshita’s nostalgia piece unfolds a celebration of family values and scenic beauty.

Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .

Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.

Oct 28, 2007 — When I started preparing for a new transfer of The Ice Storm, I asked director Ang Lee if he wanted to supervise the session. Ang said that he’d like the cinematographer, Fred Elmes, to supervise, and that he would come...

Aug 20, 2007 — David Mamet’s debut film was a welcome throwback to the primacy of character and careful story construction, at a time when narrative intricacy was in short supply on American movie screens.

Dec 4, 2006 — I had said that I was going to write about growing up with a projector in my attic, and Peter’s writing about home last week brought back some memories. Movies were cool. In the late sixties, my father would bring...

Oct 16, 2006 — Alfonso Cuarón’s first film—a sex farce that pokes fun at Mexican culture, including a public-service AIDS campaign—emerged from Mexico’s beleaguered state funding system for cinema, and was initially shelved by the government.