Coming at you hot this month cause I was at Fantasia for a week and a half and like I had time to write a whole extra blog post… it’s the August 2026 Criterion Channel lineup with commentary by me! And it’s a hot month. Because of the collections. Desert Trips, get it?
Maybe I’m still a bit thrashed from the festival.
Let’s run through this in order. Opening up, Rock Biopics That Don’t Suck, which is fair. Michael will not be appearing in this list. It includes the best biopic of all time, which happens to be about a fictional rock star, Velvet Goldmine. It’s also got Love & Mercy, which anyone curious about Brian Wilson should watch – there’s a great Paul Dano performance in there. Putting in Amadeus and Lisztomania is clever (plus I’m generally up for a Ken Russell I haven’t seen). Oh, and Nico, 1988 will give me my Velvet Goldmine fix. This is one of those collections that seems fairly complete on the topic.
Next, Southern Gothic, which makes a nice combination with the July Murderous Melodramas collection. The connective tissue is named Tennessee Williams. Those of these I’ve seen were good and I think this’ll be my chance to watch one of the Sofia Coppola movies I’ve missed so far in The Beguiled. Particularly since the Channel is also putting the 1971 adaptation of the same novel in the same collection. Hard to imagine a more divergent set of filmmakers than Coppola and Don Siegel, especially since the latter is working with Clint Eastwood. Who gets the female gaze better?
I’ve seen three out of four of the Desert Trips collection and recommend all of them except maybe Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, depending on your tolerance for Johnny Depp being indulgent these days. Zabriskie Point has intrigued me for a while. This is kind of an ad hoc collection but it’s a decent one.
The last top level big collection is James Baldwin On-Screen. I don’t have much to say about this except that it’s a deserved honor. Does it matter that he wasn’t really a film figure? Nah. Pity they couldn’t get the Baldwin vs. Buckley debate but it’s readily available online.
OK, what’s in the director spotlights? Barbara Kopple and her labor documentaries – awesome. What with the move to Minnesota, American Dream becomes even more relevant to me. The Ringo Lam collection is also good; there’s nothing really new here that wasn’t in their big Hong Kong collection, mind you. I haven’t seen a ton of his work for some reason so I’ll try and take this as a spur. Chow Yun Fat is a strong motivator.
And then the real star of this section for this month: Julien Duvivier. He’s such a titan. My wife wants to see Pépé Le Moko, and I want to dip into most of this. The End of the Day looks like the kind of film about actors I dig. Very exciting collection.
Finally, I’m gonna highilght a couple of high points from the Premiers and Rediscoveries and so on. Blue Heron is one of my favorite movies of the year so far; it’s ridiculously good for a debut, all about family trauma using a fascinating layered narrative structure. I love that the Channel is a home for more of this kind of contemporary film. I’m very pleased to see Written on the Wind as a Collection edition, since I’m interested in the documentary about Sirk that’s included. Also this one left me a bit cold the first time I watched it and I’m better in tune with melodrama now so I wanna rewatch it.
Good month, looking forward to having minimal time to watch because of our move.