Highly respected but rarely screened, Working Girls, Lizzie Borden’s 1986 feature about a group of women working an extended shift in a Manhattan brothel, finally makes its way to home video this week thanks to the Criterion Collection. Presented in a new 4K digital restoration, the film is long overdue for reappraisal, and not merely due to the struggles currently faced by sex workers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.  Borden’s previous feature, Born in Flames, was defiantly scrappy and overtly political. Working Girls represents an upgrade in production value while retaining Borden’s unwavering interest in feminist politics, race relations, workers’ rights […]

Ophélia Claude Chabrol was the first member of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd to direct a feature film with Le Beau Serge in 1958, and he scored the first box-office hit of the French New Wave with his second movie, Les Cousins (1959). Yet it took almost another 10 years for him to hit his commercial and critical stride with a series of thrillers (most notably La Femme Infidele, La Rupture and Le Boucher) that would firmly establish Chabrol as the most reliable genre stylist of his generation. In between were a series of flops and for-hire assignments, all of […]

Here’s a great video from Criterion in which documentary filmmaker Steve James (The Keeper, Stevie, Hoop Dreams) discusses how he was influenced by Robert Altman’s Nashville. He begins by noting that your most influential films are the ones you see when you’re young and falling in love with cinema, and he then goes on to say that he wasn’t interested in documentary filmmaking when he encountered Altman’s work. But there were aspects of Nashville that impressed him — including, yes, the zooms! — as well as notions of structure that wound up rippling into films like The Interruptors.

The Boost Released a year after the Partnership for a Drug-Free America’s “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” campaign frightened children into never eating their morning eggs, Harold Becker’s The Boost was this PSA’s cinematic equivalent for adults. An adaptation of political commentator and actor Ben Stein’s 1982 novel, Ludes: A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream, the film is a cautionary tale in which a real estate salesman and his wife grow addicted to wealth, entitlement and cocaine. In his review for The New York Times, filmmaker (and then freelance writer) Cameron Crowe noted that the book “winds up being largely about […]