Our Relations

Jan 14, 2015 — Legendary German-born cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Broadcast News, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas) broke through in film working with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. After shooting Whity and Beware of a Holy Whore for the filmmaker, Ballhaus was enlisted to visualize The...

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Dec 2, 2014 — Les Blank’s documentaries focusing on musicians are wonderfully easygoing and authentic. Watching films like A Well Spent Life, a 1971 portrait of Texas blues guitarist Mance Lipscomb, one senses a relationship of total trust between subjects and filmmakers. In this...

Nov 10, 2014 — Monte Hellman’s existential westerns take Beckett to the desert.

Oct 22, 2014 — In a fascinating 1963 audio interview featured on our new release of La dolce vita, actor Marcello Mastroianni talks to film historian Gideon Bachmann about how he met Federico Fellini and was cast in La dolce vita. This disarmingly personal excerpt...

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...

Oct 14, 2014 — What happens offscreen is as important as what’s on- in John Ford’s subtle, elegiac take on the Wyatt Earp–Doc Holliday story.

Oct 1, 2014 — In the hands of director Serge Bourguignon, a potentially sensationalistic story becomes a poetic and complex investigation of love and pain.

Sep 2, 2014 — The following is excerpted from the book-length study Terence Davies, out September 8. See the bottom of the post for a clip of the scene it describes. Excerpt copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois...

May 27, 2014 — Howard Hawks was both a skillful Hollywood craftsman and a deeply personal artist, and this western of uncommon wit and grandeur is among his greatest and quirkiest films.