Lost in Criterion

Jaksot

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  Spine 707: Il sorpasso 11.09.2026 2t 9min

  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 consumerism across class lines in post-war Italy, the film is a pretty clear inspiration for Easy Rider, and maybe after contextualizing Easy Rider as an American Il sorpasso we could like that movie more, too bad we'll never watch it again.
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  Spine 706: Master of the House 04.09.2026 1t 43min

  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 our last Dreyer film, this one wasn't even in the Collection yet. Unfortunately, there's a reason this is the only film from Dreyer's pre-Joan of Arc period. While the seeds of what we love about Dreyer are there, this light domestic dramedy doesn't hit nearly as nicely as any of his later work that we've seen. But hey, it's still Dreyer.
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  Spine 705: Breaking the Waves 28.08.2026 1t 48min

  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 that to make a 1970s period piece about patriarchy, religious and otherwise, in rural Scotland.
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  Spine 704: Riot in Cell Block 11 21.08.2026 2t 3min

  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 time talking about the history of prison reform, and how there's no reforming a system that's designed to disappear human beings.
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  Spine 703: The Freshman 14.08.2026 2t 1min

  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 reason, even if its relationship to higher education is very of its time. Do you know enough about football to understand comedy football? Harold Lloyd didn't think so, but still made this stellar movie.
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  Spine 702: The Great Beauty 07.08.2026 2t 10min

  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 crises of self as expressed in art. Oh and parties. So many parties. A positively Slurms MacKenzie level of parties.
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  Spine 701: Persona 31.07.2026 2t 3min

  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 to be Bergman recognizing his place in the world cinema while also having or recovering from another breakdown. It starts with like 10 minutes of experimental film, and the thesis for this experiment is "Oh you want another Bergman film?" And the weirdness continues through the rest of the movie.
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  Spine 700: Fantastic Mr. Fox 24.07.2026 1t 59min

  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 animation director of this animated movie, but this is less a Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas situation than a Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, the former of which is a Henry Selick movie that gets mistakenly attributed to the producer and the later of which Gustafson actually has credited co-director status on because Del Toro respects artists. Gustafson and the animation team bring Wes Anderson's vision to life to create one of the most Wes Anderson-y movies Wes Anderson has ever made.
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  Spine 699: A Brief History of Time 17.07.2026 1t 50min

  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 Criterion Collection release of a documentary provide context that can reshape how we view the original piece's relationship to truth. Errol Morris's A Brief History of Time (1991) is no different. In part a presentation on the ideas featured in Stephen Hawking's book of the same name and a biography of Hawking himself, the film distorts reality like an event horizon. In the supplemental material Morris states that one shouldn't judge a documentary on whether it presents the truth, but if it attempts to find the truth and whether it makes the viewer think about what the text's relationship to the truth is. The movie itself may not provide enough information to do that.
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  Spine 698: King of the Hill 10.07.2026 2t 1min

  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 movie, The Underneath (1995), a remake of the Robert Siodmak's 1949 noir Criss Cross. Accompanying each is an introduction from Soderberg about how much he loathes the films, which makes it hard to like them ourselves -- though The Underneath is certainly the worse film. Ultimately we spend a lot of time wondering why Criterion bothered to put these out, particularly together, and I think came to a satisfying if bleak answer.
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  Spine 697: Tess 03.07.2026 1t 53min

  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 bonus material is about how Polanski was a brave genius making his first movie after an unfortunate incident in which he did something that was really quite normal at the time and he got blacklisted from Hollywood. Tess won three of the six Oscars it was nominated for, and we get to spend so much time talking about this movie in the context Criterion has provided. So content warning.
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  Spine 696: Foreign Correspondent 26.06.2026 1t 55min

  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 openly call the bad guys German. This tonal dialectic really worked for us in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, Spine 643) and The Lady Vanishes (1938, Spine 3), but falls a little flatter in The 39 Steps (1935, Spine 56) and Foreign Correspondent (1940). Here the unevenness is more noticeable, and that's because bubbling just below the surface is a fight between Hitchcock's desire to make a normal Hitchcock movie and producer Walter Wanger's desire to make an up-to-the-minute ripped-from-the-headline-writers' view of the impending war, unhelped by the army of writers working on it throughout production. But also very much helped by the visual effects and production design.
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  Spine 695: Blue is the Warmest Color 19.06.2026 1t 59min

  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 considering the hundreds of thousands of words written on this film upon its release. We're just two cishet guys talking about a lesbian relationship, but maybe that's ok because it doesn't seem like there were any lesbians involved in the lesbian romance movie anyway. But beyond the male gaze-y sex scenes there is a deeply interesting story of a relationship, of a young working class woman coming into her own, and of a student becoming a teacher becoming a burned out teacher.
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  Spine 694: The Long Day Closes 12.06.2026 2t 5min

  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 coming-of-age exploration of memory, budding sexuality, music, film, and musical films. Oh and there's a like a two minute shot of light on a carpet and it may be the most perfect thing we've ever seen?
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  Spine 693: La Vie de Boheme 05.06.2026 2t 1min

  We fell in love with Aki Kaurismäki when we first watched Le Havre (2011, Spine 619), and are very excited to talk about the original film in which André Wilms plays Marcel Marx, another tale of immigrant rights but this one an ode to a Paris that no longer exists, a bohemian lifestyle that is increasingly impossible under capitalism. Oh and speaking of being an artist under capitalism, we also talk about Martin Scorsese's recent announcement that he's using AI for storyboarding, a thing he is obviously not actually doing so I hope the money is worth it.
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  Spine 692: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 29.05.2026 1t 52min

  Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) is a very fun movie and an overstuffed Criterion release. But perhaps a comedy of such epic proportions (and aspect ratios) needs an epically sized release.
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  Spine 691: Thief 22.05.2026 1t 45min

  Having finished the World Cinema boxset, we had resigned ourselves that we would have to go back to doing some acrobatics to read Marxism into the films for awhile again, but little did we expect that Michael Mann's Thief (1981) isn't just a stylish heist film but is also (and moreso) a rumination on the exploitation of labor and rent seeking. There's power in a union, but there's also apparently power in burning everything down just to show your boss who has control.
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  Spine 690: The Housemaid 15.05.2026 1t 59min

  The first World Cinema Boxset draws to a close with Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960), a film whose influence you can clearly see in many modern South Korean directors' work, from Bong Joon-ho to Park Chan-wook. A sort of domestic horror film punctuated with a moral message ending that left us floored for the audacity of its presentation, The Housemaid is maybe the best movie in a boxset of bangers, a thing I think I've said about each film in the set at this point. We also take some time to reflect on the set as a whole, its weird collection of sponsors, and how we very much want more of this from Criterion.
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  Spine 689: Trances 08.05.2026 1t 54min

  This week the World Cinema Project boxset changes pace a bit with Trances, Ahmed El Maanouni's 1981 documentary on Moroccan avant-garde band Nass El Ghiwane. But it doesn't change pace too much, as this Nass El Ghiwane's music is firmly anti-colonial and the band members' interviews deliver overt Marxist messaging in much the same way as the previous four films of the set have been.
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  Spine 688: Dry Summer 01.05.2026 1t 48min

  It's becoming increasingly obvious that the World Cinema Project is Martin Scorsese's plot to smuggle openly Marxist films into the Criterion Collection, and Metin Erksan's Dry Summer (1963) continues the trend. Erksan imagines a world where one rich man can enclose those common goods that sustain life, where one man's greed can choke his community and his own family. Surely not a world that could exist outside of film.