Paul Bartel directs this black comedy that's "not Lubitsch—but it’s not quite John Waters either", according to Criterion essayist David Ehrenstein. Eating Raoul (1982), is a story of America, of the normally hidden and unpunished violence of wealth accumulation. Or it's a story of America, of two prudish weirdos punishing the people they don't like. Or it's a story of America. the dream of revenge against the managerial class.

Or it's none of these things completely, as we get into a discussion this week about just how strong the metaphor in Eating Raoul is. But hey, it's still a pretty fun movie.

In 1975, the enigmatic Ken Russell adapted and directed The Who's concept album/rock opera Tommy into a memorable film. The Who, apparently, really enjoyed making movies and decided to follow it up four years later with an adaptation of Quadrophenia (1979), but this time hiring Franc Roddam who would go on to create MasterChef and is noticeably not Ken Russell. Quadrophenia is a throwback to kitchen sink dramas, angry young men disillusioned with a society they will be joining within a few months, but mostly just fighting each other and being sexist and racist while their at it. For a film about some of the most stylish subcultures of 20th century Britain, the film itself lacks style and flair, but maybe we just wanted Ken Russell back. It's a bit like Stephen King movies after The Shining.

We get three early films from Paul Fejos all under the banner of his 1928 part-talkie Lonesome. Also on the Criterion release is the much more interesting to us Broadway (1929) and the much less interesting to us The Last Performance (1929). Each film is inventive and interesting in its own right, but Broadway just kept getting bigger, facilitated by Fejos and his team inventing a camera crane, and then needing to build a sound stage that could accommodate their camera crane, and then needing to make a movie to justify it all.

The additional features on the Criterion release also give us plenty to talk about with biographical information on Fejos' later-career shift to anthropology and ethnography, a topic we are always willing to jump in on, though Criterion doesn't provide any examples of this aspect of his work.

Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) is an exquisite character study of a Friday-Sunday fling between two pretty opposite young men, in a precarious time where homophobia is constantly bubbling in the background. It's also just one of the cutest love stories we've experienced in the Criterion Collection. Just an absolute delight of a movie.

Last week Criterion introduced us to the work of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne with a phenomenal film, but this week they follow it up with something somehow even better. From it's frenetic first few minutes, Rosetta (1999) is the story of a a young woman that believes she can find freedom, or at least dignity, or at least normalcy in work. But she, and we, live in a society that doesn't actually care about freedom or dignity or even, really, normalcy, at least not for the lower rungs of the economic ladder Rosetta lives in. It's sort of an answer to and modernization of Bresson's Mouchette (1967), but the Dardenne are much more interested in social realism than Bresson ever was.

Like last week's film, and many social realist films we've seen, Rosetta doesn't end on a hopeful not, but perhaps on the hope for hope and the promise of freedom and dignity that comes from community and care. We need that now.

Our introduction to the films of Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, La promesse (1996) is, like last week's Le Havre, a story of African migrants in Europe. But where Aki Kaurismäki took a more magical approach, the Dardenne's hew much closer to the intense realism of, say, Ken Loach. The brothers' history in documentary perhaps make it even more intense than what Loach we've seen. It's a story of rejecting what you've been told is the order the world must work in, and finding the community and care that your heart cries out for. A better world may be illegal, but it remains possible.

Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) is a hard movie to categorize. It's the dramatic tale of solidarity and sanctuary, of a community setting aside petty differences to protect a vulnerable migrant. But it's not social realism; It's more magical than that. Some critics call it fairy tale-esque, Pat calls it a children's story, none of them to dismiss it. The moral here is one of a kids' book, but it's a child's morality that needs to lead us: Community brings life.

And that's not a miracle; it's a fact.

Steven Soderbergh's film adaptation of Spalding Gray's monologue about avoiding an eye surgery, Gray's Anatomy (1996) girds Gray's George Carlin-esque delivery in some dynamic visuals and inter-cuts them with stark black and white testimonials of people recounting there own terrible eye injuries. Perhaps not for the squeamish, but it's still an engaging story.

I don't comment on it in the episode, but Gray gives a shout out to Columbus, Ohio, hotdog institution Phillips Coney Island, which closed in 2022 after 110 year of slinging wieners and probably causing some eye injuries of their own doing that.

Many documentaries are introductions to their topics, assuming the audience has limited or even no knowledge of the subject. Steven Soderbergh's 2010 documentary about his late friend monologuist Spalding Gray, And Everything is Going Fine, is not. Soderbergh himself says it's for people who are already familiar with Gray. Since this is our introduction to him, it's a bit of a rocky start. Next week we'll talk about Gray's Anatomy (1996), Soderbergh's film of one of Gray's monologues, but this week it's all context for a body of work we know nothing about. That doesn't mean we aren't engrossed in it though. Well, at least one of us.

Add Danny Boyle to the long list of British directors who claim their work is apolitical, seemingly only to distance themselves from Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. But it doesn't take the death of the author to find a political read of his brutal debut feature Shallow Grave (1994), a film about the corrupting influence of money on relationships, about how greed inherently leads to violence and even if you can convince yourself that your extractive profits have no victims, well, they soon will. Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston, and Ewan McGregor star as the victims of their own avarice in this fantastic film.