City Lights: Criterion Collection
December 4, 2013
By the time he made City Lights (1931), Charles Chaplin was the undisputed master of the silent film comedy, having achieved just the right mix of “laughter and tears,” or “comedy and dreadful pathos,” as Gary Giddins’ liner notes for the Criterion...
Nashville: Criterion Collection
December 3, 2013
At the time, Nashville (1975) was Robert Altman’s magnum opus, a sprawling tale featuring 24 characters over five days. Not only does he manage to juggle all of these storylines, but is able to seamlessly interconnect them in major or minor ways. The...
Grey Gardens / The Beales of Grey Gardens: Criterion Collection
December 2, 2013
Grey Gardens (1976) is an odd curio even by the Criterion Collections’ standards – a documentary about Jackie Kennedy’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie who lived in a run-down, 28-room house on Long Island. How did these two members...
Frances Ha: Criterion Collection
November 25, 2013
Noah Baumbach started off with Kicking and Screaming (1995), a film, which chronicled his generation of well-off and educated twentysomethings. With Frances Ha (2013) he’s come full circle, dramatizing a new twentysomething generation in a funny and...
Parkland
November 19, 2013
Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) reignited the American public’s fascination with the John F. Kennedy assassination, spawning several other films that took a look at either the peripheral figures involved (Ruby) or its impact on society (Love Field). In...
The Uninvited: Criterion Collection
November 4, 2013
The Uninvited (1944) was based on the best-selling novel Uneasy Freehold by Dorothy Macardle and marked the directorial debut of Lewis Allen who had cut his teeth in the theater with successful productions in London’s West End and on Broadway before...
La notte: Criterion Collection
November 4, 2013
Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961) examines the turbulent marriage between a writer and his wife over the span of just under a day. The film begins with Giovanni (Mastroianni) and Lidia (Moreau) visiting a friend sick with cancer in the hospital....
I Married A Witch: Criterion Collection
October 16, 2013
Screwball comedies don’t come more full of charm then I Married A Witch (1942), and this is due in large part to the casting of Veronica Lake as a sexy sorceress who casts a spell on a man descended from the Salem puritan that burned her at the stake...
Autumn Sonata: Criterion Collection
October 16, 2013
Autumn Sonata (1978) features a simple story – Eva (Ullman) invites her mother Charlotte (Bergman) for a visit – but the emotional baggage that exists between these two characters is quite complex. It’s been seven years since the matriarch’s last...
Nashville: The Complete First Season
September 30, 2013
Nashville is a television show stacked with pedigree. Created by Callie Khouri (Thelma & Louise), this night-time soap chronicles the turbulent lives of two competing country musicians played by Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights) and Hayden Panettiere...
