Tag: Criterion Collection
Criterion Collection: Imitation of Life (1934) | Blu-ray Review
One need only look at the marketing strategy for 1934’s Imitation of Life to see how woefully inept Hollywood was (and in many ways,...
Criterion Collection: ‘Round Midnight (1986) | Blu-ray Review
George Gershwin surmised “Life is a lot like jazz, it’s best when you improvise.” In keeping with the spirit of this given, Bertrand Tavernier’s...
Criterion Collection: Eyimofe (This is My Desire) | Blu-ray Review
Far from the complicated, distressed definition of the Nigerian film movement christened ‘Nollywood’ in the early 2000s, a new coterie of filmmakers have slowly...
Criterion Collection: love jones (1997) | Blu-ray Review
An under-appreciated diamond in the rough which arrived during an explosion of Black indie cinema in the 1990s, love jones, the directorial debut...
Criterion Collection: Love Affair (1939) | Blu-ray Review
If there’s any film which really conjures an ‘empire state of mind,’ it’s Leo McCarey’s 1939 romantic tearjerker, Love Affair. Strangely, despite an intensely...
Criterion Collection: Taste of Cherry | Blu-ray Review
It’s impossible to talk about Iranian cinema without mention of Abbas Kiarostami, the most prominent figure amongst a formidable coterie of names which rose...
Criterion Collection: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) | Blu-ray Review
In a world concerned with rigid dichotomies, there remains a roughhewn juxtaposition of the male gaze and the female gaze. Taking into consideration the...
Criterion Collection: An Unmarried Woman (1978) | Blu-ray Review
Academy-Award nominated writer/director Paul Mazursky makes his first entry into the Criterion canon with his sixth feature, the seminal (first-wave) feminist landmark An Unmarried...
Criterion Collection: Husbands (1970) | Blu-ray Review
Husbands (1970), the fourth feature of auteur John Cassavetes, patron saint of American independent cinema, would end up being the first showcase for the...
Criterion Collection: The Cremator | Blu-ray Review
Criterion restores a cornerstone of the Czech New Wave with Juraj Herz’s classic The Cremator, a chilly dark comedy set in 1930s Prague which...
Criterion Collection: Destry Rides Again | Blu-ray Review
George Marshall’s classic comedy Western Destry Rides Again finally gets its due with its inclusion in the esteemed Criterion Collection. A notable entry in...
Criterion Collection: The Cranes are Flying (1957) | Blu-ray Review
The only Soviet film to ever win the coveted Palme d’Or, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), gets a loving 2K restoration on...
Criterion Collection: Leave Her to Heaven (1945) | Blu-ray Review
“I’ll never let you go,” Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent coos to her husband/victim in the 1945 melodrama film-noir Leave Her to Heaven. It’s a...
Criterion Collection: Bamboozled (2000) | Blu-ray Review
That Spike Lee remains one of the true provocative soothsayers of cinema should come as no surprise, yet it’s an epiphany for those reconsidering...
Criterion Collection: Teorema (1968) | Blu-ray Review
“Whatever the bourgeois do is wrong?” is a question posited in the flurried opening segment of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s arcane arthouse classic Teorema, a...
Criterion Collection: Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman | Blu-ray Review
If cinema can be viewed as an evolutionary form, a missing link would certainly be Czech director Karel Zemen. One must first ruminate on...
Criterion Collection: The Fugitive Kind (1960) | Blu-ray Review
“It’s time to speak of unspoken things,” is the tagline for a forgotten late 1960s Joseph Losey film called Secret Ceremony, an odd psychodrama...
Criterion Blu-ray: Antonio Gaudí (1984) | Video Blu-ray Review
A hypnotic homage serving as part-travelogue, part visionary curation of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi’s (1852-1926) masterworks in Barcelona, Japanese auteur Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1984 documentary...
Criterion Collection: All About My Mother (1999) | Blu-ray Review
Pedro Almodóvar’s most exquisitely dramatic and compassionate film All About My Mother arrived in the final year of the last century, a supercharged queer...
Criterion Collection: Betty Blue (1986) | Blu-ray Video Review
It’s time to take another look at the famed Cinema du Look auteurs of 1980s and 1990s French cinema, and what better way to...
Criterion Collection: The Story of Temple Drake (1933) | Blu-ray Video Review
“Women will understand!” read one of the many various taglines associated with The Story of Temple Drake, the pre-code rape and revenge talkie the...
Criterion Collection: Tunes of Glory (1960) | Blu-Ray Review
Ronald Neame remains somewhat of an underrated, incredibly multi-faceted figure from the annals of classic British cinema. Beginning as a writer/producer/cinematographer for David Lean...
Criterion Collection: Now, Voyager (1942) | Blu-ray Review
It ends with one of cinema’s most quotable lines of dialogue, as a chain-smoking Bette Davis slyly slows a Paul Henreid in his lukewarm...
Criterion Collection: Fists in the Pocket | Blu-ray Review
Criterion re-releases the mordant directorial debut of Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio, Fists in the Pocket (1965), just as the perennial filmmaker ends his sixth...
Criterion Collection: Cluny Brown (1946) | Blu-ray Review
Criterion resurrects Ernst Lubitsch’s final completed film Cluny Brown (1946), a post-war comedy about pre-WWII class divisions in 1938 England. Headlined by Jennifer Jones,...
Criterion Collection: Do the Right Thing (1989) | Blu-ray Review
Just in time for the film’s thirtieth anniversary, the Criterion Collection resurrects Spike Lee’s masterpiece Do the Right Thing with a 4K restoration for...
Criterion Collection: The Koker Trilogy | Blu-ray Review
There isn’t a cinematic figure like any other, at least who straddled such a drastic historical divide of censorship, like Abbas Kiarostami, a pioneer...
Criterion Collection: The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) | Blu-ray Review
For those accustomed to the bittersweet greatest hits of Japanese auteur Yasujirô Ozu’s later period familial dramas, the lesser known 1952 social satire The...
Criterion Collection: Klute (1971) | Blu-ray Review
“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” and “I have no idea what’s going to happen,” are among some of the lines...
Criterion Collection: Hedwig and the Angry Inch | Blu-ray Review
Few queer films have pierced the contemporary cultural nexus as effectively as John Cameron Mitchell’s beloved 2001 directorial debut Hedwig and the Angry Inch,...
Criterion Collection: Funny Games (1997) Blu-ray Review
“Every act of violence brings us closer to death,” wrote bell hooks, who went on to list a variety of internal and external examples...
Criterion Collection: Diamonds of the Night (1964) | Blu-ray Review
There’s a reason director Jan Nemec’s name isn’t immediately conjures in superficial conversations on the Czech New Wave, despite his haunting 1964 debut Diamonds...
Criterion Collection: A Face in the Crowd (1957) | Blu-ray Review
“There’s nothing as trustworthy as the ordinary mind of the ordinary man,” is the haunting mantra scrawled in leering monogram on the façade of...
Criterion Collection: Japón (2002) | Blu-ray Review
Nearly two decades after the acclaim it received in Un Certain Regard at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, Carlos Reygadas’ inexplicable debut Japón remains...
Criterion Collection: Wanda (1970) | Blu-ray Review
A director and a film unfortunately stymied shortly after its premiere, Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) remains a singularly unwavering portrait of neo-realistic gender identity...
Criterion Collection: Detour (1945) | Blu-ray Review
An old American proverb reads “Excuses are merely nails used to build a house of failure.” It’s also a succinct paraphrase for the trajectory...
Criterion Collection: To Sleep with Anger | Blu-Ray Review
Interlopers have long been meddlesome disruptors in cinema and literature. From those whose presence is expected to those who are unpleasant surprises, their catalyzing...
Criterion Collection: La Vérité (1960) | Blu-ray Review
What is the truth? And can you handle it? Notions of truth, perspective and judgment have long been staples of the courtroom drama, melded...
Criterion Collection: Mikey and Nicky (1976) | Blu-ray Review
Of the four noted directorial efforts from writer-director Elaine May, whose career behind the camera ended after the critical debacle of 1987’s infamous...
Criterion Collection: Panique (1946) | Blu-ray Review
Initially a box office flop and critical failure, French auteur Julien Duvivier’s 1946 title Panique is now hailed as one of the great technician’s...
Criterion Collection: Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) | Blu-ray Review
As John Simon’s insert essay “The Lower Depths” asserts in Criterion’s Blu-ray re-release of Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 masterpiece Sawdust and Tinsel, the title was...
Criterion Collection: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) | Blu-ray Review
As with almost all of Orson Welles’ filmography following the monolithic precedence established his 1941 debut Citizen Kane, it’s impossible not to deliberate on...
Criterion Collection: A Story from Chikamatsu | Blu-ray Review
Playing like the tortured precursor to Masahiro Shinoda’s similarly tragic tale of stymied romance with 1969’s Double Suicide is the great Kenji Mizoguchi’s late...
Criterion Collection: Sisters (1973) | Blu-ray Review
“What the Devil hath joined together, let no man cast asunder,” reads the gleefully blasphemous tagline of Brian De Palma’s 1973 horror film Sisters,...
Criterion Collection: Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972) | Blu-ray Review
Criterion scores ones of the most immersive additions to their prestigious collection with the recuperation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972-73 eight hours plus five...
Criterion Collection: The Naked Prey (1965) | Blu-ray Review
When one thinks of Cornel Wilde, a veritable Hollywood everyman who was peppered across a variety of noir and studio productions throughout the 1940s...
Criterion Collection: Andrei Rublev | Blu-ray Review
“God will forgive you, don’t forgive yourself,” Andrei Rublev is told, the famed Russian iconographer who’s witnessing of the world’s innate and incomprehensible suffering...
Criterion Collection: Cold Water (1994) | Blu-ray Review
Occasionally, a rare cinematic kernel lost to the ages due to whatever obsequious copyright or distributor issues, manages to resurface despite the odds. We...
Criterion Collection: Smithereens (1982) | Blu-ray Review
Known primarily for generating Madonna’s acting career in 1985 with her sophomore film Desperately Seeking Susan, director Susan Seidelman was one of the most...
Criterion Collection: The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez | Blu-ray Review
Criterion revisits the neglected 1982 indie classic from Robert M. Young, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, a revisionist, recuperative Western which formulated the tragic...
