Movies That Should Be In the Criterion Collection

They need to stop dicking around with films like The Darjeeling Limited, which isn’t necessarily a bad film, its just that there are so many essential works that need restoration, as seen below:

Michael (1924) by Carl Th. Dreyer
The Apu Trilogy (1955-59) by Satyajit Ray
The Trial (1962) by Orson Welles
Marat/Sade (1967) by Peter Brook
Privilege (1967) by Peter Watkins
Who’s that Knocking at My Door? (1967) by Martin Scorsese
The Last Movie (1971) by Dennis Hopper
The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) by R.W. Fassbinder
The Mother and the Whore (1973) by Jean Eustache
O Lucky Man! (1973) by Lindsay Anderson
World on a Wire (1973) by R.W. Fassbinder
Alice in the Cities (1974) by Wim Wenders
The Man Who Sleeps (1974) by Bernard Queysanne
Fox and His Friends (1975) by R.W. Fassbinder
The Naked Civil Servant (1975) by Jack Gold
Kings of the Road (1976) by Wim Wenders
The Tenant (1976) by Roman Polanski
Hardcore (1979) by Paul Schrader
Scum (1979) by Alan Clarke
Loulou (1980) by Maurice Pialat
Platform (2000) by Jia Zhang-Ke

Second ‘The Trial’, the DVD I watched was terrible quality.

Also, and I’m sure this has been mentioned by now, Godard’s Week-end. Such a beautiful film should not be allowed to exist in such a fugly transfer.

Manson (1973)
My Brother Tom (2001)
Arizona Dream (1993)

Because I want to watch them.

Some Woody Allen titles (with special features) would be great. Definitely Annie Hall, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Stardust Memories, and Husbands & Wives.

Also, Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean – not the best of Altman’s films, but it certainly belongs on DVD.

And PLEASE – some early Bogdanovich. The Last Picture Show (as a stand-alone title), What’s Up, Doc, and Paper Moon all deserve the two-disc treatment!

And… how about an Almodovar box set??? I’d gladly take out a loan to have all his films – complete with critical commentaries, essays, remastered transfers, etc. – in one well-crafted, handsome, shelf-enhancing set.

Some directors whose work is long overdue for the Criterion treatment:

Theo Angelopolous
Claude Chabrol (!)
Alan Clarke
Aleksandr Dovzhenko
Jean Eustache
Abel Gance
Philippe Garrel
Ritwik Ghatak
Peter Greenaway
Todd Haynes (early)
Werner Herzog
Hou Hsiao-Hsien (!)
Alexander Kluge
Emir Kusturica
Joseph Losey
Mohsen Makhmalbaf (!)
Ross McElwee
Tsai Ming-Liang
Jafar Panahi
Sergei Parajanov
Vsevolod Pudovkin
Jacques Rivette (!)
Glauber Rocha
Ken Russell
Mrinal Sen
Jerzy Skolimowski
Bela Tarr
Jean Vigo
Peter Watkins
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Frederick Wiseman (Eclipse)
Jia Zhang-Ke (!)
Andrzej Zulawski

Jiri Weiss’s THE WOLF TRAP; Michael Cacoyannis’s A GIRL IN BLACK and A MATTER OF DIGNITY; some of the Argentinian films of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, with particular reference to FIN DE FIESTA and PIEL DE VERANO; Antonioni’s first feature, CRONACA DI UN AMORE; Bunuel’s EL and LA VIDA CRIMINAL DE ARCHIBALDO DE LA CRUZ (there is a French disc, but from damaged prints). And one underrated British film, Clive Donner’s ALFRED THE GREAT. It has screenplay problems, but is – witness, for instance, the skirmish fought on the Uffington white horse – visually very striking. And it has one of the too few screen performandes of Prunella Ransome

More… Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s IL MARE (influenced by L’AVVENTURA, and none the worse for that); Philippe de Broca’s loose trilogy, LE JEU DE L’AMOUR, LE FARCEUR and L’AMANT DE CINQ JOURS; Luis Berlanga’s amiable comedy, CALABUCH (but a warning: I saw CALABUCH twice, first in Paris, then in London. Edmund Gwenn, in the leading role of the visiting scientist, was in the version for France dubbed in Spanish throughout. In London, departing at the end of the film by plane, he suddenly had his own, many tones lighter, voice. The effect was disconcerting. Far better to keep the deep, dubbed voice throughout); and THE SERVANT with the deleted scenes restored – not as extras, but in the body of the film. The rationale for this is that Joseph Losey told Tom Milne (LOSEY ON LOSEY) that he as contemplating putting these scenes (‘They do still exist’) back. In short, a sort of posthumous director’s cut… One more: Satyajit Ray’s DEVI, made immediately after APUR SANSUR with the same two leads, and the Apu trilogy’s equal. (Of course, for all these Eureka would just as well as Criterion; as someone has said, ‘These guys are the British Criterion’)

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

The Searchers
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Vertigo

A Murnau Box Set…..
Nosferatu, Phantom, Sunrise, The Last Laugh, Faust, City Girl, and Tabu

Apparently Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room has just been added to the slate. Its a good start, but hopefully this means that The Apu Trilogy is not far off.

cabinet of dr. caligari!

cabinet of dr. caligari!

Last Exit to Brooklyn
The Moderns
Cache
The City of Lost Children
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
Infernal Affairs
Shoeshine
Two for the Road
Purple Noon
The King of Comedy
Seconds
Harold & Maude
City of God

Elevator to the Gallows

… please!!

Instead of wishing there were all these disparate films and directors in the Criterion Collection, I wish there were other home video companies that both did the proper job in transferring/presenting/contextualizing films (there definitely are) and had the kind of following that Criterion does (there unfortunately is not).

… I mean, I know it is — but I was wishing for a Blu Ray release of ELEVATOR.

… and Herbie, I second that observation.

The Mother and the Whore(Jean Eustache)
Lovers on the Bridge(Leos Carax)
Last Summer(Frank Perry)
Play It as It Lays(Frank Perry)
The Landlord (Hal Ashby)
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs( Bertrand Blier)
The Lusty Men (Nicolas Ray)
Park Row (Samuel Fuller)
Greaser’s Palace (Robert Downey Sr.)
Word is Out (doc by Adair, Brown and Epstein)
Zabriskie Point (Antonioni)
The Tenant (Roman Polanski)
The Shooting (Monte Hellman)
Sorcerer (William Friedkin)
A Pure Formality ( Giuseppe Tornatore)
The King (James Marsh)
The Anniversary (Roy Ward Baker)
The Unknown (Tod Browning)
Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper)
Alamar ( Pedro González-Rubio)

The Killer and Hard Boiled. For God’s sake Criterion put them back in print cause I sure as hell am not going to pay 150 bucks on Amazon for them, or risk buying some bootleg on Ebay.

The Criterion version is 13 dollars used and 50 dollars new on Amazon.

I concur with T. J. Hartman with regard to The Lusty Men, Park Row, and The Unknown. All are excellent films. Unfortunately, as they are all currently available in non-Criterion editions, it is not clear to me whether Criterion can get acess to them.

I urge once again that Criterion release Raymond Rouleau’s Lovers of Teruel (Les Amants de Teruel), hands down the finest dance film ever made and, never released, except on VHS in a pathetic mutilated version.

William Messing

how about a arne sucksdorff series. he’s only got a few of his joints in print and theyre all PAL format on some bootleg looking shit out of sweden. heres a jacked up clip i found on youtube if youre unfamiliar.

its either misattributed or chopped down for encyclopaedia brittanica and labeled “tale of the fjords”, but its actually called “a divided world” or en kluven varld.

i was also hoping for maybe a newsreel comp by some pre-fame hollywood big dogs. dont know who that would be but thats where criterion would come in and earn that $50 a disc or whatevers.

double dip

http://japancinema.net/2011/07/27/top-10-asian-films-that-should-be-in-the-criterion-collection/

Pasolini Gospel According to St Matthew and Trilogy of Life
Preminger’s Porgy and Bess

here’s 3: pontecorvo’s ‘burn’, tornatore’s ‘a pure formality’, and fellini’s ‘casanova’