I’ve added the ten movies that Rian Johnson picked in his Criterion Closet appearance (only four of them are Criterion releases, in bold):
Girlfight
Jennifer's Body
Destroyer
Love & Basketball
The Woman King
Ocean's Eleven
Matchstick Men
Ravenous
Topsy-Turvy
Hell's Angels
Rian Johnson made two original picks: Girlfight and Hell’s Angels. This is why my Master List of Closet Picks in the Criterion Closet is so valuable.
90 titles here, once again stretching into the next decade a bit.
1. The Thing from Another World 1951
2. An American in Paris 1951
3. Der Untertan 1951
4. Quo Vadis 1951
5. A Streetcar Named Desire 1951
6. The African Queen 1951
7. High Noon 1952
8. Singin' in the Rain 1952
9. Ivanhoe 1952
10. The Little World of Don Camillo 1952
11. Limelight 1952
12. Forbidden Games 1952
13. The Crimson Pirate 1952
14. Fanfan la Tulipe 1952
15. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday 1953
16. Ugetsu 1953
17. The Naked Spur 1953
18. Tokyo Story 1953
19. I Vitelloni 1953
20. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 1953
21. Journey to Italy 1954
22. Roman Holiday 1953
23. The Wages of Fear 1953
24. From Here to Eternity 1953
25. The Caddy 1953
26. A Star Is Born 1954
27. Rear Window 1954
28. Creature from the Black Lagoon 1954
29. Diabolique 1955
30. Seven Samurai 1954
31. Johnny Guitar 1954
32. Godzilla 1954
33. La Strada 1954
34. On the Waterfront 1954
35. Bad Day at Black Rock 1955
36. The Caine Mutiny 1954
37. The Seven Year Itch 1955
38. Rebel Without a Cause 1955
39. The Man with the Golden Arm 1955
40. Smiles of a Summer Night 1955
41. Marty 1955
42. Lola Montès 1955
43. The Night of the Hunter 1955
44. Kiss Me Deadly 1955
45. All That Heaven Allows 1955
46. Rififi 1955
47. East of Eden 1955
48. Forbidden Planet 1956
49. Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956
50. Moby Dick 1956
51. Giant 1956
52. The Seventh Seal 1957
53. The Searchers 1956
54. The Ten Commandments 1956
55. Funny Face 1957
56. Elevator to the Gallows 1958
57. 12 Angry Men 1957
58. The Bridge on the River Kwai 1957
59. Jailhouse Rock 1957
60. The Incredible Shrinking Man 1957
61. Wild Strawberries 1957
62. Paths of Glory 1957
63. Witness for the Prosecution 1957
64. Ashes and Diamonds 1958
65. The Defiant Ones 1958
66. Touch of Evil 1958
67. The Tiger of Eschnapur 1959
68. Vertigo 1958
69. Horror of Dracula 1958
70. It Happened in Broad Daylight 1958
71. The 400 Blows 1959
72. Hiroshima Mon Amour 1959
73. Breathless 1960
74. Odds Against Tomorrow 1959
75. Some Like It Hot 1959
76. Ben-Hur 1959
77. Look Back in Anger 1959
78. The Misfits 1961
79. Zazie in the Metro 1960
80. L'Avventura 1960
81. Psycho 1960
82. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 1960
83. Rocco and His Brothers 1960
84. Spartacus 1960
85. Shoot the Piano Player 1960
86. The Hole 1960
87. The Apartment 1960
88. Peeping Tom 1960
89. Purple Noon 1960
90. Eyes Without a Face 1960
I talk about this thing in my work called the shitty technology adoption curve. If you want to do something terrible to people with a computer, you can't start with me. I am a mouthy white guy who speaks English as a first language and has a big platform and a short fuse and I will be a pain in your ass. So what you do is you go find someone who has no agency. You find an immigrant, you find a refugee, you find a mental patient, you find a prisoner, and you sand the rough edges of the technology down on their bodies. And then you work your way up the privilege gradient. Your gig workers, blue collar workers, white collar workers. Eventually, you get to everyone, right?
Excerpt taken from this talk with Cory Doctorow. I remember him from the boing boing blog. He is 54 years old.
A list of 87 for the 1940s, not even an even hundred.
1. The Maltese Falcon 1941
2. The Lady Eve 1941
3. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break 1941
4. The Wolf Man 1941
5. How Green Was My Valley 1941
6. Sullivan's Travels 1941
7. The Outlaw 1943
8. Citizen Kane 1941
9. Woman of the Year 1942
10. To Be or Not to Be 1942
11. Bambi 1942
12. Casablanca 1942
13. Mrs. Miniver 1942
14. The Magnificent Ambersons 1942
15. The Black Swan 1942
16. Cat People 1942
17. Shadow of a Doubt 1943
18. Obsession 1943
19. For Whom the Bell Tolls 1943
20. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen 1943
21. The Ox-Bow Incident 1943
22. I Walked with a Zombie 1943
23. Heaven Can Wait 1943
24. Le Corbeau 1943
25. Double Indemnity 1944
26. Bathing Beauty 1944
27. The Woman in the Window 1944
28. Arsenic and Old Lace 1944
29. Great Freedom No. 7 1944
30. Gaslight 1944
31. To Have and Have Not 1944
32. Cover Girl 1944
33. The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne 1945
34. Henry V 1944
35. Laura 1944
36. Ivan the Terrible, Part I 1944
37. Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot 1946
38. Meet Me in St. Louis 1944
39. The Punch Bowl 1944
40. Children of Paradise 1945
41. The Lost Weekend 1945
42. The Spiral Staircase 1946
43. Mildred Pierce 1945
44. Under the Bridges 1946
45. Rome, Open City 1945
46. Brief Encounter 1945
47. The Best Years of Our Lives 1946
48. Duel in the Sun 1946
49. The Big Sleep 1946
50. A Night in Casablanca 1946
51. Beauty and the Beast 1946
52. It's a Wonderful Life 1946
53. My Darling Clementine 1946
54. Gilda 1946
55. The Killers 1946
56. Notorious 1946
57. Murderers Among Us 1946
58. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 1948
59. Monsieur Verdoux 1947
60. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir 1947
61. Body and Soul 1947
62. The Lady from Shanghai 1947
63. Call Northside 777 1948
64. Red River 1948
65. The Red Shoes 1948
66. Bicycle Thieves 1948
67. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein 1948
68. A Foreign Affair 1948
69. La Terra Trema 1948
70. Letter from an Unknown Woman 1948
71. Fort Apache 1948
72. The Big Day 1949
73. White Heat 1949
74. The Third Man 1949
75. On the Town 1949
76. Kind Hearts and Coronets 1949
77. Adam's Rib 1949
78. Orpheus 1950
79. Winchester '73 1950
80. All About Eve 1950
81. Rashomon 1950
82. Cinderella 1950
83. The Young and the Damned 1950
84. The Gunfighter 1950
85. La Ronde 1950
86. Broken Arrow 1950
87. Sunset Boulevard 1950
I’ve added the five movies that Bi Gan picked in his Criterion Closet appearance.
Youth of the Beast
Tampopo
The Complete Jacques Tati
Master of the House
8 1/2
Bi Gan made one original pick: Youth of the Beast. This is why my Master List of Closet Picks in the Criterion Closet is so valuable.
In Spanish. 45 minute running time so wonderfully short. I don’t know anything about Luis Buñuel, but he was clearly a funny guy, a real smartass … this movie is irreverent, maybe even sacrilegious, but it’s also hilarious. Bad boy Buñuel, what a prankster, I enjoyed this …
I watched this because only one guest of the Criterion Closet (Asif Kapadia) picked it … Kapadia also recommended Investigation of a Citizen Beyond Suspicion, which was also good.
Rating: 4, you should see it, esp. with a 45 minute running time.
The devil roams this wilderness. I hear him in the night.
107 minute running time so about seven minutes too long, but I quit watching this after ten minutes. I may have lasted longer if the disc had subtitles, but it didn’t, so I gave up pretty fast. This was about some black kids in Chicago circa 1964 … they’re sort of delinquents, cutting school and stealing and screwing girls. It’s a black culture movie, and I had zero interest in it.
I watched it because only one guest of the Criterion Closet (Luis Guzman) picked this movie. I’m surprised that Criterion re-issued this since it looked pretty terrible, but it might appeal to black people of a certain age?
Rating: 2. This is a good example of a 2 rated movie… it means I didn’t finish it. Rating 1 means I actually sat through it and regret doing so.
You ain’t gots no chance with that high yellow bitch!
112 minute running time … so about 12 minutes too long. British public schoolboy revenge fantasy from the late 1960s … Malcolm McDowell plays Malcolm McDowell (he had the same role in A Clockwork Orange more or less) … rotten rich kids who hated the hypocrisy, the capricious authority, I guess... all about rebellion.
There’s a strong homosexual vein running through the whole movie as well. It’s an interesting movie, the flip flopping between color and black and white doesn’t delineate fantasy and reality, it’s not that simple. And the British Empire was pretty dead by 1969, I think.
I watched this because only one visitor to the Criterion Closet (Andrew Haigh) in the whole history of hundreds of visitors selected it.
Rating is 3.5 … I watched it start to finish, enjoyed a lot of it, though it’s a little too long.
Brunning! This is Jute. You're Jute's bumf tutor. Take him to the sweat room.
I’ve added the nine movies that David Remnick picked in his Criterion Closet appearance.
A Man Escaped
Burden of Dreams
By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two
Citizen Kane
King Lear
Shoot the Piano Player
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun
The Wes Anderson Archive
Thelonius Monk Straight, No Chaser
David Remnick made two original picks: The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun and Shoot the Piano Player. This is why my Master List of Closet Picks in the Criterion Closet is so valuable.
In Nigerian English. 116 minute running time so at least 16 minutes too long. If you’re interested in seeing what life in Nigeria is like, you can watch this movie, but be warned: it’s grim. It’s crowded and dirty and chaotic and people rip each other off at every turn and family relationships are all screwed up and people do the most desperate things to try to get the hell out of there, and who can blame them?
The movie kicks off with a horrific tragedy, so it can’t really go downhill from there. Two separate stories about two decent people, one man, one woman (and her little sister who is pregnant) that sort of intersect, but not really. It’s not a badly made movie, but it’s not fun to watch. You’ll count your lucky stars that you weren’t born in Nigeria. I have zero interest in visiting Africa, except for maybe going on a posh safari.
I watched this movie because it was another Criterion title that had only been picked once (by Ayo Edebiri) in the whole history of closet picks.
Rating: 3 or even 2.5 given that it’s a little too long. It’s not terrible, but you really have to be interested in watching what life is like in Lagos (spoiler: it’s awful) to enjoy it. “A vivid snapshot of life in contemporary Lagos, whose social fabric is captured in all its vibrancy and complexity,” says Criterion.
Are you going to fix everything here?
