Heaven’s Gate: Criterion Collection
December 19, 2012
With Heaven’s Gate (1980), Michael Cimino made the classic risky gamble that many ambitious filmmakers make. Still flush from the commercial and critical success of The Deer Hunter (1978), he used all of his newfound clout to make an epic tale depicting...
Blue Velvet: 25th Anniversary Edition
November 10, 2011
By 1984, director David Lynch was on top of the world. He had received critical acclaim and eight Academy Award nominations for The Elephant Man in 1980 and was on the verge of releasing his next film, Dune (1984), an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic...
Wise Blood: Criterion Collection
June 1, 2009
Legendary filmmaker John Huston had an uncanny ability to adapt unfilmable literature into well-crafted films. He made sense of Dashiell Hammett’s convoluted plot with his take on The Maltese Falcon (1941), he successfully translated Malcolm Lowry’s...
Halloween: Unrated Director’s Cut
December 18, 2007
Remaking a classic horror film is almost never a good idea. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004) and The Hitcher (2007) are examples of recent remakes that are inferior shadows of their original selves. And so it came with great...
Dune: Extended Edition
March 7, 2006
Based on the classic science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, Dune (1984) was a project that passed through the talented hands of Alejandro Jodorowsky, H.R. Giger, Ridley Scott, and David Lynch only to leave behind a trail of defeated creative minds and...
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Extended Edition
July 4, 2004
As with The Fellowship of the Ring before it, this extended cut of The Two Towers brings us some welcome new scenes to the most epic story ever told. This isn’t so much a director’s cut as it is a simple re-intergration of segments that were...
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
October 15, 2003
For those who haven’t read the books, watching the middle film of a trilogy might seem like a frustrating, even unsatisfying experience. Not only does The Two Towers leave you on another year-long cliffhangar, but it also demands that you’ve...