Criterion Cast: Main Episodes

On episode 210 of CriterionCast, Jordan Essoe is joined by Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Arik Devens to discuss Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 film L’eclisse.

Using the architecture of Rome as a backdrop for the doomed affair, Antonioni achieves the apotheosis of his style in this return to the theme that preoccupied him the most: the difficulty of connection in an alienating modern world.

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On episode 209 of CriterionCast, Jordan Essoe is joined by Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Arik Devens to discuss Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 film La notte.

Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau star as a novelist and his frustrated wife, who, over the course of one night, confront their alienation from each other and the achingly empty bourgeois Milan circles in which they travel. Antonioni’s muse Monica Vitti smolders as an industrialist’s tempting daughter. Moodily sensual cinematography and subtly expressive performances make La notte an indelible illustration of romantic and social deterioration.

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On episode 208 of CriterionCast, Jordan Essoe is joined by Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Arik Devens to discuss Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 film L’avventura.

Michelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork. An iconic piece of challenging 1960s cinema and a gripping narrative on its own terms, L’avventura concerns the enigmatic disappearance of a young woman during a yachting trip off the coast of Sicily, and the search taken up by her disaffected lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Monica Vitti, in her breakout role).

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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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