Mizoguchi's women

by Cláudio Alves

Last time we talked about Japanese cinema, we were looking at the history of the Best Costume Design Oscar. Among the five pictures from Japan nominated for that awards, we find Ugetsu, the only Kenji Mizoguchi film to ever receive any sort of recognition by the Academy. Considering some of the director's best films are currently available online thanks to platforms like the Criterion Channel, Kanopy, and HBO Max, it seems like a good time to highlight more of his cinematic mastery. After all, there's much greatness in Mizoguchi's exquisite cinema beyond the sartorial splendor of Ugetsu…

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Jean Arthur on Criterion

by Cláudio Alves

Charming and witty, Jean Arthur was one of the great actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. While nowadays she's most famous for her comedic works, Arthur wasn't constricted to only humorous movies, being able to play everything from melodramas to crime pictures. Still, it's easy to see why her comedy talents are her calling card to this day. The actress was able to bring the manic, unstable energy of screwball comedy to all of her movies, imbuing them with an electrifying unpredictability. Like a black hole can bend light, so did Arthur bend the tone of every film she was in, making projects bow to the power of her screen presence and helping them become better, more complicated cinema in the process.

Her filmography is full of greatness. The Criterion Channel is celebrating her enviable resume with a new collection of 16 of her films available to stream. Here are some major highlights from that sterling selection…

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Under the Sun of Satan: Did it deserve the boos?

by Cláudio Alves

Films being booed at Cannes has stopped being newsworthy. Over the years, countless pictures were received by a chorus of boos when they bowed at the Croisette, either because of their daring qualities or the transgressive nature of their subject matters. Rare is the true mediocrity that earns boos. For those unhappy films, indifference is a more common laurel than a crown of controversy. One of the most famous examples of a film being publicly reviled at Canne was in the 1987 edition when Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan was unanimously voted as the Palme d'Or winner only to be lambasted on the spot by a furious audience.

Accepting his award amid the vitriolic chaos, the first French director to win that honor since 1966, spoke with his usual combativeness...

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A Rita Hayworth lovefest

by Cláudio Alves

Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, Rita Hayworth was one of Old Hollywood's brightest and most glamourous stars. As it often happens with such legends of the silver screen, her life was an unhappy one, full of tales of abuse and five failed marriages, crippling insecurity, alcoholism and Alzheimers. Perhaps more hauntingly, her biographers agree that Hayworth despised her existence as a movie star and as a pin-up icon, longing to escape the movie business in her heyday. In Hayworth's later years, she would even come to express disdain towards some of her more famous movies like the iconic Gilda. Still, those same pictures, as well as other classics, made her an immortal legend.

To explore the filmography of Rita Hayworth is to confront the cruel incongruences of her biography, how the movies sculpted her into something bigger than life and made her suffer for it too…

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70s Fashion on Criterion

by Cláudio Alves

The relationship between fashion and cinema is a complex one, with influence going both ways. Sometimes, runway shows take their cues from the glory of the silver screen, while costume designers can find inspiration on the pages of Vogue. In cases such as the collaboration between Audrey Hepburn, Edith Head and Hubert de Givenchy, it's a multifaceted symbiosis where couture and cinema walk hand in hand to the benefit of both. These dynamics aren't exclusive to the Golden Age of Hollywood and the big studios, of course. Just look at the great style icons of the 70s moviedom...

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