The Breakfast Club: Criterion Collection
April 4, 2018

John Hughes’ movies were a cultural touchstone for an entire generation of young people in the 1980s. With Sixteen Candles (1984), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), he had an uncanny ability to tap into how teenagers felt...
Lost in America: Criterion Collection
September 9, 2017

If The Big Chill (1983) was the Baby Boomers at the height of their self-importance, then Albert Brooks’ Lost in America (1985) is its antithesis, a sly satire of the generation. The Boomers came of age in the 1960s and by the 1980s many had sold out...
Good Morning: Criterion Collection
July 31, 2017

From its whimsical score playing over the opening credits, Good Morning (1959) establishes a playful tone – something that was atypical of the work of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, known mostly for serious dramas like Tokyo Story (1953). Yet to dismiss...
Tampopo: Criterion Collection
July 20, 2017

Tampopo (1985) is a playful yet sincere ode to the art of making and enjoying ramen noodles. Early on, the film schools us as an older, sensei type instructs his young protégé how to appreciate and savor the meal. One dark and stormy night, a hungry...
Woman of the Year: Criterion Collection
July 6, 2017

Woman of the Year (1942) marked the first on-screen pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Sparks flew both on and off screen in this memorable romantic comedy and they would go on to make eight more films together, eventually regarded in film...
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Criterion Collection
March 23, 2017

Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) reflected a new chapter of Spanish culture, freed from tyranny and now under democratic leadership, which ushered in a new, vibrant youth culture where everything was permitted with...
The Squid and the Whale: Criterion Collection
January 10, 2017

In writer/director Noah Baumbach’s career there is a demarcation line as represented by The Squid and the Whale (2005). There are the films he did before it that are more conventional romantic comedies that owe a lot of Woody Allen and the ones that...
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: Criterion Collection
July 7, 2016

With the rather turbulent times in which we live in and the current state of the warring political parties in the United States, Stanley Kubrick’s savage black comedy about nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love...
The Player: Criterion Collection
May 31, 2016

The 1980s was a tough decade for Robert Altman. After enjoying so much creative freedom in the 1970s it all came crashing down with Popeye (1980), a big budget adaptation of the comic strip of the same name. It was plagued with production problems and...
Barcelona: Criterion Collection
May 18, 2016

After the warm reception and modest box office hit of Metropolitan (1990), writer/director Whit Stillman followed it up four years later with Barcelona (1994), which focused on the misadventures of two Americans in Barcelona, Spain. Chicago salesman Ted...