Purple Noon: Criterion Collection

It has been more than 50 years since Rene Clement’s adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley, was released in theaters. Entitled Purple Noon (1960), it has been eclipsed in the popular imagination by Anthony Minghella’s... 

Heaven’s Gate: Criterion Collection

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... 

Rashomon: Criterion Collection

When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon (1950), he had left Toho Studios and made movies for three other companies before returning. It was with one of these other studios that the director made this film, but it wasn’t easy. He had a hell of a time getting... 

Lawless

Based on the historical novel The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant, Lawless (2012) is a fictionalized depiction of the Prohibition-era bootlegging practices of the Bondurant family. The book got the attention of Australian filmmaker John... 

Finding Nemo: Collector’s Edition

Finding Nemo (2003) is one of Pixar Studios most successful animated films. In addition to being a critical darling and a commercial success (to the tune of $921 million worldwide), it also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. And yet, at... 

Weekend: Criterion Collection

Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) is an outrageous pastiche of 1960s intellectual discourse, fusing together the ideas of Karl Marx, Jacques Lacan and Bertolt Brecht (among others). Along with his cinematic contemporaries, chief among them, Pier Paolo... 

2 Movie Double Feature

Before he hit the big time with The Mummy (1999) reboot, director Stephen Sommers cranked out a nifty little B-monster movie called Deep Rising (1998). It had nothing more on its mind than to deliver an entertaining thrill ride and for the most part achieves... 

Comic Book Confidential: 20th Anniversary Edition

Often regarded as just for kids, comic books finally gained a modicum of respectability in the mid to late 1980s with the rise in popularity of titles like Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Maus to name but only a few. Harlan Ellison’s seminal...