Peter Labuza

While there was a certain tendency in French cinema, two of the great directors of this era that would be exalted by Cahiers Du Cinema designed two very different yet complimentary systems to tell stories. On one side, the young blood of Jean-Pierre Melville, a so-called American in Paris, but more accurately, a geometrician of human calculations. On the other: the old master, Jean Renoir, who makes every moment of cinema feel accidentally captured, and thus indelibly human....

Because our view of film history often derives through the auteurist lens, we look at Ozu’s crime dramas and see something bold and experimental, breaking all senses of his work as we’ve come to know it....

Within our contemporary reception of Birth of a Nation, a certain question always arises: can we separate the film’s narrative form from its content?...

A Day in the Country, Jean Renoir's 1936 impressionist image of past frivolities drowning in time, is drenched in the myths of its production: a sudden rainstorm halted the production and had to be integrated in the story; Renoir could never return to it because of a "creative block"; the mid-sized length was conceived by its producer while having a creative breakthrough as he hid from the Nazis. And thus the film that developed, which is now out on Criterion Blu-ray, is its own miracle....

To begin, a cliché (albeit one that’s true): a great first scene will tell you how to watch the rest of the movie. Not necessarily who is important to the s...

We explore the latest Rainer Werner Fassbinder addition to The Criterion Collection....