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Criterion War Films
Favs/dislikes: 11:0. The continuing cultural fascination with World War II has ensured that it’s the conflict most represented in cinema, and the Criterion Collection indeed contains more works about that massive conflagration than any other—whether harrowing dramas made right in its crosshairs (like Rome Open City) or poetic studies produced decades later (like The Thin Red Line)—seen through the eyes of filmmakers from many nations. But there are battle cries from other epochs in the collection as well, and taken together, these films embody a history of human combat, from the brother-against-brother bloodshed of the American Civil War (Ride with the Devil) to the trench warfare of the First World War (Wooden Crosses) to the jungle skirmishes of the Cuban Revolution (Che). -
Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films
Favs/dislikes: 18:0. Janus Films opened American viewers’ eyes to the pleasures of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and François Truffaut at the height of their artistic powers. Celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this world-renowned distribution company with Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films, an expansive collectors’ box set featuring fifty classic films on DVD and a lavishly illustrated hardcover book that tells the story of Janus Films through an essay by film historian Peter Cowie, a tribute from Martin Scorsese, and extensive, all-new notes on all fifty films, plus cast and credit listings and U.S. premiere information. -
The Criterion Collection – Blu-ray Releases
Favs/dislikes: 53:0. A List of all of titles in The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray catalogue. -
Criterion Collection Hulu Exclusives
Favs/dislikes: 24:0. Films that were exclusive the Criterion Collection Hulu channel that have not appeared in the collection as a feature or as an extra for another feature prior to the move to Filmstruck. -
The Criterion Collection: Out at Criterion
Favs/dislikes: 0:0. In 1961, Basil Dearden’s Victim became the first mainstream English-language drama to feature a sympathetic homosexual protagonist, played by matinee idol Dirk Bogarde. In 2011, Andrew Haigh’s boy-meets-boy romance Weekend defied expectations to become a crossover art-house hit. The fact that, fifty years after Victim, Weekend is also considered groundbreaking is evidence of how far cinema may still have to go in terms of gay representation. But between these two revelatory films, there have been plenty of other important and entertaining ones made about gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, and several of them are available in the Criterion Collection, including works by trailblazers like Robert Epstein, Derek Jarman, and Gus van Sant. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Silent Cinema
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. Many moviegoers think the silent era ended with the advent of sound. Yet cinema history is not so simple. While Al Jolson’s first performance in 1927’s The Jazz Singer was certainly a shot heard round the world, some film artists chose to stick with the quiet old ways for a while, and some national cinemas were slower to adopt the new talking-picture technology than others. As a result—and as demonstrated by the silent films in the Criterion Collection—presound cinema extended into the thirties, for financial and cultural reasons (in Japan, for instance, silent and sound films coexisted until 1938, out of necessity and popularity) or aesthetic ones (Charlie Chaplin was still perfecting the art of silent comedy in 1936’s partly sound Modern Times). Investigate Criterion’s collection of nontalkies, which includes groundbreaking early works from such legends as Cocteau, DeMille, Dreyer, Micheaux, Ozu, Pabst, Sternberg, and more! -
Criterion Collection Themes - Technicolor
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. Candy-colored, boisterous, lush, lurid—all words that have been used to describe the various effects, moods, and sensations of Technicolor. For the first half of cinema’s first century, the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation had a monopoly on color filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. Requiring three separate negatives, the Technicolor method involved filtering light through a double-prism beam splitter to produce magenta and green, which, when combined with blue and red light, accurately reproduced the full color spectrum, with often dazzlingly rich and sumptuous results. In later years, when Eastman Color developed a single-strip technique that could be used in any 35 mm camera, Technicolor lost its grip on the industry. Though three-strip Technicolor is still used today, it is an anomaly—often a sign of stylish distinction. Technicolor’s full spectrum is famously difficult to reproduce, but at Criterion we aim to get those eye-popping colors as close to their original vibrancy as possible. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Noir and Neonoir
Favs/dislikes: 9:0. Some call it a genre, others a movement, or even a fashion statement, but however one defines noir, with its signature femmes fatales, wisecracking tough guys, and dramatic, high-contrast cinematography, its appeal never seems to wane. Though its origins are in German expressionism and French crime films of the thirties, film noir has always been a distinctly American film movement, influenced and shaped as it was by American pulp fiction, wartime gender politics, and postwar nuclear anxieties. And since its forties and fifties heyday, the legacy of noir has spread everywhere—from Kurosawa (High and Low) to the French new wave (Alphaville) to the proliferation of “neonoirs” in the eighties (Coup de torchon) and nineties (Insomnia). Color may have seeped into noir’s rich gray palette over the years, but some things never change: anxiety, disillusionment, panic. -
Criterion Collection Themes - French New Wave
Favs/dislikes: 14:0. “Tidal wave” would have been a more appropriate name for this explosion of vibrant, innovative, and highly self-conscious films by young French directors in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The informal movement was spearheaded by a handful of critics from Cahiers du cinéma—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette—whose incisive writings were matched by their films: bold, modern takes on classical masters that reworked genres like noir and the musical, and experimented with techniques antiquated and discovered. While Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows remain the twin groundbreaking events of the movement, films such as Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 were watersheds as well, finding excited audiences hungry for a new, energetic, political cinema opposed to the stuffy “cinema of quality,” as Truffaut put it, of the old guard. Though the movement quickly dissipated, filmmakers like Godard, Rivette, Varda, and Rohmer continue to pioneer today. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Faith on Film
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Joyful professions of belief, self-flagellating admissions of guilt, and heretical abnegations of religion seem to sit alongside one another a bit more easily on the shelves of cinephiles than they do in the world at large. This list includes some films that engage matters of faith as their raison d’etre and others that deal with them more glancingly or derisively, but taken as a whole, it underlines both the compulsion of humankind to ask itself the eternal questions and the paradoxical power of a visual medium to capture the intangible. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Amour Fou
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. At Criterion, we’re as fond of a good romance as anybody. But it’s the twisted, obsessive ones that really set our hearts ablaze. Love will make you do the damnedest things—just take it from the adulterous, ultimately murderous couple in Oshima’s Empire of Passion; the runaway lonely-hearts lovers in The Honeymoon Killers; the snakeskin-jacketed Marlon Brando and unleashed Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind; or Alida Valli’s countess, operatically mad for Farley Granger’s tight-trousered lieutenant in Senso. These are heedless, self-destructive affairs to remember. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Animals!
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Predators, prey, objects of study, companions: The lives of the other creatures with which we share the planet are so interwoven with our own that it’s only natural they would put in appearances in our cinema from time to time. Some of the animals in the Criterion menagerie are documentary subjects (Koko: A Talking Gorilla); others operate almost purely as metaphor (Au hasard Balthazar). All reward visitors. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Avante-Garde
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Surreal, structural, et cetera: A handful of visionary, largely nonnarrative works belong to the collection, from some of the most important experimental film artists around the world—Jean Painlevé, Kenneth Macpherson, Stan Brakhage, and Chantal Akerman among them. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Blue Christmases
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. It’s not that we don’t get into the holiday mood at Criterion, but our carol of choice is less likely to be “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” than “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Our titles have Christmas celebrations that are marred by dysfunction (A Christmas Tale) or poverty (Mon oncle Antoine), lavish parties tinged with morbid melancholia (Fanny and Alexander) or adolescent anxiety (Metropolitan)—and what would Christmas be without some passive-aggressive gift giving (All That Heaven Allows)? Don’t even get us started on Lulu’s grisly yuletide at the climax of Pandora’s Box. Check out the titles below—they may not offer Miracle on 34th Street warm and fuzzies, but they do propose their own undeniable brand of Noel spirit. -
Criterion Collection Themes - British Realism
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. The tradition of social realism in British film is often said to have begun with the Free Cinema movement of the mid-1950s. The aim of these documentaries—shown at the National Film Theatre in London from 1956–1959, and made by the likes of Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson—was to bring to the screen authentic representations of the working class, largely absent from the conservative mainstream British culture of the day. In the early sixties, this rebellious sensibility was transposed to narrative cinema in the form of rough-edged, often black-and-white character pieces, often referred to as “kitchen-sink dramas,” such as Anderson’s major success This Sporting Life. At the end of the decade, Ken Loach, a political filmmaker with a background in television, took realism even further with the groundbreaking Kes, a grimy, unsentimental portrait of a boy in a Northern England mining town, featuring nonprofessional actors. Today, the legacy of British social realism continues to be felt in the work of many filmmakers, including Mike Leigh, Lynne Ramsay, and Andrea Arnold. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Cannes's Big Winners
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Since its inception in 1946, cinephiles have counted on the Cannes Film Festival, the most prestigious annual film program in the world, to keep up with the medium’s most important artists and movements. Its star-studded red carpets and glorious French Riviera scenery may get as much attention as the carefully selected films in its competition showcases, but the true legacy of Cannes has always been the masterpieces that premiered there—and especially those that have emerged as winners. The festival’s top award was originally called the Grand Prix, and the trophy for it designed each year by a different artist. Then, beginning in 1955, it became the Palme d’Or, with a new trophy modeled after the city of Cannes’s coat of arms. (The festival continues to bestow a Grand Prix, although it’s a second-place honor now.) At Criterion, we’ve collected many titles that have won the festival’s highest award, hailing from many nations of the world, Russia (The Cranes Are Flying), Italy (The Leopard), Japan (Kagemusha), and the U.K. (If….) among them. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Classic Hollywood
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Oh, those movies from the dream factory. There’s nothing quite like them. Products of a streamlined studio system, classic Hollywood films have always had a peculiar magic. With their clearly delineated cause-and-effect narratives, invisible continuity cutting style, and glamorous stars, these movies were designed to go down as easy as champagne. Yet we now recognize the directors, writers, cinematographers, and technical craftspeople behind the studios’ effervescent entertainments as artists, and the style they forged is one of the most distinct, beautiful, and important in cinema history. Here are the comedies, romances, melodramas, thrillers, and fantasies in the Criterion Collection that hail from those golden years of Hollywood, commonly defined as 1917 to 1960. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Comedies
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. From the sparkling witticisms of the golden age of Hollywood comedy to some of the best in contemporary wisecracks, Criterion has a satisfying selection of cinema’s biggest laughs. Longing for the Lubitsch touch? We’ve got you covered. Wondering “O Sturges, where art thou?” Look no further. Want to purchase a one-way ticket to Tativille? Step right this way. Want to split your sides with some Ozu? Uh . . . okay. Whether satire or slapstick, eliciting giggles or guffaws, a vast array of farcical flicker shows await you. It’s enough to make even the sourest cinephile smile. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Poetic Realism
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Poetic realism was a cinematic style that emerged in France during the 1930s, the peak of that nation’s classic period of filmmaking. With its roots in realist literature, this movement combined working-class milieus and downbeat story lines with moody, proto-noir art direction and lighting to stylishly represent contemporary social conditions. Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, with the iconic Jean Gabin as the titular antihero, is generally regarded as the start of this melancholic, often fatalistic brand of cinema, which in part reflected the ominous atmosphere of prewar France but also lent itself to the individual sensibilities of a wide range of brilliant directors, such as Jean Renoir (Grand Illusion, La bête humaine) and Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève), and set designers like Alexandre Trauner. Poetic realism is thought to have greatly influenced such later film movements as Italian neorealism, which was equally sympathetic to the proletariat, and the French new wave, which looked to these great masters who had retained their artistic freedom while working in the French film industry. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Italian Neorealism
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. The neorealist movement began in Italy at the end of World War II as an urgent response to the political turmoil and desperate economic conditions afflicting the country. Directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti took up cameras to focus on lower-class characters and their concerns, using nonprofessional actors, outdoor shooting, (necessarily) very small budgets, and a realist aesthetic. The best-known examples remain De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a critical and popular phenomenon that opened the world’s eyes to this movement, and such key earlier works as Rossellini’s Open City, the first major neorealist production. Other classics of neorealism include De Sica’s Umberto D. and Visconti’s La terra trema, but the tendrils of the movement reach back to De Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us and forward to Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis, as well as to some filmmakers who did their apprenticeships in this school, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini—and far beyond. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Made During WWII
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. World War II naturally created many constraints for filmmakers in the countries involved in it. Nevertheless, despite censorship, propaganda demands, battle devastation, and diminished resources, filmmakers on both sides of the conflict were able to make films—even, in some cases, personal statements. As the titles listed below show, some of the world’s great directors did some of the finest work during difficult times. Clouzot even brought Le corbeau to fruition in Nazi-occupied France. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Compare and Contrast
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. For some of our releases, one take is not enough. A number of Criterion titles feature as supplements some kind of alternate version of the main event, whether it’s a different cut (Terry Gilliam’s Brazil includes the infamous, unreleased, studio-edited “Love Conquers All” version of the film); an iteration in a different language for foreign audiences (as with our editions of Visconti’s Senso and The Leopard, in which you can see and hear their American stars delivering their lines in English); an original short that was the basis for the feature (Bottle Rocket); earlier or later versions of the same story by entirely different filmmakers (the mammoth 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz comes with the ninety-minute 1931 adaptation of the source novel); the original book or novella in its entirety (The Earrings of Madame de . . .’s source novel, Madame de, by Louise de Vilmorin, in the release booklet); or a radio adaptation (My Man Godfrey, The 39 Steps). -
Criterion Collection Themes - Cult Movies
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. Though many drive-ins have been shut down, and the practice of screening midnight movies in theaters has waned considerably from its heyday in the early 1970s, the thrill of sharing boundary-testing films in the dark can now be enjoyed just as well while curled up on the couch—no accompanying cult required. From the whiff of exploitation emanating from Roger Vadim’s sensational And God Created Woman to the touch of snuff in Michael Powell’s voyeuristic Peeping Tom, these films delicately ride the line between pulp and art, always landing firmly in the latter camp. Who better to challenge cinematic standards than Samuel Fuller, with his unforgettable B melodramas Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, or Brian De Palma, whose wonderfully nasty Sisters ushered in a new era of thrilling post-Hitchcock stylish excess? These films stubbornly refuse to be marginalized, lower budgets and lack of Hollywood gloss be damned. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Documentaries
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. “Life caught unawares”—that’s how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov expressed the principle and art of documentary in the 1930s. But the documentary has taken so many forms over the past century that it would be oversimplifying to call it merely the recording of reality. From its anthropological origins in the works of Robert Flaherty, the documentary has come to encompass Soviet and fascist propaganda of the thirties; the Direct Cinema and cinema verité of the sixties; the populist social-reform tradition of today; and so much more. What all great documentaries have in common is the ability to capture a place and time so vividly as to equal the imagery and storytelling of the best fiction. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Dysfunctional Families
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are all alike: they’re really boring to watch on-screen. Thus, cinema is besotted with deliciously unhappy families. Below, scan Criterion’s collection of miserable moms, depressed dads, and their sullen offspring, nestled as uncomfortably in the houses and yards of the suburbs of Connecticut as in the apartments of the side streets of Paris.
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