7 years ago
DVD/Streaming (7 posts found)
Second Criterion: ‘Blow Out’
In the opening minutes of Blow Out, Brian De Palma presents one of cinema’s great misdirects. What starts off as a poorly made slasher film is all a ruse. It’s a film that the protagonist of Blow Out is working on. Jack Terry (John Travolta) is a sound editor....
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The Second Criterion: ‘Three Colors: Blue’
When France commissioned director Krzystof Kieslowski to make a film trilogy about the three virtues represented by the colors of the French flag: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, they probably wanted him to celebrate these virtues. Instead, Kieslowski decide...
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The Second Criterion: ‘The Third Man’
Graham Greene’s story in The Third Man does a fantastic job of subverting storytelling expectations, and while there are several ways to examine how the film does that, the story functions as an anti-Western. I don't mean its a searing political critique of th...
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The Second Criterion: ‘A Man Escaped’
Robert Bresson’s simple and meticulous account of the real-life escape of Andre Devigny—called Fontaine (François Leterrier) in the film—is similar, yet different, than the typical escape movie. While it deals with issues of hope, patriotism, oppression and li...
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The Second Criterion: ‘A Generation’
The first film in Andrzej Wajda’s war film trilogy, A Generation is a coming of age film set in Poland during German occupation. Stach (Tadeusz Lomnicki), an apprentice at a carpentry shop, joins the Youth Underground more because the lovely Dorota (Urszula Mo...
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The Second Criterion: The Double Life of Veronique
When discussing The Double Life of Veronique, a lot of people make the mistake of approaching the film more from a metaphysical sense. Yes, a lot of what makes the film compelling are the ideas surrounding the notion of identity and the soul, metaphysical conc...
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Introduction Into The Second Criterion
If I ask a movie buff what he or she expects from The Criterion Collection, I’ll probably hear talk about an excellently crafted, artfully made film released with a high standard of audio/visual quality and a handful of in-depth special features. And while the...
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