Crit Club

The Crit Club has decided to take an extended summer vacation to Japan. This week we’re watching 1963’s High and Low from director Akira Kurosawa. It’s a procedural thriller slash morality play about class tensions, kidnapping, and detective work. When a rich man’s chauffeur’s son gets abducted, the kidnapper insists he still must pay the ransom, setting in motion a whirlwind of events to bring th...

Back to Japan we go as the Crit Club watches the 2014 family drama from director Nobuhiko Obayashi Seven Weeks. This epic-length movie seeks to lay out everything from generational lessons in one family, the continuing fallout of postwar Japan, and old man meditations on dying. It’s really a whole lot. But what did we think? Well, you’ll have to listen to that hot, hot conversation.  Next week we’...

This week, the Crit Club is on quite the drug-filled, electroclash journey as we watch the 1982 nihilistic sci fi overdose called Liquid Sky. What would it be like if orgasms attracted aliens? How would one break into the punk fashion world? What would it be like to live so close to the Empire State Building in the '80s? How much shrimp is too much? Liquid Sky inspired us to answer some of the...

Happy Pride, everyone! So much love to you all. In celebration, this week the Crit Club has watched 1991’s Young Soul Rebels, a movie that explores various queer and counter cultures in late-70s England. The movie follows two friends who operate a soul music pirate radio station as they deal with tragedy, hatred, ambition, and the realities of an intolerance mainstream. It’s an interesting counter...

This week, Crit Club returns to our home away from home: France. We watched the 1995 crime drama La Haine, which follows three young men from the Parisian slums in the day after an explosive riot that landed one of their friends in the hospital. La Haine deals with the ongoing issues of French xenophobia, police brutality, and the choices left for those trying to survive on the fringes. Come liste...

This week, Crit Club gets a remarkable education from Spike Lee’s 1988 joint School Daze. In the vein of, and making light of, such rollicking college films as Animal House, et. al., School Daze follows various social groups at an HBCU over Homecoming weekend. They struggle with each other, expectations, and politics both local and global, in hopes of realizing some vision of themselves, however c...

If a Yakuza has ever threatened you into free lasagna, then this week’s Crit Club is up your alley. We watched the 1992 dark comedy The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (aka Minbo) from director Juzo Itami. It tells the story of a group of hotel employees dedicated to ridding their hotel of Yakuza bullies, led by one fearless lawyer. Come listen to what we thought and how much protection money we...

This week the Crit Club is slowing things down a little with Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 movie Certain Women. This film tells three moderately overlapping stories of women in various stages of life going through their motions in rural Montana. It’s small and quiet, like Reichardt’s other films, and we had a lot to say about it. Like what, you ask? Come listen! And join us next week for a Wizard Pick™!...

Never one to shy away from masochism, this week the Crit Club is watching the 1985 Soviet anti-war movie Come and See. This film, directed and co-written by Elem Klimov, follows a young boy as he is swept up into the hell that is war, specifically rural Belarus during the Nazi invasion of 1943. While it borders on surrealism, the dogged pace and devoted honesty of Come and See never lets a viewer...

Surprise, surprise, the Crit Club is watching a French movie this week. The 1973 post-new wave drama The Mother and the Whore follows a young man named Alexandre as he talks, meets women, talks to them, and meets more. Written and directed by Jean Eustache, this movie is highly regarded as one of the best films of the 1970s and a unique meditation on youth, romance, and relationships. Come and hea...

This week the Crit Club is traveling way back, and way forward, in time as we watch the 1936 science fiction film Things to Come. This early special effect juggernaut is looked decades into the future with a script by H.G. Wells, and posits questions about humanity, progress, and peace. Were we left wishing for futuristic art deco toga clothes, or did this movie make us want to be shot out of the...

The Crit Club is a brave bunch, no stranger to tackling any movie, whatever its reputation. To prove our courage, this week we’re watching the notorious 1987 box office bomb Ishtar, written and directed by Elaine May. Its plot is a goofy buddy comedy starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as aspiring songwriters who somehow find themselves a gig in Morocco. But the film’s legacy is one of repor...

It’s a real date night week here at Crit Club where we’re watching the often-banned, taboo-breaking In the Realm of the Senses from 1976. From Nagisa Ōshima, this fictionalized account of a Japanese true crime incident that happened in the 1930s follows two lovers as they fall down the well of each other’s hedonistic appetites. That “date night” thing mentioned earlier was sarcasm, and all sorts o...

That train whistle blowing you hear is the Crit Club hustling their way to watch 3:10 to Yuma, Delmar Daves’ classic 1957 western based on an Elmore Leonard short story (which you can read here ). This compact story puts a modest rancher in an unexpected position with an infamous gang leader, telling a timeless story of morality, humanity, connection, and dread. Did we find the ride comfortable or...

The Crit Club spent this week trying to ward away dread with the 1981 Hong Kong martial arts, action, comedy/horror movie Dreadnaught. This physical masterpiece tells the story of two warring schools, a sheepish launderer, and, why not, a murderous, face-painted psychopath. Directed by the legendary Yuen Woo-ping, Dreadnaught is a full on, nonstop, slapstick bonanza. Did we find it as watchable as...

Bonjour mes amis! This week, the Crit Club is heading back to France, riding the first swells of that New Wave with François Truffaut’s 1959 The 400 Blows. Routinely lauded as one of the best films ever made, this small, active movie follows the adolescent discomfort of one young Antoine Doinel as he struggles to find a place in the trappings of school, his home, and society at large. Did we find...

Crit Club here with our first documentary in a long while, with Hearts and Minds, a devastating depiction of the Vietnam War. Told in a relatively modern way, Hearts and Minds is a wide-ranging film that explores the war through D.C. insider interviews and crushing footage from the invaded country. Join us next week for a PP (peter pick), where we will watch François Truffaut's 1959 coming of...

The Crit Club is traveling through time into the distant future of 2021 with the help of the 2003 film It’s All About Love by club-fave Thomas Vinterberg. This surreal, sci-fi-esque movie revolves around the disintegrating relationship between Claire Danes and Jaoquin Phoenix amid a world of people dying of broken hearts and gravitational distortions. All wrapped around Polish-ish accents and ice...

This week, the Crit Club is giving in to their inner Goth by watching Ken Russel’s 1986 Romantic-era, maximum freakout, psycho-sexual drama Gothic. This movie follows a super wholesome and fun-looking evening based ever so loosely on true events, where Lord Byron hosts Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and a few others, encouraging them to dive into the sickly depths of their souls’ darkest fears. Just...

The Crit Club is riding this wave of late stage capitalism right back to 1989 so we can learn how to better ourselves with the help of Bruce Robinson’s black comedy How to Get Ahead in Advertising. This satirical bit of consumer culture backlash examines the lengths to which the pressure of a pitch can get to one specific ad man, and we watch him unravel in a pretty unique way. But what did we thi...

Deep in the heart of a brittle northern winter, four friends (the Crit Club) decide to attend a Danish 60th birthday party as we watch 1998’s The Celebration. The first of the famous (infamous?) Dogma95 movies, The Celebration has us descend on a wealthy manor for a patriarch’s special day and leaves us stranded in stark reality to watch the family’s dirty laundry fill the whole space with an unfo...

Good day to everyone. The Crit Club has the heat turned up so we can kick off our shoes and watch 1954’s Golden Age drama The Barefoot Contessa. This movie examines the spectacular rise and sudden fall of a Spanish dancer as she is absorbed into increasing levels of high society. Did we dance to the this film’s tune or pull our booties right back on? You’ll have to listen to see. Next week, join u...

Hello listeners and Happy New Year! For 2024, the Crit Club made the joint resolution to ride off on a magic carpet and never look back. To help us in that endeavor, we watched 1940’s epic fantasy adventure The Thief of Bagdad. Plucked from 1,001 Arabian Night, and subsequently used as the inspiration for Disney’s Aladdin, this special effects-heavy spectacle follows a usurped king on a quest to f...

Howdy partners, this week the Crit Club was roped into watching the incredibly named, 1954 Joan Crawford western Johnny Guitar. It’s a psychosexual drama of bitter rivalries, NIMBY politics, and someone named the Dancin’ Kid. Come give a listen and find out whether we rode off into the sunset with this one or left it tied to the railroad tracks.  For next week, it’s a WIZARD PICK™, and we’ll be wa...

If you think Crit Club is above challenging themselves with a three-hour, near-incomprehensible dreamscape, then our watching of David Lynch’s 2006 epic Inland Empire should prove you wrong. From a Polish barbeque attended by circus performers to a nightmare sitcom starring anthropomoric rabbits, we sat through it and then tried to piece it together. Come listen to how good of a job we did!  And c...