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.

Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s dynamic, intricately madcap movie is a multitoned send-up of samurai film lore.

Feb 22, 1999 — Flipping around the channels of late-night TV in my Tokyo apartment in 1984 I came across what seemed like a B movie from the ’60s. The studio: Nikkatsu. The star: Joe Shishido. The director: Seijun Suzuki. I was not at...

Aug 22, 2017 — French cinema titan Sacha Guitry brings a savage misanthropy to this exploration of a toxic marriage and the arbitrariness of the legal system.

Sep 10, 2015 — Noah Baumbach asks one of his idols, Brian De Palma, about the stunningly elaborate museum sequence in Dressed to Kill.

Feb 26, 2015 — Ben Wheatley is the director of Down Terrace, Kill List, Sightseers, and A Field in England. He says: “Criterion, to me, has always been an exclusive collection. It stood out due to the choices they made and the design. But...

Jan 4, 1988 — The Secret Agent (1936) came to life in the prime of Alfred Hitchcock’s British period. It arrived between the popular triumph of The 39 Steps and the box-office rejection of Sabotage, a more daringly downbeat work. Secret Agent partakes of...

Oct 12, 2007 — From an interview with Ang Lee in the Northwest Asia Weekly: NWAW: Two years ago, you recorded an introduction for the Criterion Collection DVD of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a film that had a tremendous impact on you as...

Mar 10, 2003 — The Swedish director of I Am Curious explains how he fused the themes of eroticism, self-exploration, voyeurism, and nonviolence into a film about the new freedoms of the young. QUESTION: I Am Curious seemed to be a cinematic Tristram Shandy,...

Dec 11, 2009 — This expansive tribute to the iconic Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai was first published on the Criterion Collection’s website in fall 2005, around the time of the Criterion releases of two films starring Nakadai: Kurosawa’s Ran and the less well-known samurai...