Lost in Criterion

For this year's Holiday Special we come to the saint of "movies that incidentally take place at Christmas" Shane Black. Black wrote The Long Kiss Goodnight before taking a long break from screenwriting. Renny Harlin directs, and he's no stranger to holiday-adjacent action fare having also directed Die Harder. Joining us this year are Stephen G. and Ben JW, and Ben makes a compelling argument that...

In 1967 Jean-Luc Godard was like any modern young Marxist: blaming all of life’s ills on consumerism, blaming consumerism on America, yelling at his old friends for being bourgeoisie, getting into public debates with people who know his side better than he does, dating teenagers…but those young Marxists are usually college sophomores and Godard was 37. But like any good leftist unwilling to read t...

In the mid 1960's Jean-Luc Godard was going through a lot: his politics were changing, his marriage to Anna Karina was ending, and he was becoming more and more disillusioned with US cultural hegemony. So he made a lot of movies about it, and this is the most scattershot one: Made in USA .

We finish up Masaki Koboyashi's The Human Condition and need some extra time to talk about both the third movie and the work as a whole. After nearly 2 hours talking it out we're left unconvinced that this is an anti-war movie let alone the best Japanese anti-war movie, unless you thinly define "anti-war" as "anti-the WW2 Japanese war machine". How disheartening.

In part two of Masaki Koboyashi's epic The Human Condition our main character for some reason decides that being a good soldier who sticks to the word of the regulations will somehow make things better for him in a war he claims he fundamentally disagrees with. That's right, the politics get even murkier in Road to Eternity.

We start into Masaki Koboyashi's epically faithful adaptation of Junpei Gomikawa's six volume examination of Japan in World War 2 through the lens of a man who generally opposes war, or at least militarism, played by the great Tatsuya Nakadai. The Human Condition is, in total, just shy of 10 hours long. But it's helpfully broken up into three films (each containing two sections) released between J...

We've seen a lot of great Louis Malle films in the Collection, and now we get one more. A very long conversation about art or something, and while it is itself quite good, we're very interested in the peripherals film about class.

Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad is an obviously influential movie that's nearly impossible to describe. Adam thinks it's a ghost story. Pat thinks it's an examination of the epistemological crisis. Both or neither are probably true. Truth is a game, and the game is rigged against you.

First released in 2004 as a series of television episodes, then recut into a feature length film for 2006, Marie Nyreröd’s Bergman Island is an intimate portrait of director Ingmar Bergman looking back on his life just after his final retirement from film making, and just a few years before his death.

It's our first David Fincher film in the Collection and what a choice. A tour du force of special effects that do not hold up, Benjamin Button updates and elongates the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story into whatever this is.

Nothing like a gangster movie to get us talking about the alienation and the lack of community under capitalism. But beside (and because of) that, this is just such a fantastically bleak movie. Peter Yates directs Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973).

We close out the "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" boxset of Shohei Imamura films with Intentions of Murder, a tale in which Imamura apparently wants us to laugh an abused woman because she's fat. Hilarious! This is our last Imamura film in the Collection right now, and we're not mad about that.

We continue through the Imamura "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" boxset and continue to take issue with Imamura calling himself an anthropologist.  When we started this Criterion journey nearly a decade ago I had no idea it would lead to me ponder the question: can breastfeeding be an incestual act?

This week we kick off a boxset called "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" and ain't that something. It's three films by Shohei Imamura, the last three he made before leaving Nikkatsu for his own studio. The whole set really exemplifies Imamura's goal of making "messy films" with a self-described "cultural anthropologist" lens. We start off with Pigs and Battleships from 1962, a story of bad criminals,...

Seemingly always up to adapt a challenging text, John Huston directs this adaptation of a Flannery O'Connor novel. While Huston and O'Connor have dramatically opposite views on religion, but Huston himself has begrudgingly said that "Jesus wins" in the end of his movie. We're not so sure that's accurate.

Stephen Frears 1984 film The Hit combines a British gangster film with a road movie and honestly it's nice to just have a movie we enjoy and don't have to think too much about after the string we've been on.

Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was not the first person to make scientific documentaries for a general audience, but he was certainly very influential on nature documentarians real and otherwise from Attenborough to Zissou. Criterion serves us a collection of many, though not quite all, of his 5-30 minute films which fuse underwater and microscopic filmography with an eye toward surrealist humor and, i...

Nagisa Ōshima's follow-up to last week's In the Realm of the Senses is less sexually explicit and harder to pin down politically than that work, but Empire of Passion is still an interesting tale of greed and ghosts.

There was a moment in Nagisa Ōshima's obscenity trial for the printed script edition of In the Realm of the Sense where the director apologizes to the judges and police, saying, essentially, "I showed the script to all my colleagues and none of them found it titillating, so I'm sorry you guys got turned on." And I don't think he's just having a laugh at their expense. The film is certainly full, n...

Apparently considered one of Akira Kurosawa's worst films, Dodes'ka-den started life as a joint project between the top four directors in Japan calling themselves the Four Horsemen but ended up being one of the lowest points of Kurosawa's life. We explore a theory on why Japan didn't connect with the subject matter as we talk class and caste in Japanese history and a depressing and visually stunni...

Andrzej Wajda's Danton explores the French revolution through the Polish director's own experience under Soviet rule, a rule he saw as anti-worker and therefore anti-progress. Using the titular Danton and Robespierre, the film presents the tension of revolution, or perhaps violent revolution, if Wajda makes such a distinction, and particularly a revolution that seeks only to rotate who is in power...

Vittorio De Sica stars in Roberto Rossellini's Il Generale Della Rovere, the story of a conman coerced into impersonating an Italian resistance general, but really it's two stories: the first half is De Sica's character's everyday life promising to rescue people's family members from Nazi imprisonment if they can raise the money and his arrest and trial for doing that, then the second half is a wa...

A very different François Truffaut film to any we've seen before, The Last Metro draws on the director's memories of a childhood during Occupation to craft a story that is not autobiographical by any means, but instead tells the story of the community around a theater and the various ways people persevered.

David Lean's adaptation of Hobson's Choice brings the atmospheric panache that made his Great Expectations so amazing but putting it into a comedy about a guy who doesn't want his adult daughters to get married in a situation that seems like a dark parody of an Ozu plot. Ultimately, though, it's a pretty light story about a woman who exercises her own self-determination by forcing a man to be more...

Our second of back-to-back Luis Buñuel films brings us more of the director's critique of organized religion and Christianity in particular. In particular with Simon of the Desert Buñuel takes aim at performative deprecation, the inherent arrogance of claiming to be the lowest of the low (particularly when you're also literally putting yourself on a pedestal). This is maybe the most Pat has enjoye...