All posts by David Anderson »
Criterion Collection: Badlands | Blu-ray Review
1973’s Badlands marked the first feature film from writer/director Terrence Malick and it squarely put him on the path to his current cinematic sainthood. Over a forty year career and a scant six feature
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Criterion Collection: Chronicle of a Summer | Blu-ray Review
1961’s Chronicle of a Summer is generally credited with inspiring what became known as Cinéma-vérité; a style of narrative filmmaking that both copied and utilized techniques of documentary production to create films of heightened
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Criterion Collection: The Tin Drum | Blu-ray Review
The Tin Drum is a story of Europe’s nasty history in the first half of the 20th Century and, like that tortured history, the film features an intoxicating mixture of the profound and the
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Criterion Collection: The Qatsi Trilogy | Blu-ray Review
The Qatsi Trilogy is a collection of films made by Godfrey Reggio between 1983 and 2002. Each film offers an extraordinary and unforgettable cinematic experience, and their messages are, astonishingly, even more pertinent and
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Criterion Collection: Purple Noon | Blu-ray Review
Remade forty years later as The Talented Mr. Ripley, René Clément’s Purple Noon from 1960 was the first attempt to bring amorphic rogue Tom Ripley, the subject of a series of popular crime novels
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Criterion Collection: Weekend | Blu-ray Review
Weekend capped Jean-Luc Godard’s insanely productive year of 1967, and can rightly be considered the director’s Götterdämmerung. Both projects make their respective points with sledgehammer subtlety, and along with Godard’s previous features that year,
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Criterion Collection: La Promesse | Blu-ray Review
La Promesse, newly released on Blu-ray by Criterion, introduced the world to the filmmaking team of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and their patented brand of realism on steroids. Produced during the booming economy of
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Criterion Collection: Rosetta | Blu-ray Review
While there have been many coming of age films about teenage girls, it’s safe to say none have been quite like Rosetta, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Palme d’Or winner from 1999. Finally getting its
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Criterion Collection: Le Havre | Blu-ray Review
Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is a charming and engrossing fable – a sort of Fractured Fairy Tale for adults – that interprets one of today’s most contentious political issues through the director’s distinctly eccentric
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Criterion Collection: Late Spring | Blu-Ray Review
Societal customs and early forms of feminism collide in Late Spring, a masterfully delicate family drama from director Yasujirô Ozu. Produced in 1949, this seemingly modest film set in the exurbs of Tokyo spins
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Criterion Collection’s Letter Never Sent | Blu-ray Review
Bergman and Nykvist, Bertolucci and Storaro, Welles and Toland; the history of cinema is replete with great partnerships between directors and cinematographers. Through potent mixtures of chemistry and vision, these collaborations created works of
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Criterion Collection: Three Outlaw Samurai | Blu-ray Review
Three Outlaw Samurai, newly available on a gorgeous blu-ray disc from Criterion, is a rousing action adventure from 1964. Directed by Hideo Gosha, a talented cinematic storyteller who earned his stripes in the pressure
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Criterion Collection: Godzilla | Blu-ray Review
1954’s Godzilla is the paterfamilias of the giant monster from the sea concept, spawning a half century’s worth of remakes, reboots and rip-offs. Directed with grim relish by Ishiro Honda, with special effects by
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"Ron and I wanted to make a film that looked at what it means to be an outsider and we wanted to explore what it takes to reach out to someone whose life is very removed from your own."
