The Criterion Collection
Dec 16, 2008 — Science-fiction drama, western, love story, metaphysical mystery, and satire of modern America, Nicolas Roeg’s beguiling film established him as a mainstream heir to such 1960s experimentalists as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker.
Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.
Jan 21, 2008 — The feminist politics of Agnès Varda’s marital drama were ahead of their time, but it is on the level of form that the film is so unsettling and calls up contradictory interpretations.
Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...
Essays
Jun 18, 2007 — Yasujiro Ozu had already directed forty-five features by the time he started work on Early Spring, in 1955, but the artistic and commercial success of his previous film, Tokyo Story (1953), had rejuvenated him.
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.
Oct 24, 2005 — The hero in Masahiro Shinoda’s popular samurai movie is both a genre figure and an ordinary character, both killer and savior, both larger than life and lost in the mists.
Essays
Mar 14, 2005 — The appearance of this 1966 film signaled not only the debut of Volker Schlöndorff as a major international filmmaker but also the beginnings of what would become known as the New German Cinema, one of the most important film movements...
Jan 17, 2005 — Along with Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Trou, Casque d’or is now widely recognized as the summit of Jacques Becker’s achievement as a filmmaker.
Mar 13, 2004 — With uncharacteristic warmth and affection for human frailty, Ingmar Bergman raises the question of how love can possibly last forever.