The Criterion Collection
Feb 10, 2003 — The poet Paul Eluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car. Ordinarily, I would settle for that. However, with so much being written about the film...
Essays
Aug 18, 2022 — With an obsessive attention to detail and tiny gestures, Ronald Bronstein’s debut feature film turns the tale of one neurotic Brooklyn man into a furious work of personal cinema.
Jun 16, 2009 — In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,”...
In Theaters
Oct 13, 2016 — Jean Renoir’s captivating coming-of-age tale The River, playing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, centers on the relationship between three teenage girls growing up in Bengal, India.
Aug 22, 2025 — Charles Busch is the author and star of many plays, including the Tony-nominated The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, as well as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, one of the longest running plays in off-Broadway history. In 2024, he was inducted...
Jan 12, 2011 — Scott Morse is a storyteller with one foot in the world of comics and the other in the world of film. His books Soulwind, Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!, and the Kurosawa-inspired tale The Barefoot Serpent have garnered critical acclaim and a...
Nov 21, 2008 — Kevin Macdonald is the grandson of the filmmaker Emeric Pressburger (A Canterbury Tale, The Red Shoes). Macdonald’s directorial credits include 2000's Academy Award–winning One Day in September, about the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and 2003's...
Essays
Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...
Mar 4, 2016 — Over the past half century, production designer Jack Fisk has created some of cinema’s most memorable on-screen worlds—from the farmlands of early-twentieth-century Texas to the byways of contemporary Los Angeles.
Features
Mar 11, 1993 — Released the year before Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars, Nicolas Roeg’s terrestrial space opera is devoid of matte shots, models, or pyrotechnics, and it leaves us not wondering at the stars but grieving for ourselves.