Down by Law (1986)

Director Jim Jarmusch has made a lot of movies that you could describe as being “of a place” and Down by Law is no exception. Here we get a miserable, film noir-inspired version of the Louisiana bayou country that Jarmusch conceived of before he even arrived to make this movie. The story begins in New Orleans and it’s portrayed as a moody, rundown, desolate, rotting carcass of a city, populated only by the damned and the pitiful. And then we go to jail. Shot in Jarmusch’s signature black and white, on the surface, Down by Law seems like it might as well have been called “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But, more than my now-missed posting deadline, there was something to this story about three misfits which inspired me to keep watching.

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3 Women (1977)

3 Women, beyond being an apt description of the number of women directors we’ve covered in nine years of Criterion Months, is a freaky deaky little movie Robert Altman made based on a dream he had while his wife was in the hospital. It was a forgotten gem for some time, having missed the VHS generation entirely and only become available on home video when Criterion released it on DVD in the mid-2000s. Since then it’s gone on to be a favorite of the Criterion Closet and got another huge bump when Shelley Duvall passed away about a year ago, as it contains one of her finest performances. But is it any good?

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Destroy All Monsters (1968)

Fourteen years after the original Godzilla, director Ishiro Honda, special-effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube reunited to potentially end the series. Sort of like the first Avengers, the idea here was pretty simple and very much scraping the bottom of the barrel: what if the characters from all those other movies teamed up to fight a bunch of forgettable aliens? That’s right, Destroy All Monsters is an 11-kaiju extravaganza, featuring everyone from Anguirus to ‘Zilla himself. But is it any good?

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Weekend (1967)

1967’s Weekend (or perhaps “Week End”) is Jean-Luc Godard throwing up his hands in frustration. The cacophony of cars honking horns outside his window have made it clear: all is lost, and things are going to have to get a lot worse before they can get better. I knew that was going to be the vibe going in, but I was hoping there’d be something more here – some insight into how things got so bad or a vision for how we all get through it – since these days I’m kind of feeling the same way. But actually what I came away from it with was a sense that I’m still pretty far from being a Marxist French misanthrope.

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Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Who doesn’t love some juicy gossip? For as long as we’ve had famous people, we’ve had other, lesser people starting some shit about them. Nonetheless, and rather inexplicably, the jury’s still out on whether that’s a good thing or not. Mostly you’d think we’d condemn the rumor mill for appealing to our basic bitch jealousy and false sense of superiority, but what about the ever-important gossip whispers that have snowballed into the social outcries that exposed and kinda, a little bit brought down evil men like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein? In the era of #MeToo and Instagram followers and Yelp ratings and Uber ratings and Letterboxd ratings, maybe we’re actually living through peak gossip right now? Or maybe it was the late 1950s, when Sweet Smell of Success came out?

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