The Criterion Channel is my
most essential streamer (aside from YouTube perhaps), and the only one for
which I have an annual subscription, so I don’t mind going a month or more
without watching any of their films, but I always have a lot to catch up with
when I do. I’ll start with some of their
new exclusive releases, and proceed to recent collections that explore corners
of cinema history.
Vermiglio (MC-85) is a sad and lovely, funny and touching film set in the Italian Alps in the last year of WWII. Filmmaker Maura Delpero returns to the village of her just-deceased father’s childhood to recreate the era and setting, drawing on her documentary (and painterly) background and inspired by great Italian neorealists like DeSica and Olmi, in the most immersive portrait of peasant life since the latter’s supreme Tree of Wooden Clogs (also on Criterion, and due for yet another look). Eight surviving children live with their teacher-father and always-pregnant mother on a farm in a remote Alpine village, but the film concentrates on three sisters who share the same bed. The youngest is the brightest, whom the father intends to send away for further schooling. The middle daughter is most religious but struggles with her emerging libido. The oldest is immediately attracted to a handsome Sicilian stranger, who has deserted the army with an older cousin of hers. Her story emerges slowly and delicately as the focus of the film, which gradually reveals layer upon layer with an exquisite touch, as the mountain landscape progresses from deep winter through spring and into autumn. Don’t miss this, if you have the patience and the eye for acute, subtle, and heartfelt filmmaking.
All We Imagine as Light (MC-93) is the second feature from the young Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia. The first was a hybrid documentary-drama about film school protests against PM Modi, and the second maintains a similar balance in the story of three hospital workers from the provinces now living in Mumbai. The “city symphony” is one of her influences (plus Satyajit Ray obviously, but Fellini also, and the “New Waves” of various nationalities) and this portrait of the teeming, polyglot metropolis in monsoon season is very strong. The three main characters are introduced serially: a senior nurse whose husband left for work in Germany shortly after their arranged marriage and hasn’t been heard from since, a young nurse in love with a Muslim boy and fending off suitors proposed by her distant parents, and a widowed cook being evicted for construction of a luxury high-rise only to find she has no rights without a husband. In the second half of the film, the cook returns to her native seaside village with the help of the two nurses. The pace of the film changes, and we get closer to the women as they get closer to each other, while modernity recedes into folklore. Inventive and very well-acted, this is a film of multiple pleasures, mysteries, and surprises.
Wikipedia characterizes Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia (MC-83) as a “black comedy thriller,” which only requires the additional word “gay” to be an adequate description. A baker of indeterminate age, say thirtysomething, returns to his home village in the south of France, when the mentor to whom he apprenticed dies. He looks innocent enough, but is he angling to take over the boulangerie or to sleep with the widow? He moves into the room of the dead man’s son, who used to be his friend but is now his adversary. He wanders around some of his old haunts among the autumn hills (slightly reminiscent of the Berkshires, in the exquisite cinematography of Claire Mathon) and drops in on old acquaintances. What is he up to, whose bed will he wind up in? And why does that mushroom-hunting priest keep showing up everywhere? The mystery unfolds but does not resolve. It’s hard not to imagine that Guiraudie went to school on Pasolini’s Teorema.
All Shall Be Well (MC-82) is a delicate family drama set in Hong Kong and directed by Ray Yeung. We are introduced to a loving lesbian couple who has been together for forty years, though never able to formalize their marriage. One of them dies suddenly, and the other is left without legal standing. Though their relationship has been fully accepted by the family of the deceased, each of her relatives has hope of economic relief from an inheritance, which qualifies their affection for the survivor. Will she be evicted from her longtime home, so they can move up in the world? How shall she respond? Where do the rights and obligations of family lie? This well-acted and gentle film raises many questions in a small compass.
The appeal of Caught by the Tides (MC-87) is decidedly specialized, as Jia Zhangke revisits his films from the past twenty-odd years, all starring his wife Tao Zhao, along with outtakes and documentary footage he shot along the way, and constructs a portrait of vast changes in China over that period. Her character never speaks a word, but she has the expressive qualities to pull it off. In the first segment, she’s a young performer in a difficult relationship with her manager. In the second, he’s gone to work on the Three Gorges Dam project, and she goes searching for him, and observes the massive dislocation as millions of people are evacuated. In the finale, shot during Covid, the pair meet again, having aged quite differently. This simple summary is rather hard to discern in the process of the film, with its unrelated documentary scenes and unexplained transitions, but is subsumed in the examination of a generation’s worth of cultural change.
One facet of Criterion’s appeal is that I could immediately catch up with two other recent films of Jia Zhangke that I had missed, since I’ve no longer been programming films at the Clark. Ash is Purest White (MC-85) and Mountains May Depart (MC-79) are all of piece with his latest, as time-spanning semi-documentaries centered on Tao Zhao. Not only can I not separate the films in my mind, they tend to share scenes and outtakes from one to the next, which for a cinephile is part of the appeal, but I’m not sure how much a casual viewer could get out of his work.
Criterion had a collection ironically called “Fun City” about NYC in the 70s era when I was living in Brooklyn, and I was glad to see Dog Day Afternoon again, which inspired me to watch other old Al Pacino films. His first, Panic in Needle Park, was also in the collection but too grim and predetermined for me to finish. I also tracked down Serpico and Sea of Love for viewings that confirmed my positive memories of them. In a timely coincidence, Paramount+ had a special offer and just cycled The Godfather films back into streaming availability. They looked great and remain among the best films of all time, utterly familiar yet still impressive. Same goes for Pacino.
Coincidentally, I also rewatched Pacino’s favorite film, The Tree of Wooden Clogs (IMDB), always secure in my short list of most significant films. This semi-documentary portrait of peasant life in Lombardy at the end of the 19th century never fails to have a profound effect on me. As I wrote when I showed it at the Clark in connection with a Pissarro exhibition, “Crushingly sad but transcendently beautiful, this slow and patiently observed masterpiece is among the greatest films ever made.”
For another celebration of the difficult but lovely day-to-day lives of poor rural folk, turn to That They May Face the Rising Sun (AMZ, MC-81), from a distant but surprisingly related perspective, County Mayo in the 1980s. That was shortly before I toured the area with my friend Kevin O’Hara (while we were working together on his book Last of the Donkey Pilgrims). Writer-director Pat Collins’ adaptation of John McGahern’s final novel is quiet, deliberate, evocative, and reflective of his documentary background. Barry Ward plays the McGahern character, a writer who has returned from London with his artist wife to his roots in the West of Ireland. They farm with the help of neighbors, classic Irish characters who are always welcome for a meal or a drink. Days pass, the season turns, the community gathers for weddings and funerals. That’s it, and it’s more than enough – beautiful, truthful, and moving.
Returning to Criterion classics, Yojimbo (MC-93) was an Akira Kurosawa film that I’d never seen, and one of the first films I added to my CC list six years ago. That’s the beauty of Criterion for me, it’s always there and always has something new or old worth watching or rewatching. I can’t imagine a samurai film ever reaching the heights of The Seven Samurai, but this is a worthy entry in the canon, and actually Kurosawa’s most popular film. Toshiro Mifune expands on his comic persona, as the lone wolf entering an isolated town riven by a feud between the silk merchant and the saki brewer, along with their hired thugs. He offers his unbeatable swordplay as bodyguard (yojimbo) to each in turn, and plays them off against each other for his own advancement and amusement. Kurosawa borrows from American Westerns, and then is borrowed from in turn, and this certainly paves the way for Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name.”
High and Low (MC-90) was one of my favorite Kurosawa films, and I gave it another look in advance of Spike Lee’s remake, Highest 2 Lowest. Here he’s adapting an American police procedural, and bringing the impressive widescreen choreography of his battle scenes to an indoor setting. Mifune plays a hard-nosed business executive whose son is believed to be kidnapped, with the police laboring mightily to track down the culprit and recover the ransom money. He lives in a hilltop mansion that looks down on Yokohama, as the kidnapper looks back up at him vengefully. Behind the dazzling direction are moral and social quandaries aplenty. Let’s see what Spike does with his “joint.”
Another film on my CC list for six years was Kenji Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women (IMDB) and it turns out I wouldn’t have shown it at the Clark, even if it had been available when I was surveying films to accompany an exhibition of Japanese prints. This was made under postwar Occupation, before the director’s superlative films of the early Fifties, and does not approach their mastery, though it may be one of the most personal films from this painterly filmmaker/.
Filling in another filmography, I watched Robert Bresson’s penultimate film The Devil, Probably (IMDB). His severe style produced several all-time classics (A Man Escaped above all) but this attempt to dissect the youth culture of post-1968 France is woefully misguided.
A Robert Altman collection featured one of his films that I had never seen. He was an important maverick and innovator whose career is all over the map, from great to unwatchable. Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (IMDB) is below the median line, but I still found reasons to watch it all the way through. One was trying to figure out just why I’ve always found Sandy Dennis so unpalatable, but more satisfyingly seeing a so-young Cher and Kathy Bates, and Karen Black as a trans woman (in 1982!). This is a filmed play that makes no attempt to hide its provenance, except for a few lame special effects. Don’t bother unless you’re an Altman completist.
Director Bertrand Tavernier and star Nathalie Baye were enough to draw me to A Week’s Vacation (IMDB), and did not disappoint, even though the film struck me as warmed-over Eric Rohmer, about a thirtyish school teacher trying to get her bearings in love and work.
After watching the excellent Netflix series adaptation of The Leopard, rather than returning yet again to Visconti’s version, I re-watched his Senso (IMDB), an historical melodrama set in the period of Italian unification, as the Venetians seek independence from Austria. Alida Valli is the patrician wife who throws away her life in a mad passion for the Austrian soldier played by Farley Granger (the dubbed American version was called The Wanton Countess). It’s operatically over-the-top, like much of Visconti, but historically quite interesting, as well as lavish and deranged.
Criterion lists the films that will depart at the end of each month, which often prompts me to watch. La Guerre est Finie (IMDB) was one such. Director Alain Resnais and star Yves Montand made a big impression on me when I first saw this film, probably around the time I was dropping out of school, disillusioned with my studies in political economy. I returned in two years to study literature, philosophy, and religion exclusively. In the film Montand is a Spanish Communist in Parisian exile, still working to subvert Franco’s regime three decades after the Civil War and growing weary of fruitless political struggle. It spoke to me then, and speaks to me now.
Criterion recently offered an excellent collection of films by the seminal documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, from Don’t Look Back to The War Room to Kings of Pastry. One night it suited my mood to rewatch Monterey Pop (MC-77) and revisit the Summer of Love in 1967, when I was a 20-year-old college dropout.
In the midst of Jamie Lee Curtis’s late career renaissance, it was amusing to look back forty-plus years to an early film that aimed to lift her out of the teen horror genre. In Love Letters (IMDB), she’s a public radio host who finds a cache of her deceased mother’s letters to a longtime lover, and tries to relive that experience by embarking on an affair with a married man. Not great, but interesting as foreshadowing a long career.
I’ve long enjoyed the animations of Faith and John Hubley (as well as their daughter Emily) and showed a program of their work at the Clark way back when. It was great to revisit some of them in this collection.
Last but far from least, I was mesmerized by the spectacle of Gerhard Richter Painting (MC-77). I’ve been enamored of his scraped paintings since I encountered a whole wall of them at the Art Institute of Chicago some years back, and this film details just how they are made, along with interviews with the artist and visits to gallery exhibitions of his earlier (and quite different) work. These paintings are different in method and style from Jackson Pollock’s, but similar in creating an immersive visual universe of their own. Director Corinna Belz is an effective documentarian, and Richter is articulate about his artistic practice. Moreover, just watching the paint go on the canvas is a magical process.
I regret that a number of these films will have departed the channel by the time you read this, but may well return or turn up elsewhere. This diverse sample of Criterion’s offerings demonstrates that there’s always something to watch on the channel for any serious film viewer, from the latest releases to the oldest classics, from hits to sleepers, from all corners of the world and all kinds of film artists. When it comes to quality cinema, there’s no better value out there.
Vermiglio (MC-85) is a sad and lovely, funny and touching film set in the Italian Alps in the last year of WWII. Filmmaker Maura Delpero returns to the village of her just-deceased father’s childhood to recreate the era and setting, drawing on her documentary (and painterly) background and inspired by great Italian neorealists like DeSica and Olmi, in the most immersive portrait of peasant life since the latter’s supreme Tree of Wooden Clogs (also on Criterion, and due for yet another look). Eight surviving children live with their teacher-father and always-pregnant mother on a farm in a remote Alpine village, but the film concentrates on three sisters who share the same bed. The youngest is the brightest, whom the father intends to send away for further schooling. The middle daughter is most religious but struggles with her emerging libido. The oldest is immediately attracted to a handsome Sicilian stranger, who has deserted the army with an older cousin of hers. Her story emerges slowly and delicately as the focus of the film, which gradually reveals layer upon layer with an exquisite touch, as the mountain landscape progresses from deep winter through spring and into autumn. Don’t miss this, if you have the patience and the eye for acute, subtle, and heartfelt filmmaking.
All We Imagine as Light (MC-93) is the second feature from the young Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia. The first was a hybrid documentary-drama about film school protests against PM Modi, and the second maintains a similar balance in the story of three hospital workers from the provinces now living in Mumbai. The “city symphony” is one of her influences (plus Satyajit Ray obviously, but Fellini also, and the “New Waves” of various nationalities) and this portrait of the teeming, polyglot metropolis in monsoon season is very strong. The three main characters are introduced serially: a senior nurse whose husband left for work in Germany shortly after their arranged marriage and hasn’t been heard from since, a young nurse in love with a Muslim boy and fending off suitors proposed by her distant parents, and a widowed cook being evicted for construction of a luxury high-rise only to find she has no rights without a husband. In the second half of the film, the cook returns to her native seaside village with the help of the two nurses. The pace of the film changes, and we get closer to the women as they get closer to each other, while modernity recedes into folklore. Inventive and very well-acted, this is a film of multiple pleasures, mysteries, and surprises.
Wikipedia characterizes Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia (MC-83) as a “black comedy thriller,” which only requires the additional word “gay” to be an adequate description. A baker of indeterminate age, say thirtysomething, returns to his home village in the south of France, when the mentor to whom he apprenticed dies. He looks innocent enough, but is he angling to take over the boulangerie or to sleep with the widow? He moves into the room of the dead man’s son, who used to be his friend but is now his adversary. He wanders around some of his old haunts among the autumn hills (slightly reminiscent of the Berkshires, in the exquisite cinematography of Claire Mathon) and drops in on old acquaintances. What is he up to, whose bed will he wind up in? And why does that mushroom-hunting priest keep showing up everywhere? The mystery unfolds but does not resolve. It’s hard not to imagine that Guiraudie went to school on Pasolini’s Teorema.
All Shall Be Well (MC-82) is a delicate family drama set in Hong Kong and directed by Ray Yeung. We are introduced to a loving lesbian couple who has been together for forty years, though never able to formalize their marriage. One of them dies suddenly, and the other is left without legal standing. Though their relationship has been fully accepted by the family of the deceased, each of her relatives has hope of economic relief from an inheritance, which qualifies their affection for the survivor. Will she be evicted from her longtime home, so they can move up in the world? How shall she respond? Where do the rights and obligations of family lie? This well-acted and gentle film raises many questions in a small compass.
The appeal of Caught by the Tides (MC-87) is decidedly specialized, as Jia Zhangke revisits his films from the past twenty-odd years, all starring his wife Tao Zhao, along with outtakes and documentary footage he shot along the way, and constructs a portrait of vast changes in China over that period. Her character never speaks a word, but she has the expressive qualities to pull it off. In the first segment, she’s a young performer in a difficult relationship with her manager. In the second, he’s gone to work on the Three Gorges Dam project, and she goes searching for him, and observes the massive dislocation as millions of people are evacuated. In the finale, shot during Covid, the pair meet again, having aged quite differently. This simple summary is rather hard to discern in the process of the film, with its unrelated documentary scenes and unexplained transitions, but is subsumed in the examination of a generation’s worth of cultural change.
One facet of Criterion’s appeal is that I could immediately catch up with two other recent films of Jia Zhangke that I had missed, since I’ve no longer been programming films at the Clark. Ash is Purest White (MC-85) and Mountains May Depart (MC-79) are all of piece with his latest, as time-spanning semi-documentaries centered on Tao Zhao. Not only can I not separate the films in my mind, they tend to share scenes and outtakes from one to the next, which for a cinephile is part of the appeal, but I’m not sure how much a casual viewer could get out of his work.
Criterion had a collection ironically called “Fun City” about NYC in the 70s era when I was living in Brooklyn, and I was glad to see Dog Day Afternoon again, which inspired me to watch other old Al Pacino films. His first, Panic in Needle Park, was also in the collection but too grim and predetermined for me to finish. I also tracked down Serpico and Sea of Love for viewings that confirmed my positive memories of them. In a timely coincidence, Paramount+ had a special offer and just cycled The Godfather films back into streaming availability. They looked great and remain among the best films of all time, utterly familiar yet still impressive. Same goes for Pacino.
Coincidentally, I also rewatched Pacino’s favorite film, The Tree of Wooden Clogs (IMDB), always secure in my short list of most significant films. This semi-documentary portrait of peasant life in Lombardy at the end of the 19th century never fails to have a profound effect on me. As I wrote when I showed it at the Clark in connection with a Pissarro exhibition, “Crushingly sad but transcendently beautiful, this slow and patiently observed masterpiece is among the greatest films ever made.”
For another celebration of the difficult but lovely day-to-day lives of poor rural folk, turn to That They May Face the Rising Sun (AMZ, MC-81), from a distant but surprisingly related perspective, County Mayo in the 1980s. That was shortly before I toured the area with my friend Kevin O’Hara (while we were working together on his book Last of the Donkey Pilgrims). Writer-director Pat Collins’ adaptation of John McGahern’s final novel is quiet, deliberate, evocative, and reflective of his documentary background. Barry Ward plays the McGahern character, a writer who has returned from London with his artist wife to his roots in the West of Ireland. They farm with the help of neighbors, classic Irish characters who are always welcome for a meal or a drink. Days pass, the season turns, the community gathers for weddings and funerals. That’s it, and it’s more than enough – beautiful, truthful, and moving.
Returning to Criterion classics, Yojimbo (MC-93) was an Akira Kurosawa film that I’d never seen, and one of the first films I added to my CC list six years ago. That’s the beauty of Criterion for me, it’s always there and always has something new or old worth watching or rewatching. I can’t imagine a samurai film ever reaching the heights of The Seven Samurai, but this is a worthy entry in the canon, and actually Kurosawa’s most popular film. Toshiro Mifune expands on his comic persona, as the lone wolf entering an isolated town riven by a feud between the silk merchant and the saki brewer, along with their hired thugs. He offers his unbeatable swordplay as bodyguard (yojimbo) to each in turn, and plays them off against each other for his own advancement and amusement. Kurosawa borrows from American Westerns, and then is borrowed from in turn, and this certainly paves the way for Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name.”
High and Low (MC-90) was one of my favorite Kurosawa films, and I gave it another look in advance of Spike Lee’s remake, Highest 2 Lowest. Here he’s adapting an American police procedural, and bringing the impressive widescreen choreography of his battle scenes to an indoor setting. Mifune plays a hard-nosed business executive whose son is believed to be kidnapped, with the police laboring mightily to track down the culprit and recover the ransom money. He lives in a hilltop mansion that looks down on Yokohama, as the kidnapper looks back up at him vengefully. Behind the dazzling direction are moral and social quandaries aplenty. Let’s see what Spike does with his “joint.”
Another film on my CC list for six years was Kenji Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women (IMDB) and it turns out I wouldn’t have shown it at the Clark, even if it had been available when I was surveying films to accompany an exhibition of Japanese prints. This was made under postwar Occupation, before the director’s superlative films of the early Fifties, and does not approach their mastery, though it may be one of the most personal films from this painterly filmmaker/.
Filling in another filmography, I watched Robert Bresson’s penultimate film The Devil, Probably (IMDB). His severe style produced several all-time classics (A Man Escaped above all) but this attempt to dissect the youth culture of post-1968 France is woefully misguided.
A Robert Altman collection featured one of his films that I had never seen. He was an important maverick and innovator whose career is all over the map, from great to unwatchable. Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (IMDB) is below the median line, but I still found reasons to watch it all the way through. One was trying to figure out just why I’ve always found Sandy Dennis so unpalatable, but more satisfyingly seeing a so-young Cher and Kathy Bates, and Karen Black as a trans woman (in 1982!). This is a filmed play that makes no attempt to hide its provenance, except for a few lame special effects. Don’t bother unless you’re an Altman completist.
Director Bertrand Tavernier and star Nathalie Baye were enough to draw me to A Week’s Vacation (IMDB), and did not disappoint, even though the film struck me as warmed-over Eric Rohmer, about a thirtyish school teacher trying to get her bearings in love and work.
After watching the excellent Netflix series adaptation of The Leopard, rather than returning yet again to Visconti’s version, I re-watched his Senso (IMDB), an historical melodrama set in the period of Italian unification, as the Venetians seek independence from Austria. Alida Valli is the patrician wife who throws away her life in a mad passion for the Austrian soldier played by Farley Granger (the dubbed American version was called The Wanton Countess). It’s operatically over-the-top, like much of Visconti, but historically quite interesting, as well as lavish and deranged.
Criterion lists the films that will depart at the end of each month, which often prompts me to watch. La Guerre est Finie (IMDB) was one such. Director Alain Resnais and star Yves Montand made a big impression on me when I first saw this film, probably around the time I was dropping out of school, disillusioned with my studies in political economy. I returned in two years to study literature, philosophy, and religion exclusively. In the film Montand is a Spanish Communist in Parisian exile, still working to subvert Franco’s regime three decades after the Civil War and growing weary of fruitless political struggle. It spoke to me then, and speaks to me now.
Criterion recently offered an excellent collection of films by the seminal documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, from Don’t Look Back to The War Room to Kings of Pastry. One night it suited my mood to rewatch Monterey Pop (MC-77) and revisit the Summer of Love in 1967, when I was a 20-year-old college dropout.
In the midst of Jamie Lee Curtis’s late career renaissance, it was amusing to look back forty-plus years to an early film that aimed to lift her out of the teen horror genre. In Love Letters (IMDB), she’s a public radio host who finds a cache of her deceased mother’s letters to a longtime lover, and tries to relive that experience by embarking on an affair with a married man. Not great, but interesting as foreshadowing a long career.
I’ve long enjoyed the animations of Faith and John Hubley (as well as their daughter Emily) and showed a program of their work at the Clark way back when. It was great to revisit some of them in this collection.
Last but far from least, I was mesmerized by the spectacle of Gerhard Richter Painting (MC-77). I’ve been enamored of his scraped paintings since I encountered a whole wall of them at the Art Institute of Chicago some years back, and this film details just how they are made, along with interviews with the artist and visits to gallery exhibitions of his earlier (and quite different) work. These paintings are different in method and style from Jackson Pollock’s, but similar in creating an immersive visual universe of their own. Director Corinna Belz is an effective documentarian, and Richter is articulate about his artistic practice. Moreover, just watching the paint go on the canvas is a magical process.
I regret that a number of these films will have departed the channel by the time you read this, but may well return or turn up elsewhere. This diverse sample of Criterion’s offerings demonstrates that there’s always something to watch on the channel for any serious film viewer, from the latest releases to the oldest classics, from hits to sleepers, from all corners of the world and all kinds of film artists. When it comes to quality cinema, there’s no better value out there.
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