On Blue

Nov 21, 2005 — Why would ambitious filmmakers simply film an opera? Many admirers of the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have assumed that their decision to make The Tales of Hoffmann, in 1950, was in some way an admission by the...

Jun 13, 2005 — Ernst Lubitsch was a big-city director. The historical dramas that he made in Germany in the late 1910s and early 1920s were known around the world for their distinctively urbane approach, focusing on the private lives of public people. This...

Oct 18, 2004 — Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois, Nixon as Krapp—clutching every last tape to his breast with the wild fury and despair of a man on the precipice . . . Nixon in his study, poring over...

Jun 23, 2003 — The following text is from Michael Töteberg’s presentation of a collection of Fassbinder screenplays (The Merchant of Four Seasons, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fontane Effi Briest), which were published in Germany as Fassbinders Filme, Band 3 (Fassbinder’s Films, Vol....

Dec 19, 1993 — The first above-ground picture made by John Waters was a cinematic breakthrough more profound than Dolby sound or Cinerama.

Mar 30, 2015 — A master of using the camera to draw truth from interview subjects, Errol Morris was unsurprisingly a candid and fascinating interview subject himself in new supplements we made for the Criterion releases of Gates of Heaven/Vernon, Florida and The Thin...

Nov 22, 2017 — The Oscar-winning director of last year’s indie sensation Moonlight shares how he fell in love with the art of storytelling in a new conversation on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Oct 3, 2016 — Polish music icon Zbigniew Preisner, who first worked with the Dekalog director on 1985’s No End and went on to contribute to all of his subsequent films. Here, we present a selected playlist of Preisner’s most memorable work for Kieślowski.

Aug 16, 2018 — The Cleveland Museum of Art salutes the late Italian master Ermanno Olmi with a screening of Il posto, a touching and wisely funny look at the trials of work.

Aug 14, 2006 — The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career are not Eric Rohmer’s first films. By 1963, he had made several shorts and one feature, Le signe du Lion. Yet these two short works—with their meticulously charted Paris locations; their semidocumentary...