Lost in Criterion

With their 1939 adaptation of The Four Feathers Zoltan Korda seems to have wanted to make a movie critical of British imperialism, while his brother, the film's producer Alexander Korda, seems to have wanted to make a movie in praise of their adopted British homeland. What we end up with is a beautifully shot film that is sometimes biting satire and sometimes unironic Islamophobic white saviorism.

We finish up Olivier Assayas' Carlos with the final episode of the 3-part miniseries. While the original idea for a film about Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was to focus on his ultimate arrest and life just before that, Carlos Part 3 covers that time period with what amounts to a montage of scenes that end in ellipses. Our bonus features this week also reveal some surprises about Assayas' sources, and sho...

Our second episode on Olivier Assayas' Carlos (2010) finds the film in overdrive trying to strip away any ideological motivation from its main character and paint him as moving toward purely profit-driven, which is probably the worst thing a Marxist could be. While Disc 2's additional features have our first behind the scenes look with Assayas insisting that he is being true to reality as much as...

The only work we've seen from Olivier Assayas before is Summer Hours, part of the Criterion Collections sub-collection of getting 21st century cinema into their purview by releasing seemingly every non-US family drama produced in the first decade of the new millennium. Like all those films (Yi Yi, Secert Sunshine, etc) we enjoyed Summer Hours. We return to Assayas in the Collection this week with...

Our second Claude Chabrol film is his second film, Les Cousins (1959) which came out a month before Truffaut's The 400 Blows and as a piece of "French New Wave" meets almost none of the criteria we've come to associate with the movement. It's visually nice at times, but we just don't care about any of these characters or their conflicts.

Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is, by some definitions, the first film of the French New Wave. I feel like I've said that before. Chabrol clearly has a preternatural eye for the visual language of film. If only he had a similar talent for writing. Le Beau Serge is beautiful, but it's bland.

We kick off 2024 with a New Year's Eve carol. Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1921) exists in the same genre as A Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life, but unfortunately its only social message is one of temperance from alcohol. But what The Phantom Carriage lacks in intriguing plot it more than makes up for in innovative special effects, with its ghostly characters fully inhabiting a...

We finish up the Complete Jean Vigo boxset and the year 2023 this week, covering Vigo's final film L'Atalante. Vigo pressed himself for his first feature length, and perhaps too hard, dying of complications of tuberculosis before the premier. The studio took the opportunity of his demise to re-cut the movie, add different music, and try desperately to make it a pop culture smash in an era where Fr...

We've all been there, the trepidation of introducing a new partner to your family. And why do we always seem to do it at the holidays? Maybe we're hoping that all the tinsel and the trash will distract the family just enough to make them welcoming. The family in Blood Beat (1983) has your normal family problems when new girlfriend Sarah arrives, and things get worse immediately as mom's psychic ab...

This week we're covering the first part of Criterion's The Complete Jean Vigo set. There's just enough material in this set that we felt like we should do two episodes on it to give Jean Vigo his due. And what due this director deserves! Before dying of complication of tuberculosis at the age of 29 in 1934, Vigo produced only four works but they are each innovative and influential. This week we co...

8 years ago this week our episode on Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water posted and we had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Two years ago this month, we talked about Roman Polanski's Repulsion and had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Now our third of his movies, Cul-de-sac (1966), offers us a chance to armchair psychoanalyze the man once again, as it becomes clear that his mi...

Lee Chang-dong's story of incredible loss and grief, of where community can be found and where it cannot, Secret Sunshine (2007) shows the failings of a religion designed to solve status quo middle class problems under capitalism, but reminds us that there is still hope. Hirokazu Kore-eda (director of Spine 554: Still Walking) called this the best film of the 21st century so far, and he may be rig...

We get two early Stanley Kubrick films this week, not just The Killing (1956) but also Killer's Kiss (1955). While both are New York noirs, each offers a different view of the famed director. Killer's Kiss is the last film in which Kubrick did almost everything himself: directing, shooting, producing, and writing the story from scratch. The Killing is a Hollywood production, with  Lucien Ballard b...

Your hosts of Lost in Criterion were juniors in high school on September 11, 2001, and that certainly colors our opinion of Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime (2010). And so do current events. Solondz is also 25 years older than us, and while I agree, as Solondz says in one of the bonus features on this release, that the suburbs of New Jersey (where he grew up) and the suburbs of Ohio (where we li...

It took far too long for the Criterion Collection to show us anything from Bengali director Satyajit Ray, but we're finally here with the singular and beautiful The Music Room (1958). Ray's attempt at a more popular movie after his first two films (the first two of the Apu trilogy) failed to connect with an audience, The Music Room integrates classical Indian music into a story of decayed aristocr...

Jean-Pierre Melville's Léon Morin, Priest (1961) is the story of a hot priest and a hot communist having banal religious conversations that rarely rise to a level that we can even pretend they are theological or philosophical. That these conversations also take place in a French town occupied by Nazis should raise the stakes, but the whole thing largely seems flat. It's a love story, and any depth...

Our second in this pair of Louis Malle at his weirdest, Black Moon (1975) is an Alice in Wonderland-ish coming of age story during a literal battle of the sexes. We were concerned about a French male director making such a movie at the height of second-wave feminism, but Malle is nothing if not surprising. Malle claims he wrote the film on a sort of automatic writing while also changing course whe...

With the Louis Malle films we've seen so far it was clear the man was willing to reinvent his style, but I had sort of assumed he had eras at least. This week we start off a pair of his more out there films, one from very early in his career and one from the height of his career in the 80s. This week it's Zazie dans le Metro, an adaptation of a popular French book that borders on Finnegans Wake-le...

In 1930 a group that would soon be the who's who of young German filmmakers, including the Siodmak brothers and Billy Wilder, released People on Sunday, a semi-narrative semi-documentary look at how to spend a weekend in late-Weimar Republic Berlin. Also on the Criterion release is Eugen Schüfftan's Ins Blaue hinein (1931), a narrative short about hustling during the Depression. Both offer a fasci...

What happens when a writer and a director who despise the best-selling reactionary violence of private detective Mike Hammer decide to make a Mike Hammer movie? And then the government tells them it's too violent so they cut out the entire mafia plot and replace it with a radioactive macguffin (that screams and melts your face)? Well, you get Robert Aldrich's highly influential Kiss Me Deadly (195...

Kon Ichikawa's 1985 adaptation of the Jun'ichiro Tanizaki novel (serialized from 1943-48) is seemingly a new leaf for our experience with Ichiwaka's work. We've had his avant-garde sports documentary. We've had his strong anti-war films - perhaps the best anti-war films in the Criterion Collection. And now we get a pre-War tale of four sisters in a merchant family, a family epic shot on a televisi...

Insignificance, Nicholas Roeg's 1985 adaptation of Terry Johnson's play of the same name, is a study of fame and guilt, womanhood and the bomb. If the concept of "Barbieheimer" were a single film, it may look something like this.

In 1940, Charlie Chaplin determined that the only way he had to stop the fascists march around the world was to use his voice, literally, and produce his first true sound film with The Great Dictator. Inarguably, this film did not stop the war, but it did give us one of the most enduring calls to humanism ever put to celluloid. Returning guest Adam S. joins us to talk about this marvelous movie th...

If Pale Flower were just composer Toru Takemitsu's Musique concrète score and sound design it would be worth talking about. If Pale Flower were just director Masahiro Shinoda's avant garde deconstruction of a Shintaro Ishihara story and yakuza films in general, a New York Noir but Japanese, it would be worth talking about. But Pale Flower (1964) is both, and more for the sum of it's parts.

Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (1986) is a fun, sexy, if a little weird Manic Pixie Dream Girl road movie. That is until about the halfway point, when the music and lighting suddenly both get darker, and Ray Liotta walks in to change this movie into something like an action thriller. In less steady hands, this could have felt more like two separate movies, but Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye s...