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 […]

The best films of writer-director Paul Mazursky feel like small miracles, movies that are carefully crafted yet give the impression of life caught on the fly; they have the enthusiasm and audacity of Mazursky’s idol Fellini, but their subjects are almost entirely, gloriously American and their harsh truths are presented in a warm comic voice that is as accessible to mainstream audiences as it is sophisticated. His 1978 dramedy An Unmarried Woman is a case in point, a picture that was a box office smash (after being turned down by financiers all over Hollywood) yet still manages to deliver the […]

In the mid-1980s, photographer and aspiring filmmaker Jennie Livingston discovered New York City’s drag ball scene and found the subject for what would become her debut feature, the landmark 1990 documentary Paris is Burning. A moving, empathetic, and very, very funny portrait of the black, Latinx, gay and transgender voguers who find support and community in rival “houses” during a time of cultural hostility defined by homophobia, transphobia, and racism, Paris is Burning is both a remarkable time capsule and a timeless ensemble character study about the need for self-expression and the desire to be heard. Livingston’s sensitivity as an […]

Some good news for those crushed by the looming demise of FilmStruck: The Criterion Collection, a major part of the cinephilic streaming site that’s coming to an end on Nov. 29, will be launching its own freestanding service. Their solo venture is scheduled to go live in spring of 2019, and it will act much as it did on its FilmStruck channel, with thematic programming, spotlights, retrospectives, supplemental features, double features and guest introductions. Those interested in signing up as a “charter member” — meaning you’ll be notified when the service is officially launching and receive a subscription at a […]

One of the greatest and most criminally overlooked Westerns in the history of cinema arrives on Blu-ray and DVD this week in the form of the Criterion Collection’s release of Robert M. Young’s The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. A landmark independent film that kicked off the Chicano cinema movement of the 1980s (a movement that would include movies as varied as El Norte, Stand and Deliver, and Born in East L.A.), it’s a genre piece without a shred of manipulation or sentimentality; director Young and producer Edward James Olmos, who also stars in the title role, tell their chase narrative […]

Some films make a splash on their initial release and are largely forgotten just a few years later; others are ignored but rise in stature with the passage of time. Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 debut sex, lies, and videotape is one of those rare movies that was a phenomenon in its time and has only gotten better with age, a razor-sharp exploration of the ways in which we lie to each other and ourselves and an inquiry into what those lies say about our relationships, our desires, and our society as a whole. An extremely specific movie about a precise social […]

Jean-Luc Godard called Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar “the world in an hour and a half,” and revisiting the film over 50 years after its release, it’s hard to disagree. There’s not a lot of plot in the conventional sense; Bresson simply follows the life of a donkey as he passes through various owners and uses the animal as a linking device between episodes depicting the human condition in all its variety — though he does tend toward the darker side of the emotional spectrum. For all the talk of salvation and transcendence in Bresson’s films that has been going […]

For my final home video column of the year, I’d like to round up the most interesting and enjoyable Blu-ray and DVD titles I’ve encountered in recent months — not necessarily a “ten best” list, but a compendium of highly recommended releases that rank among 2017’s home viewing highlights (and that make great gifts for cinephiles as the holiday shopping season approaches). Here goes: Desert Hearts. Director Donna Deitch embarked on her narrative feature debut with a simple goal — to tell a love story between two women that didn’t end with either of them dying or in a bisexual […]

Barry Lyndon joined the Criterion Collection last week, and they’ve shared an excerpt from one of the disc’s supplements in which focus puller Douglas Milsorne and gaffer Lou Bogue discuss the difficulty of shooting with all those candles — oxygen got scarce on the ground — and surreptitiously bouncing light to provide the necessary amount of illumination. For more, see this video on various DPs discussing the film’s groundbreaking cinematography and Jim Hemphill’s interview with three of the cast members.