Lost in Criterion

It's week 2 of the Zatoichi boxset and we get our first taste of what will become a favorite aspect of the films moving forward: Zatoichi versus a corrupt government. That doesn't show up until movie six though, and we've got two others to talk about, too. First up is Zatoichi the Fugitive (Tokuzo Tanaka, 1963) which kicks off with some comedy sumo and sees the return of Otane from the first two f...

Oh boy. Sometimes the Criterion Collection hears a whiff that there's two guys doing a Spine Number podcast and says to themselves, "What can we do to mess this up?" Normally, within the Collection, and therefore within our podcast, each Spine Number release is a single film (or maybe a couple) or a collection of short works. Sometimes a boxset will have it's own number, but if the films in the bo...

We kick off 2026 with a Michelangelo Antonioni film which totally bodes well. La Notte (1961) is the second of three or four films about middle class discontents in a rapidly changing world, and the last of the four that Criterion has decided to show us. It also caps off nearly two months of Lost in Criterion episodes dealing with divorce or other marital troubles - especially if you cast that net...

Every December, during the darkest times of the year in our part of the world, we take a little break from our unending Criterion Quest to gather with friends and watch a film that takes place during the winter holidays that is not at all a holiday movie. We may have found the platonic ideal of that concept in this year's offering. According to the intertitles, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), dire...

Lewis Allen only gets one film in the Criterion Collection but it's a pretty fun one. The Uninvited (1944) doesn't have great special effects for a haunted house flick, or especially bad ones which can be fun in their own right, but it does have an over-complicated story about family lies, two ghosts who hate each other, a mean lesbian, and cinematography by Charles Lang Jr. And while the film is...

René Clair was an early favorite among the filmmakers this project introduced us to. It was a lifetime ago what we watched Le Million (Spine 72), A Nous la Liberte (Spine 160), and Under the Roofs of Paris (Spine 161) but they have stuck with us. And indeed it seems like Clair had lived a lifetime or two between those early 1930s French films and I Married a Witch (1941) just 10 years later, his s...

The third and final film in the 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman boxset is another film in a long list of looks at the class and culture of Naples, Italy across time - Rossellini's own Paisan, Rosi's Hands over the City (and his Neapolitan Diary), Garrone's Gomorrah, to name a few. While the story of Journey to Italy (1954) is about a British couple decoupling and recoupling w...

The second film in our journey through the Roberto Rossellini Directs Ingrid Bergman boxset doesn't lead either our agnostic or Christian host to denounce the story's conversion narrative like last week's film. Instead, Europe '51 is a tale of a bourgeois woman reacting to tragedy by embracing social solidarity in a pre-Liberation Theology Catholicism, so a St. Francis-like faith that still thinks...

This week we start 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, a boxset containing three of the five films Rossellini and Bergman made together over the course of their 7 year relationship. We've already seen enough variety from Rossellini, chronologically before and after this set in his career - The War Trilogy, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, The Flowers of St. Francis, Il Generale...

Sometimes Criterion shows us a single film from a director we'd never seen before and leaves us wanting for the rest of our project, so often actually that we call them "one and dones". But then sometimes Criterion shows us a movie by Edouard Molinaro and it's fine that they aren't going to show us another. La Cage aux Folles (1978) is a funny movie, and is also a film that wants to show a very no...

A problem talking about the films of Ernst Lubitsch is that it's very hard not to just start listing the good gags, and To Be or Not to Be (1942) is full of great gags. It's also full of suspense - a film that seamlessly balances noir-ish intrigue with farce. Fascism deserves to be mocked. Fascism is a performance, and can be undermined with performance. To wring our hands over jokes about Hitler,...

Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) is a masterpiece. We haven't seen a film that so exquisitely captures longing since Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) 500 Spines ago. In ten more years I suspect I will still be thinking about the visuals of Charulata - the swing, the bedroom window, that final pair of freeze frames - as much as I still think about, say, the camera following the cigarette i...

We absolutely fell in love with the films of Satyajit Ray when we first watched The Music Room a few years ago, and we are so happy that Criterion is finally showing us more of his work. The Big City (1963) is an Ozu-like take of the effect progress has on the "traditional" family, an ode to female emancipation, and a condemnation of social, racial, and gender-based discrimination in Ray's homelan...

We get our first John Frankenheimer feature in the Collection with Seconds (1966), though we covered his version of Dr. Moreau on a Patreon episode recently and also he directed The Comedians teleplay in the Golden Age of Television boxset. In Seconds a late middle aged banker, bored with career and marriage is stalked and blackmailed into using a MLM service that promises a new life with the face...

Sometimes the Criterion Collection goes and does a silly thing, like releasing Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone as Spine 666. How spooky! One of the great Mexican director's films about how fascism is bad for children - a lesson we as a society apparently do actually keep needing to learn - The Devil's Backbone sets a ghost story at an orphanage during the waning years of the Spanish Civi...

Gabriel Axel's beautiful Babette's Feast (1987) looks at food as art and art as freedom. "Give me leave to do my utmost" - allow each of us the resources and time to create and any of us can create. Capital destroys the Commune, destroys the freedom of resources, creates scarcity and destroys art. But still the artist lives, and lives abundantly.

We are very happy to finally get another Kenji Mizoguchi film with The Life of Oharu (1952), a film that kicked off a postwar boon for the famed Japanese director. This melancholy tale shows us the dangers of patriarchy and social hierarchy, like how it can lead to Mifune getting cameo'd to death.

In addition to Shoah (1985), the Criterion release contains three of the five additional films Claude Lanzmann has made from the footage he shot for his landmark documentary. A Visitor from the Living (1997) is an interview with Maurice Rossel in which Lanzmann swings hard at Rossel's report for the Red Cross on conditions in the "potemkin ghetto" of Theresienstadt. In Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4...

The second half of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) focuses on explicit details of how the Nazi's machinery of mass murder worked, on the industrialization and logistics of the business end of it. Lanzmann also focuses on just how incomprehensible the scale of violence was, how no one who had not seen it with their own eyes could believe that humans were capable of such inhumanity, how even victims...

Claude Lanzmann was hired to make a 120 minute documentary about the Holocaust and turn it in within about 18 months. He did not do this. Instead, acknowledging the truth of the matter, that one could not begin to grasp the inhuman enormity of the Nazi's decimation of the Jewish people of Europe, Lanzmann spent the next decade interviewing survivors of the camps, non-Jewish Poles who lived and wor...

With Safety Last! (1923, dir. by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor) the Criterion Collection brings us a fantastic introduction to Harold Lloyd only a few years after we introduced him to ourselves watching Grandma's Boy (1922) for a Patreon bonus episode. Safety Last! is a more fun movie than Grandma's Boy, not least of all because there's no Confederate apologia, and Criterion helps us contextualize...

František Vláčil's historical epic Marketa Lazarová (1967) is another example of what happens when an insane artist is at the right place at the right time to be given carte blanche: a breathtaking film stuffed to the brim with beautiful images that seems like it was an absolute nightmare to work on. Fortunately, we didn't have to help make the movie, we just get to watch it.

A few months ago we were surprised to learn that HG Wells, the famed 19th century science fiction writer, survived long enough to comment on film adaptations of his work. This is a silly thing for us to be surprised by, because the man was only 66 when Island of Lost Souls, the movie that he commented on, came out. Just a few years later Alexander Korda hired Wells himself to adapt Wells' futurism...

To Pat, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet (1990) feels a lot like a Very Special Episode of a 90s sitcom. Adam tries his best to rescue Pat from that particular abandoned refrigerator, and we arrive at the film as an interesting critique of capitalism in the era of Margaret Thatcher’s “There’s no such thing as society.” We also get five shorts from an unrealized television project Leigh originally shot i...

Haskell Wexler was hired to make a film adaptation of Jack Couffer's The Concrete Wilderness, a 1967 novel that seems a lot like an American version of Barry Hines A Kestral for a Knave which came out the next year. Like some of our other favorite films in the Criterion Collection, Wexler nearly completely rejected the brief and took his adaptation far from the source material to make Medium Cool,...