Lost in Criterion

We're joined again by Stephen Goldmeier for Fellini's 1957 delight: Nights of Cabiria.

Black Orpheus is Marcel Camus' ode to Greek myth with a bossa nova beat. It's also a beautiful film.

Stephen Goldmeier joins Lost in Criterion once more to discuss Erik Skjoldbjærg's 1997 debut Insomnia and the problems with subtitles in multi-lingual works.

Stephen Goldmeier joins us once again to discuss the b-side to King Kong, 1932's The Most Dangerous Game

Abbas Kiarostami's Tate of Cherry (1997) is probably one of the more famour films to come out of Iran. That doesn't mean Pat or Adam had ever heard of it.

You can tell this films a fantasy because it opens with people excited to watch ballet.

Peter Brook's 1963 adaptation of the classic novel about a bunch of boys lost on an island who slowly kill each other because that's how humanity works, apparently?

John Lurie's hilariously surreal fishing show from 1992. Why it's in the Criterion Collection, no man can say, but we're glad it is.

Laurence Olivier's 1944 propagandist (at the behest of Churchill himself) adaptation of Henry V is not only Olivier's first film directorial, it's also the first time in film history that an adaptation of one of Shakespeare's plays actually made money. It was nominated for four Academy Awards but only managed to garner Olivier an Honorary Oscar for "for his outstanding achievement as actor, produc...

It's the episode you've all been waiting for. Since we made it through Pasolin's Salo this was the next film of dread albeit for (thankfully) different reasons. But still dread nevertheless. Armageddon is Michael Bay's 1998 sophomore work that challenges our understanding of what The Criterion Collection is actually collecting. We come up some good justifications with this week's special guest Ste...

Seijun Suzuki's 1966 film Tokyo Drifter is more comprehensible than  Branded to Kill  -- it does actually have a discernible plot for most of the film --  but barely -- there's an extended fight scene that plays like a Merry Melodies short. The studio didn't like this one either. While Tokyo Drifter didn't lead directly to Suzuki's firing, it did get his color film privileges revoked, which is why...

Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill (as well as next week's film, Tokyo Drifter) is a B movie Yakuza film from a guy who could make a B movie Yakuza film in his sleep who wanted to do something different. Released in 1967 Branded to Kill led directly to Suzuki being fired for turning in a completely "incomprehensible" film. Considering that Suzuki is a director who doesn't believe there's even such a...

Terry Gilliam's 1981 fantasy film Time Bandits is a polarizing film, it seems. If you experience it at a time when you can relate to the main character, a put-upon boy with a Roald Dahl-ian family life, it may be your favorite movie of all time. Elsewise, well, you may not like it at all. It's a movie that is successfully written (and often physically shot) from the point of view of its young prot...

Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953), only serves to hammer home the fact that he had a better hand for suspense than Hitchcock. The Wages of Fear manages to be one of the most suspenseful films in history without being anything close to a murder mystery or spy thriller or horror film. Take the explosive threat that drives the suspense in the opening scene of Touch of Evil and expand t...

Henri-Georges Clouzot has been called the French Alfred Hitchcock, which is really just a Anglo-centric way of saying that if Clouzot had been working in English he'd be more popular (in general? or more than Hitchcock? Yes). We've got two of his best movies in a row starting this week with Diabolique (1955) based on a novel by Pierre Boileau. It's said that Clouzot bought the rights to the novel...

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 almost-a-biopic film about the artist Andrei Rublev was suppressed almost before it came out, but many things with any merit were in Soviet Russia so it's not that surprising. Eventually Martin Scorsese found a copy of the film and brought it out of Russia, and that copy is where the Criterion Collection edition comes from. The film is quite the trip, and a long one, but th...

Oh man, if  Oliver Twist  was problematic then Robert J. Flaherty's 1922 "documentary" is the pure problem to which problematic things aspire. It's not just staged, it's purposefully primitivized, Falherty taking away an modernity his Inuit subjects had allowed into their lives, from guns to to jeans to houses. Still as the world's first full-length documentary, it proved that such a thing was pos...

There's a lot of good in David Lean's 1948 adaptation of another Dickens classic. Oliver Twist has all the artful design and framing of Great Expectations, and once again Lean manages to trim down the story into a movie people will actually sit through. And Alec Guinness is back! Well, those last two aren't wholly good. Particularly Guinness's Fagin. Oh there is so much wrong with Guinness's Fagin...

This week marks the second David Lean film we've talked about and next week will be a third, which is a good indication that, like the British Film Institute, Criterion considers Lean a pretty important director. This week it's the first of his adaptations of the work of another British great Charles Dickens and one of the best book to movie adaptations I've ever seen: 1946's Great Expectations. D...

Fritz Lang's M (1931) is the German directors first film with sound and star Peter Lorre's first film and first villainous role. Technology and star are both put to excellent use. M is also a film that the Nazi's tried to suppress before they were even in power. I can't think of a more glowing recommendation, but I will say that has always been one of my favorite films since I first saw it many, m...

Peter Weir's 1975 adaptation of Joan Lindsay's equivocally "true" novel is a trip, and not just because it's a mystery with no resolution. Sure it's success was based almost entirely on people thinking the story was real, but there's also a reason it won the BAFTA and Saturn awards for it's cinematography. It's a lovely movie, even if the answer to its central mystery remains unsolved and the answ...

The story is that while filming  Flesh for Frankenstein  Paul Morrissey and crew discovered they were quite ahead of schedule and under budget, so they decided to make a second movie. Released the following year, Blood for Dracula, which shares Frankenstein's critique of sexual promiscuity, was partially improvised and for some reason has a cameo from Roman Polanski. It's also a much more entertai...

Paul Morrissey's 1973 horror-comedy was originally titled Andy Warhol's Frankenstein despite the fact that Andy Warhol had virtually nothing to do with it. Udo Kier (whose name is amazing) stars as the good doctor in this bizarrely sexualized telling of Mary Shelley's classic that doubles as a critique of Free Love. In 3D! (Where available.) It was originally rated X for all the sex and gore, almo...

John Mackenzie's 1980 British gangster film was the break out role for Bob Hoskins who will still forever be Mario whenever I think of him. Or possible Smee. Helen Mirren's in it, too, and they're both great actors. An incredibly young Pierce Bronson has no lines. BFI puts it at number 21 of the top 100 British films of the 20th century, because it is obviously very British. And explodey. As the l...

In 1965 Jean-Luc Godard took an established film-noir detective character and shoved him into a dystopian future city ruled by an authoritarian computer that runs everything on cold logic while quoting Borges' poetry about the nature of myth and maintaining the most inefficient public execution system in history. Alphaville is weird. It's disjointed. It's baffling.