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 on…

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 ta…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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 thin…

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…

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.Bởi Lost in Criterion

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 an…

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 rev…

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 insi…

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 r…

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.…

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.Bởi Lost in Criterion

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 effect…