Press Notes

Berlin Alexanderplatz is "the DVD event of the year," according to The New Yorker's "Top DVD Boxed Sets of 2007." Nothing could make us more proud, except maybe the fact that two other Criterion sets made the cut, and both were from our new line, Eclipse. Late Ozu and The First Films of Samuel Fuller ("instant classics") also made the list.

Over at the Huffington Post, Kim Morgan gets revved up over Two-Lane Blacktop, saying it's not only "the greatest car movie ever made... Two-Lane Blacktop is, no question, a work of enigmatic significance and auto-erotic gorgeousness (full confession, the movie turns me on -- and not just because of Oates -- the cars, oh those cars are so erotic."

Criterion was nearly passed over in The Los Angeles Times' critics' choices this year. Film critic Kenneth Turan was one of the few who didn't include a single Criterion release in his year-end tally, but dance critic Lewis Segal came to the rescue, singling out not one but two Criterion entries, calling Martha Graham: Dance on Film "a treasure trove" and pointing out that for dance audiences, the draw of the Flamenco Trilogy is not so much Carlos Saura's direction as "its look at the performances and choreography of the late flamenco icon Antonio Gades."

"Perhaps the most important DVD release of the year is Jean-Luc Godard's 1959 Breathless (Criterion)," says Armond White in his year-end DVD roundup for the New York Press.... It is the best way to start a DVD exploration of film history, Movies 101." Also on his list, Les Enfants Terrribles, with which White says Jean-Pierre Melville "set a standard of fluid expressiveness he never again equaled."

"No road movie is as in touch with its own road movieness as Monte Hellman's long-martyred Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "Blacktop might be a definitive American expression of roadness -- uncompromised, Rorschach-inconclusive, mythic, yet as real as highway weeds, and so eloquent in its mumbling way about basic existential identity and destination dilemmas that every frame has the poignant and needy ache of a child fruitlessly asking about God. It has little competition as the great lost and found movie of the much-missed American New Wave. Virtually everyone who sees the film is seduced by it..."