This time on the podcast, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, Trevor Berrett, and Arik Devens discuss Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.

While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family’s fragile ties are tested when daughter Karin (an astonishing Harriet Andersson) discovers her father (Gunnar Björnstrand) has been using her schizophrenia for his own literary ends. As she drifts in and out of lucidity, Karin’s father, her husband (Max von Sydow), and her younger brother (Lars Passgård) are unable to prevent her descent into the abyss of mental illness. Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Through a Glass Darkly, the first work in Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy on faith and its loss (to be followed by Winter Light and The Silence), presents an unflinching vision of a family’s near disintegration and a tortured psyche further taunted by the intangibility of God’s presence.

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Ryan and David chat about the Wacky New Year’s Drawing for 2019.

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To celebrate The Criterion Collection’s 2018 releases – and there’s a lot to celebrate – Ryan Gallagher, Arik Devens, David Blakeslee, and Jordan Essoe gather to talk about the past year in Criterion, including their favorite three Criterion releases of 2018.

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This time on the podcast, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Trevor Berrett discuss Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.

By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women undergo a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Performed with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.

In this episode, Trevor Berrett, David Blakeslee and Scott Nye discuss Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

The angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through lilting songs by the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.

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In this episode, David Blakeslee, Arik Devens and Aaron West take a break from watching live coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Peongchyang to talk about some of their favorite images from past Winter Games, as captured in the Criterion Collection’s massive release from late 2017, 100 Years of Olympic Films 1912-2012.

Spanning fifty-three movies and forty-one editions of the Olympic Games, 100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912–2012 is the culmination of a monumental, award-winning archival project encompassing dozens of new restorations by the International Olympic Committee. The documentaries collected here cast a cinematic eye on some of the most iconic moments in the history of modern sports, spotlighting athletes who embody the Olympic motto of “Faster, Higher, Stronger”: Jesse Owens shattering world records on the track in 1936 Berlin, Jean-Claude Killy dominating the Grenoble slopes in 1968, Joan Benoit breaking away to win the Games’ first women’s marathon in Los Angeles in 1984. In addition to the impressive ten-feature contribution of Bud Greenspan, this stirring collective chronicle of triumph and defeat includes such documentary landmarks as Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, along with captivating lesser-known works by major directors like Claude Lelouch, Carlos Saura, and Miloš Forman. It also offers a fascinating glimpse of the development of film itself, and of the technological progress that has brought viewers ever closer to the action. Traversing continents and decades, reflecting the social, cultural, and political changes that have shaped our recent history, this remarkable movie marathon showcases a hundred years of human endeavor.

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In this episode, David Blakeslee, Scott Nye and Trevor Berrett discuss John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, recently reissued by the Criterion Collection in a newly upgraded 4K restoration on Blu-ray and DVD.

Few American historical figures are as revered as Abraham Lincoln, and few director-star collaborations embody classic Hollywood cinema as beautifully as the one between John Ford and Henry Fonda. This film, their first together, was Ford’s equally poetic and significant follow-up to the groundbreaking western Stagecoach, and in it Fonda gives one of the finest performances of his career, as the young president-to-be, a novice lawyer struggling with an incendiary murder case. Photographed in gorgeous black and white by Ford’s frequent collaborator Bert Glennon, Young Mr. Lincoln is a compassionate and assured work and an indelible piece of Americana.

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Hot off the press, David Blakeslee and Aaron West get together to dissect the clues provided by the Criterion Collection’s annual Wacky Drawing hinting at upcoming releases for 2018.

Follow along with our conversation by referencing the alphabet-coded breakdown of this year’s illustration by Jason Polan.

Links to past analyses:

Here are links to the various drawings from the past few years

To celebrate The Criterion Collection’s 2017 releases – and there’s a lot to celebrate – Aaron West, Arik Devens, David Blakeslee, Jordan Essoe, Scott Nye and Trevor Berrett gather to talk about the past year in Criterion, including their favorite three Criterion releases of 2017.

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This time on the podcast, Scott is joined by David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett to discuss Monte Hellman’s The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind.

In the midsixties, the maverick American director Monte Hellman conceived of two westerns at the same time. Dreamlike and gritty by turns, these films would prove their maker’s adeptness at brilliantly deconstructing genre. Shot back-to-back for famed producer Roger Corman, they feature overlapping casts and crews, including Jack Nicholson in two of his meatiest early roles. The Shooting, about a motley assortment of loners following a mysterious wanted man through a desolate frontier, and Ride in the Whirlwind, about a group of cowhands pursued by vigilantes for crimes they did not commit, are rigorous, artful, and wholly unconventional journeys to the Old West.

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