The Criterion Collection

UPDATE 08FEB2012: In the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim writes that these films are “endlessly interested in individual experience and idiosyncrasy, fully alert to the tragicomedy of human complexity and contradiction.”

In a review for Artforum, Darrell Hartman introduces the latest Eclipse set Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin: “People talk about how this or that director has a good eye. In the case of the experimental filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, it’s just as much about the ear. Gorin, a French-born émigré based in California, has that ear cocked toward outsiders; his films are stories from the fringes of American culture, told by a guy who refuses to tell them the way anyone else would.” Christopher McQuain, for DVD Talk, writes that the three films included are “playful, self-reflexive, heady, and in some measure political,” and praises their “surprising, haunting staying power.” Very Short List calls them “three great films about the Golden State,” with special praise for the “mesmerizing” Poto and Cabengo. And Slant’s Jaime N. Christley declares, “If you think you know the documentary-essay-sketchbook genre, Jean-Pierre Gorin proves that there’s always a little more country to undiscover.”

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