The Criterion Collection

Last month, we called your attention to a new recurring feature in the Guardian, in which a filmmaker writes a short essay about the film that changed his or her life. Bernardo Bertolucci, the inaugural writer, heralded Renoir’s The Rules of the Game; recently, two younger contemporary filmmakers have offered selections you can also find in the Criterion Collection. American independent directors Lynn Shelton (Humpday) and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) chose, respectively, Steve McQueen’s Hunger and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. In discussing McQueen’s harrowing evocation of Bobby Sands’s prison hunger strike, Shelton writes that the British filmmaker “had such a unique, singular vision for the film . . . He didn’t lapse into more conventional ideas of how to tell a story.” For Fleck, Spike Lee’s Brooklyn-set game changer was “the first movie where I was really aware of the filmmaking and the voice behind the movie . . . I’ve been hooked on the idea of filmmaking ever since.”