The best film by America’s greatest comic filmmaker arrives on Blu-ray this week in the form of Criterion’s release of Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life. Some Brooks partisans might argue on behalf of the more acidic and self-flagellating Modern Romance or the more influential Real Life (and if you caught me on certain days I could probably be convinced that Mother is as great a movie as anyone has ever made), but Defending Your Life is the director’s most philosophically dense, emotionally satisfying, and conceptually ambitious comedy, an inquiry into the meaning of existence as serious as Tree of Life […]

The Criterion Collection adds another indispensable boxed set to its library with this month’s release of World of Wong Kar Wai, a package of seven essential features, all restored and remastered and accompanied by an abundance of interviews, deleted scenes, and alternate endings. Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love have been released by Criterion before, but the remaining five films – As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and 2046 – are new to the label and presented here in vastly superior presentations to prior U.S. home video releases. The early films are […]

Director Budd Boetticher made dozens of movies ranging from romantic comedies and noirs to science fiction and prison pictures, but he’s long been known primarily for the seven Westerns he made with Randolph Scott between 1956 and 1960. While those films are all terrific and worthy of the praise bestowed upon them by the likes of Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino, their canonization has kept many other worthwhile Boetticher works from discovery. I’ve always been partial to the movies he made as a contract director at Universal in 1952 and 1953, a period during which he made a […]

The following interview with David Cronenberg about his film Crash originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1997 edition. With Crash having just been rereleased in a new restoration by Criterion, it is being republished online for the first time. Also regarding Crash: Joanne McNeil’s essay on the relation of the work to the source material, J.G. Ballard’s novel. Blood, semen and gasoline are the liquids that course through David Cronenberg’s compelling study of sexual fetishism, Crash. But far from being a, well, messy affair, Crash is startling for its cool precision and astute manner of intellectual provocation. […]

One of the more interesting periods in the history of Italian cinema is the era of international co-productions that followed neorealism; kicked off by the massive success of MGM’s 1951 extravaganza Quo Vadis, the Italian film industry entered a boom age in which the location shooting, social consciousness, and limited resources of neorealism gave way to spectacular sets, glamorous Hollywood stars, and lavish budgets thanks to the country’s abundance of breathtaking scenery and attractive production incentives. One of the most expensive and entertaining of the 1950s historical epics was Ulysses (1954), a gorgeously photographed and cleverly written adaptation of Homer’s […]

With Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai newly released by Criterion Collection today, Filmmaker is publishing online for the first time Peter Bowen’s interview with Jarmusch and actor Forest Whitaker from our Winter, 2000 print issue. In Jim Jarmusch’s latest adventure, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, the title character, played by Forest Whitaker, is set on a collision course with the mob after a local boss’s daughter (Tricia Vessey) witnesses him making a hit. Soon, Ghost Dog is declared a “liability,” and a hit is ordered on him as well. Naturally, this mysterious urban samurai easily eludes […]

When Francesco Rosi adapted artist and activist Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli for Italian television in 1979, contemporary observers of the director probably saw it as a strange choice. Rosi had made his name with searing, forcefully immediate studies of Italian society and politics like Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Over the City; Levi’s book about his banishment to an isolated rural town during the reign of Mussolini was as modest and personal as Rosi’s earlier films were sweeping and elaborate. Yet the memoir had in fact been a dream project of Rosi’s for decades, and the four-part, […]

Earlier this year I wrote about Criterion’s Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits boxed set and declared it one of the best Blu-ray releases of all time. Less than two months later, the producers at Criterion have already topped themselves with the 15-disc The Complete Films of Agnes Varda collection, a comprehensive look at the work of one of the French New Wave’s grand masters. The set contains 39 features and shorts, arranged not in chronological order but in a series of intelligently curated programs, as though the movies were being shown in a public retrospective; there are discs devoted to […]

It’s often hard for me to avoid using superlatives when writing about the work done by the Criterion Collection, and they’ve made it even more difficult with their new Blu-ray set Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits, a seven-disc package that ranks with the company’s best releases – which means it’s one of the best Blu-ray releases ever, period. The box contains the four features martial arts icon Lee made at the height of his powers (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, and Enter the Dragon) as well as two films cobbled together after his premature death […]

Ever since the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the International Olympic Committee has commissioned films of the games to be produced in collaboration with their host countries; though many of them are relatively traditional sports documentaries, there are a handful – such as the experimental anthology film Visions of Eight, which chronicles the 1972 Summer Olympics via segments by Arthur Penn, Milos Forman, John Schlesinger, and other major directors – that are cinematically significant even for viewers who couldn’t care less about anything athletic. The best of the Olympic films that I’ve seen is Kon Ichikawa’s 1965 masterpiece Tokyo Olympiad, a […]