Mike Allred’s Top 10
Comic-book rock star Mike Allred is best known as the creator of Madman, Red Rocket 7, and The Atomics. He may also be familiar to Criterion viewers from his illustrations for Seduced and Abandoned and Chasing Amy. Allred: “My list was determined mostly by ranking my top ten favorite films that Criterion offers—though the packaging at times may have subtly influenced my choice in moving a film up or down!”
Jonathan Lethem’s Top 10
Winner of a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program genius grant, Jonathan Lethem is one of America’s premier contemporary writers. His works include the novels The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, as well as a vast array of short stories and essays. He has also contributed essays to the Criterion releases of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours, and the John Cassavetes: Five Films box set. Author illustration by Paul Hornschemeier.
Allison Anders’s Top 10
“Wow, this assignment kicked my ass in a glorious way!” said Anders. “As with everyone before me, picking just ten Criterion classics is too daunting; so you have to find a system that allows you to play a favorite game, all the while knowing there are others you have left out that you love as much but maybe have less original things to say about.” Allison Anders co-directed Border Radio and has also directed five other feature films, including Gas Food Lodging, Mi vida loca, and Grace of My Heart.
Allan Arkush’s Top 10
Allan Arkush is an Emmy-winning television director and executive producer of NBC’s hit series Heroes. Arkush’s directing credits also include the Ramones’ cult classic Rock ’n’ Roll High School, which Rolling Stone magazine named as one of the top-10 rock n’ roll DVDs of all time.
Ramin Bahrani’s Top 10
Writer-director Ramin Bahrani’s first two feature films, Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2007) have won awards and acclaim all over the world, from Venice to Cannes to the U.S. Chop Shop also won Bahrani the Someone to Watch Independent Spirit Award in 2008. Bahrani is currently in postproduction on his third feature, Goodbye Solo.
Michael Barker’s Top 10
Michael Barker and his copresidents at Sony Pictures Classics, Tom Bernard and Marcie Bloom, have brought out some of the best and most successful independent and international films of the last two decades, from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and House of Flying Daggers to Saraband, Capote, and Cache. Michael has also been an invaluable friend and supporter of Criterion, offering advice and suggestions, and occasionally helping us to secure the participation of some of the many filmmakers whose respect and admiration he has earned.
Steve Buscemi’s Top 10
Steve Buscemi’s latest directorial effort, Interview, an adaptation of the 2003 film of the same name by the controversial Dutch director Theo van Gogh, was released by Sony Classics in New York and L.A. in July 2007.
Jane Campion’s Top 9
In honor of her introduction to the collection, with An Angel at My Table, we asked director Jane Campion to contribute a list of Criterion films that are on her mind at the moment. Campion’s debut feature, Sweetie, is also now available from Criterion.
“Firstly, thank you, Criterion. I am very moved to have An Angel at My Table included in the Criterion List,” wrote Campion in 2005. “There is not a film on the list that I have not either already seen or am eager to see and some to see again and again. But since you have asked me to talk about titles, I’ll tell you about some I have acquired and watched recently.”
Diablo Cody’s Top 10
Diablo Cody is the author of Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, and the Academy Award–winning screenwriter of Juno.
Stuart Cooper’s Top 10
“I have chosen ten titles from the Criterion Collection not because they are my favorites or necessarily the most important, but because they mean a lot to me personally and bear some relationship to my filmmaking career and the making of Overlord. My list is in no particular order,” says British filmmaker Stuart Cooper.
Peter Cowie’s Top 10
Peter Cowie has provided commentaries for around a dozen Criterion titles. His latest book, Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever, is available from Rizzoli.
Matt Dentler’s Top 10
Matt Dentler is the producer of the South by Southwest Film Conference & Festival, in Austin, Texas (sxsw.com), as well as a curator for American distributor Film Movement and Canadian distributor Films We Like. He also hosts the weekly local PBS series SXSW Presents. In its summer 2006 issue, MovieMaker named him one of the 25 Coolest People to Know in Indie Film, an honor with which his girlfriend disagrees.
Gary Giddins’s Top 10
In honor of his participation in our release of Louis Malle’s jazzy noir classic Elevator to the Gallows, we invited music critic Gary Giddins to contribute a list of his ten favorite Criterion films. Giddins: “Just ten? Obviously impossible, but I’ve narrowed the field somewhat by focusing on crime films. Even so, choosing randomly, I’ve only scratched the surface (no Hitchcock, Melville, Clouzot, Suzuki, Imamura, Godard, Becker, or Malle, for starters).” In no particular order:
Bruce Goldstein’s Top 10
Recipient of a special New York Film Critics Circle award for visionary programming, Bruce Goldstein is the Repertory Program Director of New York’s Film Forum, for which he has created more than 350 film festivals and spearheaded the rereleases of more than one thousand classic films, all in new 35 mm prints. In 1997, he founded Rialto Pictures, a distribution company specializing in classic rereleases. Because few have done more for classic film than Goldstein, we asked him to pick his ten favorite non-Rialto Criterion titles.
“All these films have one thing in common: they’re audience pleasers. Rules forbid me from including Rialto titles on this list; otherwise, Rififi, Nights of Cabiria, Quai des Orfèvres, Pépé le Moko, Masculin féminin, Billy Liar, and others might have made the cut.” In no particular order:
Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Top 10
Writer and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin collaborated for many years with Jean-Luc Godard, on the Dziga Vertov Group films as well as Tout va bien. He also made three popular films, Poto and Cabengo, Routine Pleasures, and My Crasy Life.
David Hudson’s Top 10
David Hudson lives in Berlin and translated screenplays until his blog, GreenCine Daily, swallowed him whole.
“It’s awfully daunting to scan a list of over four hundred titles—especially these four hundred–plus titles—and force yourself to pick out ten. I started out trying to cover all the bases: one from this genre, one from that director. But the list that was taking shape could’ve come from anyone. We’ve been bombarded well enough with canons. So, on a whim, I’ve decided to simply skim the spines and make an impulsive grab at the titles that conjure a memory or a smile—or a chill. This is not a ‘desert island’ list. If it were, there’d be an Ozu, a Bresson, a Sturges, a Lubitsch. I’ll be the first to admit that this approach has led to a pretty goofy top ten, and as the common disclaimer goes, ask me on another day and you’ll get another list, but here goes.”
Rian Johnson’s Top 10
We asked director Rian Johnson, whose “high school noir” Brick was one of the most acclaimed films of 2006, what his favorite Criterion releases were. Johnson wrote to us: “I’m a huge Criterion fan. My first exposure to many of my favorite films came from Criterion laserdiscs back in college, and today I seriously follow your new releases the way most people follow bands.”
Frank Kozik’s Top 10
Credited with single-handedly reviving the lost art of the concert poster, Frank Kozik credits his career to his enthusiasm for Austin, Texas’s growing underground rock scene in the mid-eighties. Find out more, at frankkozik.net and fkozik.com. In addition to the poster included with Dazed and Confused, Kozik also designed Criterion’s cover art for Gimme Shelter.
Neil LaBute’s Top 10
Neil LaBute, director of In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, and Nurse Betty, has contributed supplemental interviews to two Criterion DVD editions: Mike Leigh’s Naked and Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon, the latter available in our deluxe box-set edition of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales.
Christa Lang-Fuller’s Top 10
Author and actor Christa Lang-Fuller married director Samuel Fuller in 1967. In 1981, they founded Chrisam Films, which Lang-Fuller has continued to run since her husband’s death, in 1997. She coedited Fuller’s autobiography, A Third Face, for Random House and is currently writing a new book and working on two screenplays. She has one daughter by Fuller, Samantha, a glass artist and actor, and a granddaughter, Samira, eight years old. They are all big film buffs.
Dennis Lehane’s Top 10
Dennis Lehane is best known for his novel Mystic River, made into the acclaimed film by Clint Eastwood. When we discovered his love for Criterion, we asked him to write for us, and he did, contributing a terrific essay to our rerelease of The Wages of Fear.
Richard Linklater’s Top 10
Richard Linklater, whose groundbreaking Slacker we released in 2004, and whose Dazed and Confused we released in 2006, offers up his list of favorite Criterion DVDs. About his “ever-changing but current top ten,” Linklater says, “I’ve been revisiting spirit-and-the-flesh titles, with a little comedy mixed in.”
John Lurie’s Top 10
John Lurie, whose band, the Lounge Lizards, was one of the most acclaimed jazz groups of the eighties and nineties, has recorded twenty-two albums and has acted in several films, including Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Lurie also wrote, directed, and starred in the television series Fishing with John, which was shown on IFC and Bravo. For the last four years, he has been concentrating primarily on his painting, which can be seen at strangeandbeautiful.com.
Kevin Macdonald’s Top 10
Kevin Macdonald is the grandson of the filmmaker Emeric Pressburger (A Canterbury Tale, The Red Shoes). Macdonald’s directorial credits include 2000’s Academy Award–winning One Day in September, about the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and 2003’s Touching the Void, which tells the story of two climbers’ disastrous attempt to scale the Siula Grande, in the Andes, in 1985, and 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, for which Forest Whitaker won a Best Actor Oscar.
Guy Maddin’s Top 10
Canadian filmmaker and writer Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!, featuring Isabella Rossellini as the narrator, was released on DVD from the Criterion Collection in 2008. Maddin also contributed an essay on Kirk Douglas for our release of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole.
David Markey’s Top 10
Independent filmmaker and underground music aficionado David Markey’s films include 1991: The Year Punk Broke (1992) and the Los Angeles punk Super 8 cult classics The Slog Movie (1982), Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984), and its sequel Lovedolls Superstar (1986), all of which represent a unique record of the punk scene in Southern California throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Patton Oswalt’s Top 10
Patton Oswalt is a stand-up comic, the instigator of the Comedians of Comedy tour, and voice star of Pixar’s Ratatouille. He wrote an appreciation of Allen Baron’s film Blast of Silence in Sean Phillips’s comic book Criminal (Phillips did the artwork for the Criterion edition). His next project is the independent film Big Fan, in which he has his first lead role.
D.A. Pennebaker’s Top 10
Filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker (Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop, The War Room) and Chris Hegedus (The War Room, Startup.com), creative partners and husband and wife, offer these favorites. Note: “This list was supposed to be ten in number, but I find that I am unable to restrict my choices. So, in veneration of my many years of film watching, there may be a few extra . . .”
Bill Plympton’s Top 10
Cartoonist, filmmaker, and animator Bill Plympton, whose illustrations have appeared in the pages of the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Vanity Fair, and whose short films became famous on MTV in the eighties, directed the documentary Walt Curtis: The Peckerneck Poet, featured on Criterion’s release of Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche.
Rodarte’s Top 10
Fashion designers from Pasadena, California, sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, together named Rodarte after their mother’s maiden name, first showed their clothing line during fashion week in spring 2005. Criterion asked the sisters, who’ve since become fixtures of the New York fashion world and whose clothes have been inspired by films in the Criterion Collection (from Late Spring to The Double Life of Véronique) to pick their ten favorite Criterion releases, and they happily obliged.
Nicolas Roeg’s Top 10
“Oh! What have you done to me? What an impossible task. To pick ten titles from the Criterion Collection is difficult enough, but to put them in any kind of order would defeat Ockham’s sharpest razor,” exclaimed Nicolas Roeg, director of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, and Walkabout, all available from the Criterion Collection.
Roeg: “It’s a wonderful list that I have gone over again and again and everytime I’ve tried to make a selection, I’ve ended up with fifteen or twenty different choices—usually dictated by my mood of the day. Don’t do this to me. Please stop. I love them all. But only with a pin and blindfold can I land on ten. Now, looking at them, I find I could champion each one equally, but then of course I could do the same for all the rest the pin didn’t pick. My advice would be to work your way through the whole collection and look forward to new ones being added.”
Tom Schnabel’s Top 10
Music director at Los Angeles’s KCRW radio station, Tom Schnabel started the daily program Morning Becomes Eclectic in the 1980s, first bringing world music to U.S. radio with such artists as Buena Vista Social Club, Ravi Shankar, and Caetano Veloso. Schnabel is also currently the program adviser for the Hollywood Bowl and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
David Schwartz’s Top 10
David Schwartz is the chief curator at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image.
Leanne Shapton’s Top 10
An artist, art director, illustrator, and publisher based in New York City, Leanne Shapton designed the covers of the Criterion releases Kicking and Screaming and Cría cuervos . . . , and is the author of Was She Pretty?
Paul Schrader’s Top 10
It’s pretty hard to go wrong selecting ten “best” or ten “favorites” from the Criterion Collection, although it might be interesting to select the ten worst Criterion releases (something that, in deference to my friends at Criterion, I will not do). As a longtime cinephille I’m familiar with most of the Criterion catalogue. Rather than select ten favorites I’ll choose ten films that I was able to see because of Criterion, films I previously did not know about or were not available.
Robin Wood’s Top 10
This month we asked critic Robin Wood—whose books include Hitchcock’s Films and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and who recently wrote essays for the Criterion releases The Furies and Le plaisir—to pick his ten favorite films in the collection. Newly retired from teaching, Wood told us he intends to spend the remainder of his life enjoying himself with movies, operas, and concerts on DVD, while writing books and articles on Michael Haneke, Tsai Ming-liang, Satyajit Ray, and others, and spending a happy old age with his partner, Richard Lippe, and their cats.
Adam Yauch’s Top 10
Adam Yauch is a founding member of the Beastie Boys. Recently he created a new division of his company Oscilloscope Laboratories called Oscilloscope Pictures (oscilloscopepictures.com) for the sole purpose of distributing films. He even hired two guys from ThinkFilm to come over to his new company. At first we were a little concerned that Adam intended to compete with Criterion, but then we thought it over and, honestly, we have been doing this for a long time and are not threatened by Adam’s new company. The groundbreaking DVD The Beastie Boys Video Anthology is currently available from the Criterion Collection. So right there that proves we have the upper hand.
Ricky Jay’s Top 10
Author, actor, and historian Ricky Jay first worked with director David Mamet on House of Games. They have since collaborated often, including on seven films, the TV show The Unit, the one-man Broadway show Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, and Redbelt.
Chris Hegedus’s Top 10
Filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker (Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop, The War Room) and Chris Hegedus (The War Room, Startup.com), creative partners and husband and wife, offer their favorites.
Dave Filipi’s Top 10
Dave Filipi is the film and video curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. He has been a fan of the Criterion Collection since the days when laserdisc was king. (Ohio State 42, Michigan 7; photo by Jerry Dannemiller).
In alphabetical order:
Monte Hellman’s Top 10
I’ve fulfilled a dream to become a part of the Criterion family. Criterion has helped to preserve not only the films I grew up with but also the ones I’m now trying to keep up with. Picking ten is worse than trying to choose between my wives, my dog, and my kids.
Paul Morrissey’s Top 10
Paul Morrissey is the director of Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula.
James Franco’s Top 10
You can add James Franco to the list of Criterion’s most ardent fans. This month, the actor, seen left in a photo recalling My Own Private Idaho, taken by Gus Van Sant in Oregon in fall 2008, has contributed to our ongoing collection of Criterion top ten lists. Franco, who’s currently studying fiction writing at Columbia University and film direction at NYU, wrote to us, “I am obsessed with the Criterion Collection. I have included more than ten, but I have lumped them by director. After compiling this list, I realized that I don’t have Fellini, De Sica, Godard, or Truffaut on here. Or Kurosawa, Jarmusch, Buñuel, or Fuller. Basically, I have every disc in the collection, and I am making my way through them all. It’s rare that I watch one I don’t like.”
Jaime Hernandez’s Top 10
Artist Jaime Hernandez’s diabolically clever illustrations for our release of Divorce Italian Style (now available as a signed art print at the Criterion store) made for one of our most popular DVD covers. And this month, Hernandez has sent us his top ten favorite Criterion Collection titles. “I put these in alphabetical order,” he said, “so I wouldn’t drive myself mad trying to pick my most favorite.” Hernandez is the coauthor—along with his brothers Gilbert and Mario—of the seminal comic Love and Rockets. His most recent books, all available from Fantagraphics Books, include Ghost of Hoppers, The Education of Hopey Glass, and Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories.
Götz Spielmann’s Top 10
Götz Spielmann is the director of Revanche.
Joe Swanberg’s Top 10
“It’s worth noting that I have not seen the majority of the films in the collection (giving me hundreds of hours of great stuff to look forward to!),” says Joe Swanberg. “But of the many that I have seen, the following have either shaped my life or my work in some profound way.” Joe Swanberg is the writer and director of the independent American films Kissing on the Mouth, LOL, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Nights and Weekends, and Alexander the Last.