Lost in Criterion

Louis Malle reunites with the stars of My Dinner with Andre, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, for a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in a an abandoned theater just off Time Square. Not just a delightful production of Uncle Vanya, but also a look at theater for the sake of theater, squatting and otherwise unmoored from financial obligations.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's only sci-fi work, World on a Wire asks the important questions: what if we asked an AI to simulate the Matrix as a 1970s German television miniseries, and then scrapped that garbage and just had a great screenwriter, fantastic cinematographer, and masterful director make it instead. While dealing with the same questions of humanity and existentialism that

Lena Dunham has a tendency to say dumb things, and she's garnered quite a backlash during her short career. Because of that the inclusion of her 2010 film Tiny Furniture in the Criterion Collection appears to be often mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Bay's Armageddon and Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: that is, with Criterion aficionados asking "why is th

Our friend and samurai-film-fiend Donovan joins us to talk about Hideo Gosha's Three Outlaw Samurai (1964). This origin story for a long-running tv show that seems like it was Gosha's version of the A-Team plays like a more cynical version of a Kurosawa tale. It's also got some fantastic camera work thanks to Tadashi Sakai.

Following the festival successes but domestic box office failures of Salvatore Giuliano (1962) and Hands over the City (1963), Francesco Rosi decided an international picture would fix his money problem, and decided to make a documentary on the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. He didn't end up making exactly that, as The Moment of Truth (1965) is a narrative film with a n

We've got sympathy for the Godzilla as guest Jason W. returns to talk with us about the Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla and the American recut of it, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the original film's anti-war metaphor (and what gets lost in the Americanization), as well as the media inspired by the film. We've got a lot to cover so save this one for long evening walk.

We here at Lost in Criterion love Luis Buñuel, and (currently) this is the last one we have in the Criterion Collection. Belle de Jour (1967) is the story of a middle class woman, wife of a surgeon, who becomes a sex worker in the afternoons. Or it's about a middle class woman who imagines that she's become a sex worker in the afternoons. Buñuel takes a lot of liberties with the

Noel Coward's Design for Living premiered in Cleveland, Ohio -- apparently the world's bastion of progressive and transgressive theater at the time -- on January 2, 1933. By the end of the month it would be on Broadway, by the end of the year Ernst Lubitsch and Ben Hecht would adapt it into the sexiest film of 1933. Meanwhile, Coward wouldn't stage the play in his native England fo

Somehow Sidney Lumet is our most watched director on our Patreon bonus episodes, but the actual Criterion Collection has a distinct lack. We get one of his best this week with 12 Angry Men (1957), a film adaptation of a teleplay from the Golden Age of Television (though not from Spine 495: The Golden Age of Television boxset). Our friend Stephen G. joins us to talk about how this i

The final film in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy, and the final film of the director's life, is the capstone to the set and, perhaps, a capstone to his entire career. A story of connection, coupled with the others in the trilogy, we're reminded that without Fraternity - the guiding theme of this film - life is hell. You gotta care. You deserve to be cared about.