Lost in Criterion

Since first watching Taste of Cherry way back at Spine 45, we have looked forward to each Abbas Kiarostami the Criterion Collection has shown us. Color us intrigued when we found out that Like Someone In Love (2012) was...

With Il sorpasso (1962), Criterion once again shows us a single movie from a director we've never heard of and they will never mention again. As per usual, this is a great movie. An road trip through the effects of...

We are thrilled to finally have another film from our (second?) favorite Danish director. Master of the House (1925) is the earliest Carl Th. Dreyer we've seen and the last the Criterion has to offer us. When we watched...

We are thrilled to finally have another film from our (second?) favorite Danish director. Breaking the Waves (1996) is the first film Lars von Trier made after establishing the Dogme 95 framework, but he mostly ignored...

The back story on Don Siegel's fantastic Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) is pretty crazy, and I promise we do eventually talk about it this week. But this is a message picture about prison reform, so we have to spend some...

We get Harold Lloyd's classic silent college movie The Freshman and a handful of shorts on this week's episode. Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer direct the feature, among the most popular silent comedies in history for good...

Paolo Sorrentino's 2013 film The Great Beauty is in line with many an Italian film we've seen, a story of a middle aged man having an existential crisis. Like many a Fellini film, this crisis is also a crisis of art, a...

Given the rate of Bergman releases in the Criterion Collection it surprised us to realize that we haven't seen a film from the man in nearly two years. And what a surprising Bergman to come back to. Persona (1966) seems...

Spine 700, can you believe it? We've been doing this for a long time. Criterion rewards our dedication with an overly full release of Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). Mark Gustafson is...

Every documentary the Criterion Collection shows us leads to a discussion on what documentaries are, what they can do, and what their relationship to truth can and should be. Inevitably as well the supplements to a...

Stephen Soderberg's third movie is the marquee release this week, King of the Hill (1993), an adaptation of A.E. Hotchner's memoir of being poor in Depression-era St. Louis. Also slid in here is Soderberg's fourth...

Oh boy, another Roman Polanski film. Tess (1979) is Polanski's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's 1890's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The film is well acted and well shot and we'd love to just talk about that but all the...

Alfred Hitchcock's pre-war spy thrillers are interesting because on the one hand they're romps and on the other hand they're designed to subtly push the British public against Germany in a time when the film cannot...

Abdellatif Kechiche's adaptation of Jul Maroh's Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) offers us a lot to talk about, but Criterion's release offers no additional content to frame our conversation, which is extra weird...

According to director Terence Davies, he wasn't interested in presenting what happens chronologically next in a film, but emotionally what's next. As such The Long Day Closes (1992) is a stream-of-consciousness...