The Criterion Collection
Mar 17, 2008 — Francesco Rosi’s film is a painstakingly documented reconstruction of the nefarious relationships between the Mafia, banditry, and economic and political power in Sicily between 1943 and 1950.
Essays
Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first feature is the kind of uncanny, equivocally realist movie you might hope to duck into in a strange city, stumbling across it in a low-rent theater while escaping a bad date or a debt collector.
Essays
May 22, 2006 — Luis Buñuel’s merciless satire concerns the smallness of our vision of progress and our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning.
Jan 5, 2006 — A gray flannel ghost story in which the living haunt the dead, the least appreciated of Akira Kurosawa’s midperiod collaborations with Toshiro Mifune throws open the windows of Japanese corporate corruption.
Essays
Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s subversion of the samurai movie possesses the same gritty, stark realism with regard to imagery and body count, yet the tone is decidedly comic.
Essays
Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s dynamic, intricately madcap movie is a multitoned send-up of samurai film lore.
Essays
Jul 11, 2005 — Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story balances realism and fantasy.
Jun 9, 2003 — In Stan Brakhage’s films we enter into momentary perceptual transactions in which we trade unhindered assimilation of images for intensified contact with pictorial or sensory features that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Essays
Apr 28, 2003 — Federico Fellini both identifies with and satirizes the provinciality that forms his romantic comedy's central subject.
Essays
Sep 17, 2001 — George Sluizer’s nightmarish film is a study in everyday madness, rooted in the specifics of the Dutch and French landscapes and character.