March’s lineup is the kind of varied, interesting curation that represents the Criterion Channel at its best. Unfortunately, there’s one big miss: no celebration for Women’s History Month! Nannina Gilder took up the slack with a great Bluesky thread curating the collection she’d have made with movies that are already on the Channel.
Also I’m late on this one. Criterion dropped the lineup later than usual and it’s been a very busy month for me. So it goes.
First up: a Michael Mann collection. This includes Heat, so what more do you need? These range from great to good but there’s not a dud on the list. If you haven’t seen Collateral, it’s worth it for the chilling Tom Cruise performance.
Next there’s a really quirky concept: movies with a supporting performance Oscar but no lead performance Oscar. It’s a good lineup without a lot of coherence, as you might expect. The Last Picture Show is my vote for standout; it’s an early Peter Bogdanovich with a ton of great performances; Ben Johnson won for Best Supporting Actor and Cloris Leachman won for Best Supporting Actress. Deeply melancholy.
In a completely different and more unified vein, we have a Dogme 95 collection. This is probably the one where I actually delve into Dogme. There are many of the films people associate with the movement — The Celebration is high on my list, and probably the first one I’ll watch — plus a couple of more obscure movies. I like this collection. Will I finally watch a Von Trier? Maaaybe.
More film movements! I love these collections; this month Criterion’s also giving us a French Poetic Realism collection. I’ve seen quite a few of these; Pépé le Moko is a good place to start if you’re interested in the way French film has portrayed Algiers over the years, plus it stars Jean Gabin. It’s a huge collection and looks well worth browsing.
Then we get to the premieres. Both All We Imagine as Light and Only the River Flows looks excellent; I’m particularly interested in the latter as I’ve seen some very good neo-noir takes from China.
The restorations and rediscoveries section includes Amadeus which may steal all the attention. Fair; Forman’s a great. But I really wanna watch Pressure and Burning an Illusion — two British movies by Black directors, which look to shed more light into a time and culture I don’t know a lot about.
The Director Spotlights give us a French director I don’t know, but who looks interesting, Alain Guiraudie, and three Douglas Sirk noirs. Noir was not where Sirk found his mastery; still and all, you could do worse. Finally, it’s another director I feel like I should have delved into already with Lee Chang-Dong. Time to finally catch Burning, huh?
Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization trilogy gets tucked in at the end. I’ve watched the first one already and man, the undertone of danger in the nihilism she documented is powerful. It’s not just a celebration of punk. Can’t wait to get to the next two.
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