Lost in Criterion

Some of the best tragedy narratives indict a whole society for creating the system and the path that keep the tragic character imprisoned in his journey toward loss. There's a bit of that in This Sporting Life but the tragedy is focused on the main character's inability to court the woman he can't stop harassing, herself an even starker victim of the local political and economic system.

What Alf Slöberg’s 1951 film adaptation adds to August Strindberg’s 1888 play makes the film both more interesting and quite probably more infuriating. How fun.

Who amongst us hasn't decided to solve a problem maybe without talking to anyone actually affected by the problem or even understanding what the problem is, so you just ended up doing something that adds to the problem in a different way?

An experiment in what constitutes a movie finds James Taylor and Dennis Wilson partnered in a cross country race that resolves (or doesn't) sometime after the last reel burns up.

Frequent guest Donovan H. joins us again, and he's maybe become more of an accelerationist than the last time he was on. We're talking Kurosawa's Drunken Angel, the famed director's first work with Toshiro Mifune.

The earliest Bergman we've seen yet is the story of circus performers humiliated at every turn, and apparently something about the battle of the sexes.

Another week, another adaptation of a stream-of-consciousness novel about a perpetually drunk man, this time Fassbinder’s epic mini-series adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Taking place (and originally written) in Germany between the wars, it’s got some lessons for us.

I finally actually counted and figured out this is episode 400. Too bad it's the story of a drunk white guy.

We get our first taste of Terrence Malick in the collection with his tenuously Biblically-inspired period story of poor farm workers and a series of cons that don't really make sense.

I promise you there are Godard films we actually like.