Features

Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s Werckmeister Harmonies is one of the newest films added to the Criterion Collection. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time in an unnamed village in Hungary, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens that builds inexorably toward violence. Shot in stark…

Amir Naderi’s 1984 film The Runner is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection.  Inspired by director Amir Naderi’s own boyhood, The Runner is lit from within by Madjid Niroumand’s electrifying performance as a young orphan fending for himself on the streets of a port city, determined to rise above his circumstances—working odd jobs, passing time with friends, learning to read—and running, always running, toward the future. Water, fire, the human body in motion: in hypnotic images…

Carl Franklin’s theatrical film debut One False Move is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection.  One False Move looks at a small-town police chief (Bill Paxton), holding on to a life-changing secret, who gets word that a pair of ruthless, murderous drug dealers (co-screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Beach) are on their way to his small Arkansas town. And an enigmatic woman (Cynda Williams), originally from the small town, who is caught up…

Targets, the directorial debut by Oscar-nominated writer and director Peter Bogdanovich, is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection.  Old Hollywood collides with New Hollywood, and screen horror with real-life horror, in Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film. Produced by B-movie legend Roger Corman, this chillingly prescient vision of American-made carnage casts Boris Karloff as a version of himself: an aging horror-movie icon whose fate intersects with that of a seemingly ordinary young man (Tim O’Kelly)…

Terry Gilliam’s Oscar-winning film The Fisher King has been given a 4k rerelease through the folks over at the Criterion Collection. A fairy tale grounded in poignant reality, Terry Gilliam’s Manhattan-set The Fisher King features Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams in two of their greatest roles. Bridges plays a former radio shock jock reconstructing his life after a scandal, and Williams a homeless man on a quest for the Holy Grail—which he believes to be hidden somewhere…

Last Hurrah for Chivalry, one of the first feature films from action maestro John Woo, just recently got added to the Criterion Collection. The good folks at Criterion sent me a copy of the film to check out. Before he became known as the master of the bullet-riddled heroic tragedy, John Woo sharpened his trademark themes and kinetic action choreography with 1979’s Last Hurrah for Chivalry. Unaware they are caught in a deadly game of…

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1994 landmark trilogy, Three Colors, recently got a 4k release. The good folks at Criterion sent me a copy of the box set to check out. From Krzysztof Kieślowski comes the Three Colors trilogy, a defining event of the art-house boom of the 1990s. The films are named for the colors of the French flag and stand for the tenets of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—but that hardly begins to explain their…