The Criterion Collection

Idiosyncratic Hollywood auteur Nicholas Ray’s induction into the Criterion Collection, with the release on DVD and Blu-ray disc of the scintillating fifties potboiler Bigger Than Life, has been met with supersize enthusiasm by critics. GQ’s Tom Carson reminds readers that Ray also directed two other of “the American midcentury’s defining movies,” Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, but that Bigger Than Life “may top ’em both in laying the 1950s bare.” In the Dallas Morning News, Chris Vognar exclaims, “Ray’s poisonous ode to fifties conformity is a haymaker of a movie, one of the darker takes on the American dream you’re likely to encounter.”

Vognar also makes the time to sing the praises of Ray’s visuals: “Shooting in CinemaScope, Ray plays up Mason’s mania through expressionist shadows, low angles, and forced perspective. This is a filmmaker in full command of his craft.” The Los Angeles Times’ Sam Adams also focuses on the film’s aesthetic splendors, “impressively rendered in Criterion’s high-definition transfer, which serves as reminder that Ray was, along with Vincente Minnelli, one of the great American colorists of his time.”

Paper’s Dennis Dermody is mightily impressed as well: “A real rarity—never before even on VHS—this truly subversive work on conventionality and fifties normality is even better than I remembered. Jean-Luc Godard was so right when he said about the director: ‘Cinema is Nicholas Ray.’”

More from the New York Times’ Dave Kehr (a “masterpiece”), the New York Post’s Lou Lumenick (“one of the most powerful movies of that decade”), and NPR’s John Powers (“a highly entertaining 1956 classic that reaches home video for the first time in glorious new Blu-ray and DVD versions from Criterion”).