Crit Club

Tis the season! The WEDDING season, that is. This week your Crit Club pals are hitchin' a ride to watch Tricia get hitched in 1971’s surrealist satire short film Tricia’s wedding lovingly staged by a coterie of irreverent drag performers. Come listen and see whether we renewed our vows to this classic piece of queer performance art, or if we stood it up at the altar. Join us next week for a Co...

October might be done with us, but we’re not done with October. This week, the Crit Club is clinging on to the last vestiges of spookiness with Abel Ferrara’s 1995 vampire horror film The Addiction. This heavy film, which uses everyone’s favorite Twilight characters as a metaphor for drug addiction, insists that it has a lot to say about free will, human cruelty, and redemption. Were we drawn into...

During this spooky month, the Crit Club decided to take yet another trip to an isolated location, specifically a desolate island in the north of Sweden for a chill bit of insomnia with Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 horror thriller Hour of the Wolf. This surrealist nightmare about art, existence, codependency, and self-perception follows a quiet, expecting couple making a home away from others, until the h...

They said it couldn’t be done. They swore up and down there was no way four nerds could record 50 podcast episodes about the Criterion Channel streaming service. Well, after three years and one pandemic, Crit Club is here with a 51st Episode Extravaganza to prove them all wrong.  Come listen to Angela, Coire, Peter, and Wizard Chris talk through the highs, the lows, and the lasting impressions of...

Predictably, the Crit Club couldn’t stay away from France for long. This week, we joined a sloppy movie production for 1996’s Irma Vep from Olivier Assayas. This sly, meta commentary on the state of French films at the time stars Maggie Cheung playing a version of herself as she plays the titular Irma Vep in a haggard director’s lackadaisical attempt to reboot the silent classic Les Vampires. It’s...

Oh this? Why yes, the Crit Club is wearing a new immaculately tasteful and exquisitely handcrafted new movie, specifically 2022’s The Blue Caftan from writer/director Maryam Touzani. A quiet family drama of a husband and wife managing a tailor shop in Morocco, The Blue Caftan has volumes to say (albeit in hushed tones) about love, family, identity, and devotion. Did your Crit Club faves learn from...

Your Crit Club pals are taking an extremely dangerous and existential road trip this week as we hitch a ride with 1953’s The Wages of Fear. This intense thriller from Henri-Georges Couzot tells the story of a collection of downtrodden drifters from around the world, stuck in a South American oil company town. A chance for escape comes when four of these rascals get hired to drive tons of highly vo...

If you feel that brisk air blowing in, that’s just the Crit Club taking an early fall trip to the British seaside to watch the 1978 psychological thriller The Shout. When a mysterious man chooses to insert himself into the marriage of a bored rural couple with metaphysical vagaries and black magic, who knows what might happen. Or what the Crit Club thinks about it. Well, you can know, by listening...

You may not recognize your Crit Club pals this week as we go undercover to take down the drug kingpins of LA and watch 1992's Deep Cover, directed by Bill Duke, starring Laurence née Larry Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum. Come listen and see if living a life of crime appealed to us, or sent us fleeing back towards society's rule of law. Join us next week for a Peter pick, where we're check...

This week, the Crit Club (Club de Critique, en francais, I would assume) becomes a fly on the wall as we watch 1988’s Jane B. by Agnès V., in which legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda sets out to tell the life story of legendary pop icon Jane Birkin. What follows is an utter dreamscape of collaborative egos swirling around themselves in attempts at clarity, playfulness, and poignancy. Come listen to s...

This week, the Crit Clubbers were whisked away in time and place, like four Major Toms exploring a WWII prisoner of war camp in the Pacific Theater. We watched 1983’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a Nagisa Oshima movie about British POWs at the hands of Japanese captors on Java. Oh and it stars David Bowie. That’s why I said that Major Tom thing. It’s a unique movie that led us down a winding con...

Hello Crit Clubbers! This week we’re watching 1990’s The Comfort of Strangers, directed by Paul Schrader, with a screenplay from Harold Pinter adapted from a book by Ian McEwan. It follows bored couple in a stagnant relationship trying to reignite the spark with a very laid back vacation to Venice. They stumble up a stolid Christopher Walken, who gives them a tour of the dark passageways of the so...

Hello! Crit Club is back to take a look at 1982's Chan Is Missing . It's an ambitious amalgamation of a movie that's both a detective story about two men looking for a disappeared business partner, and a exploration/celebration of the many Asian-American communities in San Francisco's Chinatown. Listen in and hear what we thought of this groundbreaking movie and its place in film h...

Aaaaand we're back! This time talking about Steven Okazaki's 1987's drama Living on Tokyo Time about a young Japanese woman trying to figure her life out in the U.S. and a disaffected Japanese-American young man doing the same. The two fall into an impromptu marriage exposing the buried desires within them both. Listen to this post-hiatus episode to see what we thought about it. Join u...

The Crit Club doesn’t want to live on this planet anymore, so we’re reading the vibrations of the 1974 experimental jazz movie Space Is the Place. Following the music, the philosophy and the interstellar aspirations of Sun Ra, Space Is the Place unfolds a cosmic story about Black identity. Sun Ra plays a prophet of Black excellence and a shepherd to usher Black people into the heavens and away fro...

We’re back from holiday break in time to bring you a nice British romantic drama, aggressively titled Sunday Bloody Sunday. Sorry, The Edge fans, you won’t find any U2 here. Rather, it’s a contemplative, wry story about finding what we need from each other and from love. So basically, any U2 song. That’s a joke. U2 is bad. But what do the rest of the Crit Club think about U2, or this movie? Listen...

That's not a rusty saxophone playing echoing through a dirty LA alleyway you hear, that's the Crit Club investigating the 1975 Dick Richards mystery movie Farewell, My Lovely. Based on the excellent Raymond Chandler book of the same name, Farewell, My Lovely follows rumpled private dick Phillip Marlowe who's found himself in league with the enormous Moose Mallow, a lost jade necklace and an awkwar...

Your beloved Crit Club rises from the dregs of the previous week's watch with 1966's Daisies. This Czechoslovakian funhouse mirror of a movie from director Věra Chytilová is filled to the brim with bohemian delight and nihilistic exhibitionism. Plot-wise, you might say it follows two women named Marie as they scrape together an existence in their Soviet paradise, but Daisies is not at all worried...

Well, well, well, it seems like the Crit Club took their recent fascination with adult animation just a bit too far this week as we try to shake off the patina of slime that 1973's Belladonna of Sadness dipped us in. While we expected to watch an animated, mature-themed romp, fate had other, crueler plans. We're not even going to hide our attempt to tease you into listening for our opinions: this...

We're celebrating (U.S.) Thanksgiving the right way: with quiet, sad, potentially boring family time. This week, the Crit Club watched Olivier Assayas' 2008 film Summer Hours, a contemplative movie about siblings dealing with the loss of their mother. With different priorities and different expectations of life, two brothers and a sister reckon with what will become of their family's legacy and wh...

As the sun slips away earlier and earlier, it's only natural for the Crit Club to spend this time imagining what it would be like to bound through sunny British meadows like rabbits. In aid of this, we watched the 1978 animated classic Watership Down, based on the 1972 Richard Adams novel of the same name. The surprisingly serious movie takes viewers on an adventure with a renegade group of rabbit...

And Crit Club is back! We've returned from our extended summer vacation to rejoin the world of cinema, starting with Jacques Tati's 1967 spectacle of a film Playtime. Focusing on how the modern world buzzes and shines with its steel and glass, this very creative movie plays with how people clumsily bumble through it. Will the Crit Club be won over by its futuristic vision of modernity, or will nos...

Welcome to another Wizard Pick™! On this week’s Crit Club, our dear co-host Wizard Chris takes us on something of an… uneven journey with the 1970 “horror” film Equinox. Eleven years before Evil Dead, Equinox follows four friends who venture into mysterious woods to discover an ominous book and an eternal evil. They are plagued by oddly designed claymation monsters and a park ranger named Asmodeus...

No longer content with sitting in one country, this week the Crit Club joined icon Grace Jones in a trip around the world. We watched Sophie Fiennes’ Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, which chronicles Jones recording her 2008 album Hurricane, its subsequent world tour and her visit to her family in Jamaica. Come listen to us discuss divas stripped down, musical documentaries, the benefits of confi...

This week we stayed in the '70s, but moved onto comedy with Elaine May's directorial debut, A New Leaf. This riches to rags film stars a young(er) Walter Matthau scheming to wed the bookish and oblivious Henrietta, played by May, in order to reclaim his wealth. The Crit Club was somewhat divided on this airy screwball comedy of sorts, so come hear who settled nicely into this comedy and who wanted...