Annie Hall
January 31, 2012
Prior to Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen was known as a comic, cutting his teeth in stand-up comedy and paying his dues as a comedy writer. When he started making films, his early efforts were flat-out comedies and farces like Bananas (1971). It wasn’t...
Godzilla: Criterion Collection
January 30, 2012
Godzilla is more than just some guy in a cheesy rubber suit terrorizing badly dubbed Japanese actors and stomping miniature cities. The original film, made in 1954, is actually a tragedy of epic proportions, a potent warning of an escalating nuclear arms...
Belle de jour: Criterion Collection
January 9, 2012
In 1967, master provocateur Luis Bunuel released one of his most celebrated films Belle de jour, an erotic tale of an unhappy bourgeois Paris housewife who works part-time at a posh brothel in order to act out her complex psychosexual fantasies. It was...
Branded to Kill: Criterion Collection
January 4, 2012
Seijun Suzuki cut his teeth on pop musicals, comedies, action and war films. Over time, he became impatient with his status as a B-movie director while some of his peers were making A movies. Often stuck with substandard screenplays, the frustrated director...
Tokyo Drifter: Criterion Collection
January 3, 2012
Seijun Suzuki made his name in Japan with hard-boiled B-crime films during the 1950’s. By the 1960’s, he took traditional Yakuza stories and juxtaposed them with an extreme Andy Warhol-esque pop art look that gleefully pushed genre conventions. He...
