Lost in Criterion

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...

Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) is a political thriller for the dawn of the Reagan Era which is, not coincidentally, a political thriller for the Trump Era, which is, really, a political thriller for any USA age post the assassinations of the MLK, Malcolm X, and, primarily to Blow Out, the Kennedies. Like the Trinity Test, JFK's assassination was a genie released, and while high-profile USA polit...

Ken Loach's 1969 film Kes is like a British 400 Blows, but Loach takes seriously the political reality of the working class characters he portrays in a way I just don't find in Truffaut. Maybe I'm being less than gracious to the French New Wave pioneer, but maybe also Loach just knocks it out of the park in such a way that it sets a new standard. Since it's an additional feature on the Criterion r...

Our first Claire Denis film (well, unless you count all the work she did for Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch), 2009's White Material is the story of a white French coffee farmer trying to hold on to normalcy as the African country she lives in decolonizes. The crux of the problem of course being that while "normal" may mean "I can harvest and sell my coffee" it also means "the French army maintains a...

Victor Schertzinger's 1939 adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado is the first film adaptation of a Gilbert and Sullivan work, the only one to include members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the first Technicolor picture put out by Universal. But let's face it, it's only in the Collection because of Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Should have been a bonus feature, though I suppose if it...

Before this I'd only ever seen one film by Mike Leigh, Spine 307: Naked (1993) which we watched like five years ago. I remember it being fairly dour. So when I found out we were watching a Mike Leigh musical period biopic about Gilbert and Sullivan writing an orientalist light opera, I was concerned and confused. Gilbert and Sullivan is not for me. Topsy-Turvy is for me. A story about art and capi...

Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) is a poignant look at the assassination of the San Francisco Supervisor, his assassin, and his organizing paradigm. Not just fighting for gay rights, but helping to build a coalition for liberation, Milk's life as shown in the movie is an important lesson on movement building. Even if it were just that, I would recommend it to everyone. But beyond the...

After years we finally get another Luchino Visconti film and it does not disappoint. Like The Leopard, Senso is set against the backdrop of the struggles of Italian unification, an idea that Visconti seems to have seen as analogous to the struggle to implement communism in his own time. Unlike The Leopard, Visconti takes a melodramatic love story and just shoves all that political stuff in there u...

Every so often the Criterion Collection shows us exactly one movie from a director and will apparently never show us another. With very few exceptions we've loved these one-and-dones, and Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Succcess is no outlier. It's very dark, it's very entertaining, and we'll never see anything from Mackendrick again.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2008 drama looks at a day in the life of a Japanese family, a day that just so happens to be the anniversary of the eldest son's death by drowning. It's a little bit Ozu, it's a little bit Naruse, and it's a wonderful exploration of the ways trauma and grief linger in family relationships.

Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank is, refreshingly, a "this is how the poor people live" movie from someone who actually grew up in similarly impoverished situations to the protagonists of their film. Criterion also provides us with 3 of Arnold's short films, each dealing with a similar theme to those that show up in the main film: young womanhood, single motherhood, and grief.

First a note: Sorry to have missed last week, but Adam was in the hospital after a bicycle accident left him with a fractured elbow. He's on the mend, and we should be back to the regular schedule. This week we're talking James L. Brooks office rom-com set against the changing background of 1980's newsrooms. 1987's Broadcast News is a fun movie, indicative in many ways of Brooks' decades writing c...

Guillermo del Toro's first film, Cronos (1993), is flat out just a really great vampire flick, with an eye toward how the machinations of adults effect the children in their lives, like many of his best films. But that bit of family-focus isn't the only way Cronos rises above simple genre film, as del Toro uses the vampire to tell a story of capitalism and colonialism, and the particular evil that...