Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Though I did not pick a distinct theme for my Criterion films this year, I feel like I inadvertently picked a number of films that pair nicely with each other. I had the lonely women going on vacation movies (Now, Voyager and Summertime), the bunch of dudes have to work together to pull off a job movies (Big Deal on Madonna Street and The Flight of the Phoenix), and now I have my young women getting into shenanigans movies (Daisies and today’s pick). I would say Daisies and Céline and Julie Go Boating might be good double features, but they also might not, since they have kind of the opposite approach to filmmaking. Where Daisies is kinetic and abrasive, Céline and Julie is about as loose and carefree as it gets, to the point where I sometimes had a hard time grasping what I was watching, but maybe that was the point. Continue reading →

The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

A group of men must band together in order to complete a job that will hopefully save their lives. It’s a simple premise that has gotten used plenty over the years in various films and one that is at the heart of 1965’s The Flight of the Phoenix. Somehow, this film was not a huge hit when it came out, despite the fact that it feels like a real crowd-pleaser and has an amazing cast (though the box office vitality of a bunch of character actors and an aging Jimmy Stewart may have proved faulty). It’s a little hard to believe also because it fits so nicely along “team of dudes” movies from this era like The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, or director Robert Aldrich’s next film, The Dirty Dozen. But maybe the film was too ahead of its time, as it also brings to mind the disaster movies of the 70s as well as one of that decade’s biggest hits, Jaws.

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The Executioner (1963)

How does one make a great film while living under a fascist dictatorship? It’s not a question that Hollywood filmmakers are quite having to ask themselves yet, but it’s something that director Luis García Berlanga had to navigate during the majority of his career working in the Spanish film industry under Franco’s rule. The truly amazing thing is that The Executioner in many ways comments on Franco’s government, as its main character works for the state, doing its most unseemly business of carrying out the death penalty. Yet somehow, the film managed to weave its way around the censors while wringing some dark laughs out of the material and commenting on how society forces all of us into doing its dirty work. Continue reading →

Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958)

I had kind of a depressing thought while watching 1958’s Big Deal on Madonna Street: am I still capable of being blown away by the crime genre? It has been a little while since I’ve watched a crime movie for the first time that really made me reconsider the genre, which is a little sad for me personally because the crime genre was really my gateway to film geekery. From gangster movies to film noir to capers-gone-wrong like this one, it’s a genre that can contain the most exciting elements of storytelling and ways in which to use a camera. And yet, at this point, it’s a genre I fear doesn’t have all that much to say about the world as I perceive it, which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of exciting and visually inventive moments in today’s film. Continue reading →

Summertime (1955)

On the surface, I thought I’d be walking into familiar territory with 1955’s Summertime, since its basic plot does bear some resemblance to my last movie, Now, Voyager. This is another story about a lonely woman going on a vacation in the hopes of finding herself and some peace of mind, set during a time when female independence was a bit of a rarity. But as this film shows, there are many ways to tell a similar story, as the more somber tone of Now, Voyager is miles away from the picturesque, unabashedly romantic mood of Summertime, which revels in the rebirth that a trip abroad can bring, even if such things are never meant to last. Continue reading →