The Criterion Collection
Dec 9, 2013 — The critic and WCP executive director offers a personal take on art cinema and a primer on the project’s scope and mission.
Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.
Nov 20, 2012 — For a brief, shining moment, the genteel Japanese studio mutated into a fun house of grim ghouls and slimy aliens.
Jun 11, 2012 — Charlie Chaplin’s transcendent, visionary comedy is made up of one iconic moment after another.
May 29, 2012 — A watershed film in Bergman’s career, this tale of a woman caught between the past and present is a masterful study in darkness and light.
Essays
Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s landmark film intermingles the sacred and profane, associating libertines with holy music, the avant-garde of the thirties, and neoclassical and biblical references.
Features
Jul 6, 2011 — Cinephilia was the buzzword at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about that, of course, but the 2011 edition (the festival’s sixty-fifth—it’s the oldest continuously running film festival in the world), which ran from...
Essays
Nov 23, 2010 — An overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice.—“Porpoise Song”Where there is choice, there is misery.—SwamiHow’s about some more steam?—Sonny Liston The final episode of the television show The Monkees aired March 25, 1968. Cowritten and directed by Micky Dolenz,...
Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Ozu Yasujiro’s personal feelings about Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s are not on record. Perhaps, like most people around him, he accepted the...
Sep 8, 2009 — “It’s not my fault that I’m Japanese . . . yet it’s my worst crime that I am!” The words are those of Kaji, hero of The Human Condition (1959–61), but in his anguish and existential despair, he also speaks...