The Criterion Collection
Oct 23, 2013 — If there’s one quality that separates John Cassavetes’s movies from almost everybody else’s, it’s the density of detail in the storytelling. His films need to be read closely, from beginning to end. There are no lulls with Cassavetes, no lapses...
Sep 26, 2013 — Roberto Rossellini officially left neorealism behind with his modern masterpiece, an intimate tale of marriage on the rocks.
Short Takes
Sep 17, 2013 — The author sheds some light on the fascinating life of the American scriptwriter behind Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan.
Aug 30, 2013 — Did You See This?• The great beauty of actor Toni Servillo • De Palma on De Palma • Support an LGBT film festival in Russia. • See the real New York. • Ginger Rogers, working girl • Successes here, shockers...
Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.
Sneak Peeks
Mar 14, 2013 — Ministry of Fear, now available for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray in the U.S., was the eighth film Fritz Lang made in Hollywood after emigrating from Germany in 1936. It was also, as author Joe McElhaney (The Death...
Feb 19, 2013 — Elia Kazan’s masterwork is a vivid, tough look at a time and place, and a transcendent human drama.
Essays
Nov 14, 2012 — Jean Luc Godard’s exuberant, multipronged attack on the bourgeoisie is both theater of the absurd and political horror.
Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...
Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...