This time on the podcast, Jordan Essoe, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Arik Devens discuss Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero.

The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin, seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy.

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This time on the podcast, Jordan Essoe, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Arik Devens discuss Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan.

With its documentary-like visuals and intermingled cast of actors and nonprofessionals, Italians and their American liberators, this look at the struggles of different cultures to communicate and of people to live their everyday lives in extreme circumstances is equal parts charming sentiment and vivid reality.

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This time on the podcast, Jordan Essoe, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Arik Devens discuss Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City.

This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the films that would follow it to form The War Trilogy and starring some well-known actors—Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member—Rome Open City is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II, with immediacy in every frame. Marking a watershed moment in Italian cinema, this galvanic work garnered awards around the globe and left the beginnings of a new film movement in its wake.

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Ryan is joined by David and Aaron to chat about the Wacky New Year’s Drawing for 2020.

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To celebrate The Criterion Collection’s 2019 releases – and there’s a lot to celebrate – Ryan Gallagher, David Blakeslee, Scott Nye, Trevor Berrett, and Jordan Essoe gather to talk about the past year in Criterion, including their favorite three Criterion releases of 2019.

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This time on the podcast, Trevor Berrett, Scott Nye, and David Blakeslee discuss William Wyler’s The Heiress.

Directed with a keen sense of ambiguity by William Wyler, this film based on a hit stage adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square pivots on a question of motive. When shy, emotionally fragile Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland, in a heartbreaking, Oscar-winning turn), the daughter of a wealthy New York doctor, begins to receive calls from the handsome spendthrift Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), she becomes possessed by the promise of romance. Are his smoldering professions of love sincere, as she believes they are? Or is Catherine’s calculating father (Ralph Richardson) correct in judging Morris a venal fortune seeker? A graceful drawing-room drama boasting Academy Award–winning costume design by Edith Head, The Heiress is also a piercing character study riven by emotional uncertainty and lacerating cruelty, in a triumph of classic Hollywood filmmaking at its most psychologically nuanced.

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To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the first episode of the podcast going live (on July 6th, 2009), Ryan is joined by Arik Devens, David Blakeslee, Josh Brunsting, and Scott Nye to talk about the anniversary.

They also get into their own thoughts on the theories surrounding the upcoming 1000th spine number, how the Criterion Channel is faring so far, and the Studio Canal titles coming back into print.

Thanks for all of the support over the past decade!

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This time on the podcast, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, Trevor Berrett, and Arik Devens discuss Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence.

Two sisters—the sickly, intellectual Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and the sensual, pragmatic Anna (Gunnel Lindblom)—travel by train with Anna’s young son, Johan (Jörgen Lindström), to a foreign country that appears to be on the brink of war. Attempting to cope with their alien surroundings, each sister is left to her own vices while they vie for Johan’s affection, and in so doing sabotage what little remains of their relationship. Regarded as one of the most sexually provocative films of its day, Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence offers a disturbing vision of emotional isolation in a suffocating spiritual void.

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This time on the podcast, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, Trevor Berrett, and Arik Devens discuss Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light.

“God, why hast thou forsaken me?” With Winter Light, Ingmar Bergman explores the search for redemption in a meaningless existence. Small-town pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand) performs his duties mechanically before a dwindling congregation, including his stubbornly devoted lover, Märta (Ingrid Thulin). When he is asked to assuage a troubled parishioner’s (Max von Sydow) debilitating fear of nuclear annihilation, Tomas is terrified to find that he can provide nothing but his own doubt. The beautifully photographed Winter Light is an unsettling look at the human craving for personal validation in a world seemingly abandoned by God.

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In this episode, David Blakeslee interviews director and film critic Kent Jones, a frequent contributor to the essays published by the Criterion Collection. His new film Diane, starring Mary Kay Place, won prizes at Tribeca and Locarno, and earned nominations at numerous festival showings in 2018. Diane is now set to open in theaters across the USA over the next several weeks. Here’s the synopsis from the film’s press kit:

For Diane (Mary Kay Place), everyone else comes first. Generous but with little patience for self-pity, she spends her days checking in on sick friends, volunteering at her local soup kitchen, and trying valiantly to save her troubled, drug-addicted adult son (Jake Lacy) from himself. But beneath her relentless routine of self-sacrifice, Diane is fighting a desperate internal battle, haunted by a past she can’t forget and which threatens to tear her increasingly chaotic world apart. Built around an extraordinary, fearless performance from Mary Kay Place, the narrative debut from Kent Jones is a profound, beautifully human portrait of a woman rifling through the wreckage of her life in search of redemption.