American Utopia is, simply, one of the best performance films—and one of the best performances—you’re ever likely to see. I loved the David Byrne songs when they were first released back in 2018 and was delighted to see Spike Lee’s film of Byrne’s Broadway production in 2020. The production, elegantly and idiosyncratically mounted, is itself […] More
Even well into its nonagenarian decade, Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels is still a hellacious, audacious spectacle. To modern sensibilities, its characters and dialogue may register a bit trite, its pacing uncertain, but once it takes flight, Hughes’ spendy WWI drama still excites. Centered around a love triangle between two British brothers, both soldiers in the […] More
Every David Cronenberg film is, I suppose, its own acquired taste. There will be those who will blanch at the brilliant body horror of Videodrome or Scanners, even in as commercial a vehicle as his hit remake of The Fly; others might find his more mainstream-minded filmmaking, like the graphic-novel adaptation A History of Violence […] More
Somehow, it’s been a full 45 years since I’d seen Altered States. I recall distinctly the impression it made on me when I saw it in the theater on its 1980 release: its wild, dizzying visuals depicting the protagonist’s scientific explorations; its Jekyll-and-Hyde narrative, modernized its late-twentieth century milieu; its surprising turn of events towards […] More
New this month to The Criterion Collection on special edition Blu-ray is a real treat: Jacques Audiard’s 2005 Cesar-winning breakthrough The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a surprisingly affecting new-noir with a most unlikely protagonist. Tom Seyr is basically a thug, a violent fixer posing as a legitimate real estate broker but who spends most […] More
Born in Flames is a film no one should miss, though too many have. An early-’80s salvo of guerrilla-style feminist filmmaking, it took its director Lizzie Borden (yes, she took her professional name from that Lizzie Borden) some five years of DIY work with a band of upstarts to complete, and then just barely earned […] More
The Criterion Collection continues its program of upgrading catalog content to its 4K UHD format with its new-ish releases of Kon Ichikawa’s great World War II films The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain. Both films are unmistakably Ichikawa’s in their approach to cinematic storytelling, and each deserves the attention of any cinephile invested […] More
To “save face” is to preserve your dignity in the eyes of others. It’s an idiom that has roots in East Asia, and the idea of “face” as a concept tied to dignity in social situations. Saving Face is the 2004 film from writer/director Alice Wu about a lesbian and her mother who each have […] More
Carnal Knowledge is a film so thorny and prickly—prick-ish, even—it’s hard to love. I can’t quite see it as the kind of film a cinephile or even a casual buff would want to watch and re-watch: so loathsome are its two central protagonists, college buddies Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, being in their company is […] More
To submit to Mitchell Leisen’s savvy, cutting Midnight is to yield to a frothy 94 minutes of mistaken identities, shocked expressions, furtive sidelong glances, stinging retorts, witty asides, high fashion, and mistaken assumptions. It’s screwball comedy at its finest—and sadly still a little too easily overlooked. That was the case in a release year that […] More
Jacques Demy’s timeless musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is nothing if not exquisite. Its star-crossed lovers are played by the impossibly winsome Catherine Deneuve and the rakishly handsome Nino Castelnuovo. Michel Legrand’s music is lovingly lilting and memorable. Demy’s mise-en-scène and set design is so impeccable that even six and seven decades on it continues […] More
The Criterion Collection brings a 4K UHD disc upgrade to its already-excellent 2018 Blu-ray release of 1967’s sharp-edged Southern drama In the Heat of the Night, a film that features not only one of cinema’s greatest lines but two of the medium’s best actors facing off over an unsolved murder case. Add in an historically […] More
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J Paul Johnson
Tina Kakadelis