This "story of a ship" kicks off the David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset. Lean was an in-demand film editor (and had previously done some uncredited co-direction), and Noel Coward wanted to make a war propaganda film based on his friend Lord Mountbatten's naval exploits. Thus we get In Which We Serve (1942), a biography of the crew of a doomed destroyer told in flashback after the ship sinks in the Battle of Crete. Ronald Neame acts as cinematographer and the film is produced by Anthony Havelo...
Jun 28, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 605
Every time we watch a documentary, we end up talking a lot about the nature of documentary. With Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's The War Room (1993), much of that end of the conversation is focused on how Direct Cinema is not a journalistic endeavor, and how the material covered - Bill Clinton's 1992 US Presidential campaign - could have used a journalistic approach. Instead what we get is a collection of some of the worst people in US politics for the last 30 years given free reign to lie t...
Jun 21, 2024•1 hr 46 min•Ep. 604
Mikhail Kalatozov makes some beautiful films, particularly in his work with Sergey Urusevsky, who may just be our favorite cinematographer. Many, many years ago (Spine 146!) we watched their film The Cranes are Flying (1957), and images from that film still grace my dreams. Many, many years from now (Spine 1214!) we will watch I am Cuba (1964), their final collaboration, and we can't wait. But thankfully between these two masterpieces we get Letter Never Sent (1960), a tale of Soviet vs Nature, ...
Jun 14, 2024•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 603
Otto Preminger's ripped-from-the-headlines courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) stars a delightful mix of young and old Hollywood, is a big middle finger to the Production Code, and is an ode to manipulating the US legal system. And if that weren't enough, we've got a soundtrack by Duke Ellington and titles by Saul Bass.
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 602
Louis Malle reunites with the stars of My Dinner with Andre, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, for a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in a an abandoned theater just off Time Square. Not just a delightful production of Uncle Vanya, but also a look at theater for the sake of theater, squatting and otherwise unmoored from financial obligations.
May 31, 2024•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 601
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's only sci-fi work, World on a Wire asks the important questions: what if we asked an AI to simulate the Matrix as a 1970s German television miniseries, and then scrapped that garbage and just had a great screenwriter, fantastic cinematographer, and masterful director make it instead. While dealing with the same questions of humanity and existentialism that many tales of virtual prisons do, World on a Wire also gives us a jumping off point to talk about tech innovation, ...
May 24, 2024•2 hr•Ep. 600
Lena Dunham has a tendency to say dumb things, and she's garnered quite a backlash during her short career. Because of that the inclusion of her 2010 film Tiny Furniture in the Criterion Collection appears to be often mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Bay's Armageddon and Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: that is, with Criterion aficionados asking "why is this here?" But Lost in Criterion has long held that the Collection seems to have had a particular interest in festiva...
May 17, 2024•1 hr 56 min•Ep. 599
Our friend and samurai-film-fiend Donovan joins us to talk about Hideo Gosha's Three Outlaw Samurai (1964). This origin story for a long-running tv show that seems like it was Gosha's version of the A-Team plays like a more cynical version of a Kurosawa tale. It's also got some fantastic camera work thanks to Tadashi Sakai.
May 10, 2024•2 hr 11 min•Ep. 598
Following the festival successes but domestic box office failures of Salvatore Giuliano (1962) and Hands over the City (1963), Francesco Rosi decided an international picture would fix his money problem, and decided to make a documentary on the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. He didn't end up making exactly that, as The Moment of Truth (1965) is a narrative film with a neo-realist bent, and if you can get over all the ritualistic animal abuse it's probably the best bull fighting movie...
May 03, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 597
We've got sympathy for the Godzilla as guest Jason W. returns to talk with us about the Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla and the American recut of it, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the original film's anti-war metaphor (and what gets lost in the Americanization), as well as the media inspired by the film. We've got a lot to cover so save this one for long evening walk.
Apr 26, 2024•2 hr 7 min•Ep. 596
We here at Lost in Criterion love Luis Buñuel, and (currently) this is the last one we have in the Criterion Collection. Belle de Jour (1967) is the story of a middle class woman, wife of a surgeon, who becomes a sex worker in the afternoons. Or it's about a middle class woman who imagines that she's become a sex worker in the afternoons. Buñuel takes a lot of liberties with the source material and imagines a film that is perhaps 100% a character's fantasies, but even if it's not, it's still at ...
Apr 19, 2024•1 hr 51 min•Ep. 595
Noel Coward's Design for Living premiered in Cleveland, Ohio -- apparently the world's bastion of progressive and transgressive theater at the time -- on January 2, 1933. By the end of the month it would be on Broadway, by the end of the year Ernst Lubitsch and Ben Hecht would adapt it into the sexiest film of 1933. Meanwhile, Coward wouldn't stage the play in his native England for nearly another decade. Why? Well, one there's the scandal of even portraying a polyamorous relationship, but then ...
Apr 12, 2024•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 594
Somehow Sidney Lumet is our most watched director on our Patreon bonus episodes, but the actual Criterion Collection has a distinct lack. We get one of his best this week with 12 Angry Men (1957), a film adaptation of a teleplay from the Golden Age of Television (though not from Spine 495: The Golden Age of Television boxset). Our friend Stephen G. joins us to talk about how this is a great movie whose politics are not as great as we'd like and whose understanding of the legal system is going to...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 593
The final film in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy, and the final film of the director's life, is the capstone to the set and, perhaps, a capstone to his entire career. A story of connection, coupled with the others in the trilogy, we're reminded that without Fraternity - the guiding theme of this film - life is hell. You gotta care. You deserve to be cared about.
Mar 29, 2024•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 592
D.H. Lawrence once said "Never trust the teller, trust the tale" and we fully embrace that as we struggle to step around the obvious political metaphor of a rocky relationship between a French woman and a Polish man in Krzysztof Kieślowski's anti-romantic comedy "Equality" movie Three Colors: White. Kieślowski is rather insistent that these are not political movies, though his collaborator and co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz is perhaps less insistent. In either case though, the tale does th...
Mar 22, 2024•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 591
This week we kick off Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy with Blue. Each of the three colors, drawn from the colors of the French flag, are also used in the films to represent one of the ideals of the French Revolution: Blue is associated with Liberty, White with Equality, and Red with Fraternity. Ultimately, as we'll discuss in the coming weeks, the films make an argument that without Fraternity, Liberty and Equality are meaningless and even hellish. In Blue we see a woman who has embr...
Mar 16, 2024•1 hr 52 min•Ep. 590
Erle C. Kenton's The Island of Lost Souls is a pre-code adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, and the Criterion release contains quite possibly the most seemingly erratic and certainly esoteric collection of bonus features to ever be put on one of their discs. The movie itself is a wonder of early make-up effects, but among other things the additional materials bring us commentary from someone involved with a famously bad different adaptation of the work, a band loosely inspired by...
Mar 08, 2024•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 589
Listen, we don't get Michelangelo Antonioni. We admit it. Maybe someday we'll watch Blow-Up and kinda like it, but for now we're not there yet. This week we get Identification of a Woman (1982), Antonioni's entry into one of our most hated genres: male film director directs a movie about a male film director's search for a new lover/star/muse. This one is even arguably - and we do! - more self-aware and less misogynistic than others in that genre. It's certainly no less elliptical and enigmatic ...
Mar 01, 2024•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 588
Years after watching the fantastic Onibaba, we once again get an atmospheric horror film from Kaneto Shindo with Kuroneko (1968). Shindo continues to impress with this tale of feline and feminine justice. I just wish we didn't have to wait so long for his next film in the collection.
Feb 23, 2024•1 hr 48 min•Ep. 587
With their 1939 adaptation of The Four Feathers Zoltan Korda seems to have wanted to make a movie critical of British imperialism, while his brother, the film's producer Alexander Korda, seems to have wanted to make a movie in praise of their adopted British homeland. What we end up with is a beautifully shot film that is sometimes biting satire and sometimes unironic Islamophobic white saviorism.
Feb 16, 2024•1 hr 56 min•Ep. 586
We finish up Olivier Assayas' Carlos with the final episode of the 3-part miniseries. While the original idea for a film about Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was to focus on his ultimate arrest and life just before that, Carlos Part 3 covers that time period with what amounts to a montage of scenes that end in ellipses. Our bonus features this week also reveal some surprises about Assayas' sources, and show that at least Edgar Ramírez understands he's playing a character even as Assayas continues to equi...
Feb 09, 2024•1 hr 49 min•Ep. 585
Our second episode on Olivier Assayas' Carlos (2010) finds the film in overdrive trying to strip away any ideological motivation from its main character and paint him as moving toward purely profit-driven, which is probably the worst thing a Marxist could be. While Disc 2's additional features have our first behind the scenes look with Assayas insisting that he is being true to reality as much as possible, there's already been a lot of speculation that seemingly serves to only depoliticize Carlo...
Feb 02, 2024•1 hr 57 min•Ep. 584
The only work we've seen from Olivier Assayas before is Summer Hours, part of the Criterion Collections sub-collection of getting 21st century cinema into their purview by releasing seemingly every non-US family drama produced in the first decade of the new millennium. Like all those films (Yi Yi, Secert Sunshine, etc) we enjoyed Summer Hours. We return to Assayas in the Collection this week with a very different film, well the first of three, actually. Carlos (2010) is a sort of biopic (though ...
Jan 26, 2024•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 583
Our second Claude Chabrol film is his second film, Les Cousins (1959) which came out a month before Truffaut's The 400 Blows and as a piece of "French New Wave" meets almost none of the criteria we've come to associate with the movement. It's visually nice at times, but we just don't care about any of these characters or their conflicts.
Jan 19, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 582
Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is, by some definitions, the first film of the French New Wave. I feel like I've said that before. Chabrol clearly has a preternatural eye for the visual language of film. If only he had a similar talent for writing. Le Beau Serge is beautiful, but it's bland.
Jan 12, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 581
We kick off 2024 with a New Year's Eve carol. Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1921) exists in the same genre as A Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life, but unfortunately its only social message is one of temperance from alcohol. But what The Phantom Carriage lacks in intriguing plot it more than makes up for in innovative special effects, with its ghostly characters fully inhabiting a three dimensional world. With the technical limitations of cameras at the time, this movie is all th...
Jan 05, 2024•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 580
We finish up the Complete Jean Vigo boxset and the year 2023 this week, covering Vigo's final film L'Atalante. Vigo pressed himself for his first feature length, and perhaps too hard, dying of complications of tuberculosis before the premier. The studio took the opportunity of his demise to re-cut the movie, add different music, and try desperately to make it a pop culture smash in an era where France was obsessed with stories of barges. Despite the studio's efforts, a slightly restored L'Atalan...
Dec 30, 2023•1 hr 58 min•Ep. 579
We've all been there, the trepidation of introducing a new partner to your family. And why do we always seem to do it at the holidays? Maybe we're hoping that all the tinsel and the trash will distract the family just enough to make them welcoming. The family in Blood Beat (1983) has your normal family problems when new girlfriend Sarah arrives, and things get worse immediately as mom's psychic abilities put Sarah on edge and celebrations take a backseat to a ghost samurai murdering the neighbor...
Dec 22, 2023•1 hr 48 min•Ep. 578
This week we're covering the first part of Criterion's The Complete Jean Vigo set. There's just enough material in this set that we felt like we should do two episodes on it to give Jean Vigo his due. And what due this director deserves! Before dying of complication of tuberculosis at the age of 29 in 1934, Vigo produced only four works but they are each innovative and influential. This week we cover his first three works: a newsreel/travelogue look at class distinctions in a port town in À prop...
Dec 15, 2023•1 hr 56 min•Ep. 577
8 years ago this week our episode on Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water posted and we had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Two years ago this month, we talked about Roman Polanski's Repulsion and had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Now our third of his movies, Cul-de-sac (1966), offers us a chance to armchair psychoanalyze the man once again, as it becomes clear that his misogyny stems from his understanding all human relationships as power-struggles that someone must win...
Dec 08, 2023•1 hr 57 min•Ep. 576
