Criterion Collection
Articles and Essays on Criterion Collection
Gospel According to St. Matthew, The (1964)
Only Pier Paolo Pasolini, an artist who was an atheist, a Marxist, and a homosexual could have made such an authentic and effective film on the life and death of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it was because the story was adapted by a nonbeliever who did not preach, glorify, sentimentalize or romanticize the famous story; and instead did his best […]
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Life of Oharu, The (1952)
The film begins on a chill dawn in the dark outskirts of Kyoto, while the heroine named Oharu, her face hidden behind a fan, encounters some of her fellow prostitutes. “It’s hard for 50-year-old women to pass as 20,” she observes. The women ultimately find a friend who has built a fire, and huddle around […]
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Weekend (1967)
Jean-Luc Godard’s cathartically political and infuriating masterpiece Weekend is one of the key films of the late 1960’s. It is on one hand a chaotically brilliant black comedy and on the other hand a surrealistically acid disdain on the nihilistic bourgeoisie consumer society. Weekend is less like a film and more like a abstract angry political collage, as its pop art […]
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A Man Escaped (1956)
Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is generally looked at as one of the greatest prison-break movies ever made. The story was inspired by Andre Devigny, a decorated French lieutenant in World War II who escaped from Fort Montlue prison in German-occupied Lyon in 1943. Besides the beginning and final shots of the film, the entire story is […]
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Double Life of Véronique, The (1991)
Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique is a mesmerizing and poetic film experience which expresses such transcendent feelings as intuition, identity, fate and free-will. Are we alone in this universe, or is there more than one of us? We have no rational understanding of this, it is simply a feeling that we have, perhaps physical or metaphysical, as […]
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