Lost in Criterion

Seemingly always up to adapt a challenging text, John Huston directs this adaptation of a Flannery O'Connor novel. While Huston and O'Connor have dramatically opposite views on religion, but Huston himself has begrudgingly said that "Jesus wins" in the end of his movie. We're not so sure that's accurate.

Stephen Frears 1984 film The Hit combines a British gangster film with a road movie and honestly it's nice to just have a movie we enjoy and don't have to think too much about after the string we've been on.

Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was not the first person to make scientific documentaries for a general audience, but he was certainly very influential on nature documentarians real and otherwise from Attenborough to Zissou. Criterion serves us a collection of many, though not quite all, of his 5-30 minute films which fuse underwater and microscopic filmography with an eye toward surrealist humor and, if you can read it right, a mind toward social change.

Nagisa Ōshima's follow-up to last week's In the Realm of the Senses is less sexually explicit and harder to pin down politically than that work, but Empire of Passion is still an interesting tale of greed and ghosts.

There was a moment in Nagisa Ōshima's obscenity trial for the printed script edition of In the Realm of the Sense where the director apologizes to the judges and police, saying, essentially, "I showed the script to all my colleagues and none of them found it titillating, so I'm sorry you guys got turned on." And I don't think he's just having a laugh at their expense. The film is certainly full, nearly wall to wall, of sex, unsimulated even, but being full of sex and being sexy are different things, and Ōshima has a different goal.