The Moment

Apr 25, 2011 — In 1981, the legendary critic went all out for Blow Out, which she thought was De Palma's most mature work to date.

Jan 11, 2011 — His most personal film as well as the final one to deal with the German occupation of France, Jean-Pierre Melville’s thriller showcases human consciousness grappling with mortality.

Apr 28, 2010 — Just over halfway through Ang Lee’s masterful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, the small group of men at the story’s center, young, Southern-sympathizing Bushwhackers fighting in divided Missouri, meet up with other ragtag bands of rebels. Coalescing under...

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...

Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...

Jun 30, 2008 — The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.

Aug 14, 2006 — The appearance of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales in the midst of the sixties’ sexual revolution brought unexpected sobriety to the European sexual drama and the comedy of erotic manners. Their stateside popularity successfully challenged the sauciness and candor audiences were...

Apr 17, 2006 — In the absence of a finished, definitive edit of Orson Welles’s enigmatic project, three writers dive into the unsolvable mystery of the film and the different versions presented in the Criterion edition.

Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.

Jan 6, 2003 — Ernst Lubitsch set the screwball comedy standard, treating hard-on material with dignified aplomb and a combination of suaveness, hilarity, and sexiness.