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Criterion Collection Themes - Originals
Favs/dislikes: 1:0. The history of cinema: one hundred years of do-overs. Whether updating critically acclaimed foreign hits for Hollywood consumption (Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven), bringing the art house to the grind house (The Last House on the Left was a gorier iteration of The Virgin Spring), or reconstituting old plots as inspiration for new genres (Star Wars was based on The Hidden Fortress) or showcases for newfangled effects (The Blob was reincarnated as . . . The Blob), the remakers keep on trying—but the films will never be as good as these originals. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Stage to Screen
Favs/dislikes: 1:0. At Criterion, cinema is king, but the play is also the thing. Look at the lineup of theater legends from whose work films in the collection were adapted: Bertolt Brecht (The Threepenny Opera), Noël Coward (Brief Encounter), Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths), Eugene O’Neill (The Emperor Jones), Terence Rattigan (The Browning Version), Arthur Schnitzler (La ronde), George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion), August Strindberg (Miss Julie), Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), Tennessee Williams (The Fugitive Kind)—and, of course, the Bard himself, whose Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III became grandiose film spectacles thanks to that towering thespian Laurence Olivier. We also have a cracking selection of films made from lesser known works, including Danton, Andrzej Wajda’s adaptation of Stanisława Przybyszewska’s 1931 play The Danton Affair injected with the fervor of the Solidarity liberation movement, and Nicolas Roeg’s radically exploded version of Terry Johnson’s Insignificance. -
When Hollywood Came to Town (Other Films)
Favs/dislikes: 1:0. Films listed in the back of James d'Arc's book "When Hollywood Came to Town: A History of Moviemaking in Utah" (2010, 2019) but NOT mentioned at all in the book (mostly newer films). TV series not included. Sorted chronologically, then alphabetically. See the main list here: https://www.icheckmovies.com/lists/when+hollywood+came+to+town/yormovies/ -
Academy Award "Best Story" Winners
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. The Academy Award for Best Story was given out from 1928-1956. (No award given in 1929 and 1930) -
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 - 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 - Food on Film
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. http://www.criterion.com/explore/101-food-on-film -
Criterion Collection Themes - Great Performances
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. When you’re talking about great performances in the collection, acting is naturally the first thing that comes to mind. But there are plenty of other kinds of shows on our shelves deserving of the spotlight, whether concerts by rock icons (the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix), modern dance by the regal Martha Graham, or Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, as staged and captured in all its beauty by none other than Ingmar Bergman. We are proud to present a selection of spellbinding music and dance, Criterion-style. Please hold your applause until the intermission. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Independent American Cinema
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. In a national cinema dominated by behemoth Hollywood studios, independently produced films have always made for refreshing alternatives. There’s a great, diverse history of autonomous moviemaking in the United States, by artists whose intensely personal visions and ideas would have been unlikely to see a green light from, say, MGM or Universal. This selection of American films from the collection—narrative, documentary, experimental—got made without studio financing, whether by choice or necessity. The titles below come from raw, rough, and ready directors of nearly every period, including the silent era (Body and Soul, directed by African-American pioneer Oscar Micheaux), World War II (Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz’s political semidocumentary Native Land), the radical sixties (the fiercely idiosyncratic films of John Cassavetes and William Greaves), and the indie waves of the eighties (Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant’s daring early works) and nineties (the debuts of Whit Stillman and Wes Anderson). Whether exposés on disenfranchised subcultures, character studies heavy or hilarious, or microbudgeted horror flicks, these are some of the most uncompromised films ever made. -
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 - Melodrama
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. One aim of art has always been to evoke intense feelings; for melodramatic cinema, that is its unabashed and overt raison d’etre. With themes of love, suffering, betrayal, sacrifice, and redemption, melodrama puts its audiences through the emotional wringer. Various national cinemas have made contributions to the genre—from Japan, we have Mikio Naruse’s dramas of steadfast women trapped in quiet domestic anguish; from France, Max Ophuls’s luxurious tragic romances; from Italy, Luchino Visconti’s opulent tales of amour fou and Raffaello Matarazzo’s contorted, epic expressions of thwarted desire. Historically, the Hollywood work of the German émigré Douglas Sirk has been considered the expressionistic epitome of the movie melodrama; his All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession, and Written on the Wind used the form to comment on 1950s America with a sophisticated mix of irony and forthright emotion. In the ’70s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a fan of Hollywood melodrama, provocatively remade All That Heaven Allows as the heartbreaking interracial romance Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Samurai Cinema
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Samurai cinema, which includes both chanbara (action-oriented sword-fight films) and the historical jidai-geki film, focuses on the nationally mythologized samurai warriors of the twelfth to sixteenth century. Like the American western, the samurai film lends itself to tales of loyalty, revenge, romance, fighting prowess, and the decline of a traditional way of life. Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films have arguably been the most influential both in Japan and around the world; certainly the range of his approaches—from Seven Samurai’s epic scope to Yojimbo’s acidic black humor to Ran’s poetic despair—established the genre’s creative possibilities, influencing generations of filmmakers, including George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. Key works of the genre, in its more traditional form, also include Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion, Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, and Hiroshi Inagaki’s Musashi Miyamoto, the first part of his epic “Samurai Trilogy.” -
Criterion Collection Themes - Tearjerkers
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. There is a genre of classic films that, finely crafted as they are, we remember first and foremost for their ability to wring tears from us. Can one even think of Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow or Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. without immediately recalling their beyond poignant ultimate scenes? And what would Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru or Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory be without those final waterworks (the characters’ and ours)? From Ozu family sagas to Sirk melodramas, we have a large selection of titles for those looking for a little cinematic catharsis. So come and cry along with Criterion. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Virtually Reality
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Who needs silly, circumscribed categories like “fiction” or “documentary”? From such classic examples as Robert Flaherty’s original almost-ethnography Nanook of the North and Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz’s political semidocumentary Native Land—about violations of civil liberties in everyday America—to contemporary hybrids by living artists like Abbas Kiarostami (Close-up) and Pedro Costa (In Vanda’s Room), these works blur the lines with panache. -
Criterion Collection Themes: Yakuza!
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. We have a killer selection of Japanese gangster films—or yakuza pictures—in the Criterion Collection, all from the genre’s heyday in the fifties and sixties. Tales of the criminal underworld marked as much by themes of honor and loyalty as by images of shocking, manic violence, they explore the codes and rituals of a society simmering right underneath “civilized” culture. Directors like Takumi Furukawa, Takashi Nomura, and especially Seijun Suzuki depict this bloody world of heists, double crosses, and rivalries with stylish excess, imitating their subjects’ freewheeling daredevilishness—Nomura’s A Colt Is My Passport and Suzuki’s Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter stand as some of the most visually inventive Japanese films of all time. And as proven by recent films from Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike, the genre doesn’t seem to be going out of fashion. -
Movies Quoted by Remington Steele
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. -
TSPDT 1920s Films
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Films from the 1920s on the TSPDT Top 1000 List. -
TSPDT 1930s Films
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. 1930s Films on the TSPDT Top 1000 List. -
TSPDT Pre-1920 Films
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Movies filmed before 1920 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They Top 1000 List. -
When Hollywood Came to Town
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Films mentioned in James d'Arc's book "When Hollywood Came to Town: A History of Moviemaking in Utah" (2010, 2019). Sorted chronologically, then alphabetically. Lost films are not included in the check-off list. These are: - One Hundred Years of Mormonism (1913) - The Deadwood Coach (1924) - Forlorn River (1926) - Arizona Bound (1927) - Lightning (1927) - The Shepherd of the Hills (1928) - Under the Tonto Rim (1928) - The Vanishing Pioneer (1928) - The Night Flyer (1928) - West of the Rockies (1929) - The Mormon Conquest (1939) More recent films listed in the back of the book but not mentioned in the book itself have been moved to a separate list here: https://www.icheckmovies.com/lists/when+hollywood+came+to+town+other+films/yormovies/ -
Alternate Oscars (Danny Peary) - Best Actor
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. These are the movies with performances that film critic Danny Peary picked as his “best actor” choices from 1927-28 to 1991 in his book “Alternate Oscars” from 1993. Note that Peary selected two “best actors” for 1951. -
Alternate Oscars (Danny Peary) - Best Actress
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. These are the movies with performances that film critic Danny Peary picked as his “best actress” choices from 1927-28 to 1991 in his book “Alternate Oscars” from 1993. Note that Peary selected two “best actresses” for 1942. -
Criterion Collection Themes - America, America
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. Call it star-spangled skepticism—there’s a whole host of movies in the collection that celebrate the United States by taking a hard, clear-eyed look at it. Uncompromising documentaries, historical dramas, surreal countercultural head trips: these are films that wrestle with the idea and reality of America, from the Civil War (Ride with the Devil) to the bicentennial (Dazed and Confused) to the contemporary political landscape (Tanner ’88). -
Criterion Collection Themes - First Films
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. It takes some master movie artists years to hone their craft, working through ideas and aesthetics until they achieve their consummate creative statement. But cinema history is also dotted with thunderous works of art that announced their makers’ brilliance right out of the gate. There’s no dearth of dazzling debuts in the Criterion Collection, from the New Wave launchers Breathless and The 400 Blows, by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, respectively, to the still career-defining early masterworks of Victor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive), Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket), and Maurice Pialat (L’enfance nue). Here’s a great way to savor the beginnings of some of the pillars of cinema.
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