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 […]

For anyone who follows the TV business, the end of HBO’s Game of Thrones this year has raised all kinds of big, potentially era-defining questions. Will Thrones be the last series that tens of millions of people around the world watch together each week? Can HBO find another zeitgeist-y hit that fans flock to social media to discuss? Will the network have to make major changes if it doesn’t? And, perhaps most important: Will anyone again ever make another show that looks so staggeringly expensive? We don’t talk about television enough in terms of money: not just which shows and […]

A couple years ago, I was in a hotel room flipping channels when I came across an episode of the popular CBS series Blue Bloods, an ensemble family drama in the form of a procedural anchored by Tom Selleck. I was struck almost immediately by how stylistically expressive the episode was; it was clear that the director had thought through a precise means of conveying each character’s perspective in a distinctive way, assigning specific focal lengths, camera moves, and color and lighting strategies to each protagonist. It was the kind of subtle but dynamic approach to visual design one finds […]