On their surfaces, Mike Leigh and J.M.W. Turner — the artist at the center of his latest film, Mr. Turner — couldn’t seem more like polar opposites. The 19th-ce...
Abderrahmane Sissako can no longer be called one of the greatest African directors of our time; he has become, simply, one of the greatest directors of our time...
A tracking shot slowly moves around a blonde princess on a Hollywood set. We follow the applause as she leaves for the final time and into her dressing room, le...
As much as we'd love to believe certain myths, no filmmaker has simply waltzed into making a masterpiece without cutting their teeth beforehand. Jaws may ha...
Thanks to the work of the Harold Lloyd Entertainment and Janus Films, Lloyd’s 1925 comedic masterpiece The Freshman is the latest film to join the Criterion Collection in a fantastic new Blu-Ray. The college set, football-obsessed feature is one of Lloyd’s consistent works, showing off both his skills as a master of elongated gag set pieces as well as the character’s down to Earth pathos. Like the release of Safety Last!, Criterion has also included three recently restored shorts with new orchestral scores that demonstrate aspects of Lloyd’s comic forte from a slightly earlier period in his career....
If the contemporary experience of watching Akira Kurosawa has been colored by commentary describing his work as “channeling meaning towards a single destina...
No matter what “period” of his career you search, one of Steven Soderbergh's main interests has always been the concept of transaction. How does A become B ...
With Michael Mann's directorial debut getting The Criterion Collection treatment, we look at how it's a film of flows, one both about and made through them....
It is strange to think that even now, in an age with seemingly infinite access to the entire world of cinema, many of our viewings are quite limited in thei...
When the Criterion Collection announced that Yasujirô Ozu’s towering 1953 work, Tokyo Story, would be coming to Blu-ray, my first reaction was “shit.” Not t...
