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 […]

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.