The Criterion Collection
Sep 12, 2007 — Here’s a Criterion discussion that won’t die. It has to do with Berlin Alexanderplatz, and it came up again this week, thanks to a couple of customers writing in. We were standing there in a clump outside our production manager’s...
Sep 3, 2007 — It came from nowhere, it’s always been here—or so Stranger Than Paradise might seem.Jim Jarmusch had completed his first feature, Permanent Vacation, in 1980 and spent the next four years working on his second. Screened a few times as a...
Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.
Nov 6, 2006 — The circumstances of our first encounters with movies are often as memorable as the movies themselves. Sometimes the juxtaposition of movie and circumstance seems merely accidental; but there are those films that change us enough that we can identify the...
Oct 23, 2006 — Throughout the sixties and seventies, the Italian director created a series of political dramas that were at once provocations, exposés, puzzles, and acts of virtuosity.
Oct 16, 2006 — Screenwriter Carlos Cuarón delves into the character played by Luis De Icaza.
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...
Essays
Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...
Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s crime film contains plenty of the requisite genre elements—double-crossings, violence, kidnappings, and gun battles—but it’s also a pensive meditation on age, friendship, and lost opportunities.