Fantastic Mr. Fox: Criterion Collection
February 21, 2014
When it was announced that Wes Anderson would be adapting Roald Dahl’s short story Fantastic Mr. Fox, it came as something of a surprise. Up to that point, Anderson had only made films based on original material that he created himself or with a co-collaborator....
It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Criterion Collection
February 19, 2014
Thanks to the massive success of Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Hollywood started cranking out epic, big-budgeted movies populated by a slew of movie star cameos. It was an attempt to get people away from their television screens and back into the...
Jules and Jim: Criterion Collection
February 18, 2014
Based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, Jules and Jim (1962) is one of the most famous love triangles ever put on film. Film critic Francois Truffaut read the book in 1955 and wanted to make it into a film. The story stayed with him and once he became...
The Long Day Closes: Criterion Collection
February 4, 2014
Despite being hailed as Britain’s greatest living film director by the London Evening Standard, Liverpool’s Terence Davies is not widely known. Over a 37-year career, he has only made six feature films, most of which are deeply personal stories about...
Rififi: Criterion Collection
February 4, 2014
Blacklisted by Hollywood during the 1950s, American director Jules Dassin went to France and made Rififi (1955), considered by critics to be one of the greatest heist films ever made. It also became part of a thriving French film noir movement that included...
Thief: Criterion Collection
January 30, 2014
The best thieves in the United States operated independent crews working high-line jobs from the 1940s to the 1970s. Most of them came out of Chicago, in particular, a neighborhood known as the Patch. Meeting these people would prove vital to the creation...
Throne of Blood: Criterion Collection
January 23, 2014
Using Shakespeare’s Macbeth as his jumping off point, Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) takes a fascinating look at the chaotic swirl of turmoil and treachery that was feudal Japan. The play dealt with notions of civil disorder and battles for...
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: Criterion Collection
January 23, 2014
Filmmaker Elio Petri cut his teeth on Italian arthouse cinema, but with Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) he did the unthinkable by making a radical political film within the mainstream Italian film industry. It was an audacious move that...
The Lone Ranger
January 14, 2014
Johnny Depp and director Gore Verbinski’s first collaboration was on the surprise box office success that was Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). They worked together on two subsequent sequels, Dead Men’s Chest (2006) and...
John Mellencamp 1978 – 2012
December 9, 2013
“My world is in Indiana and this, here, is what I do for a living. I wish I could do it better sometimes than I do. That’s the same as anybody that cares about their job.” John Mellencamp once said this is an interview he gave to Rolling Stone magazine...
