The Criterion Collection

Kiss Me Deadly

Robert Aldrich

Christopher Sharrett: “The Fifties as dark, depressed era, the hero as barbarian.”

Belle de jour

Luis Buñuel

Christopher Sharrett: “Bunuel shows the uselessness of the notion of the "perverse" in this film about female desire, and the underlying contempt for useless sexual norms.”

Written on the Wind

Douglas Sirk

Christopher Sharrett: “Only a veteran of Weimar could make this clever film, one of the most intelligent examinations of the male and female hysteric.”

The Earrings of Madame de . . .

Max Ophuls

Christopher Sharrett: “Ophuls shows the female, in patriarchal society, to be nothing more than an item of exchange, like the possessions of the title.”

Red Desert

Michelangelo Antonioni

Christopher Sharrett: “The best indictment of postwar industrial society and its destruction of the erotic, of all human interaction”

Sansho the Bailiff

Kenji Mizoguchi

Christopher Sharrett: “One of the most beautiful films ever made, and one of the best indictments of patriarchal society East and West”

Bigger Than Life

Nicholas Ray

Christopher Sharrett: “Was there ever a great vision of the lunacy of postwar suburban life? One should watch this film alongside nonsense like Leave it to Beaver.”

All That Heaven Allows

Douglas Sirk

Christopher Sharrett: “Sirk is one of our very best satirists, an artist able to fill studio demands while showing the utter bankruptcy of American life.”

That Obscure Object of Desire

Luis Buñuel

Christopher Sharrett: “Again, Bunuel uses his wonderful wit to show how desire cannot be contained, and have contempt for so-called mores.”

L’eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni

Christopher Sharrett: “The suffocating nature of bourgeois life has never been better rendered. Antonioni's use of landscape show him to be a masterful graphic artist.”

The Complete Jean Vigo

Christopher Sharrett: “One of the best "teenage" films, although its call for anarchy might be a bit more visceral.”

Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais

Christopher Sharrett: “The aristocracy as a group of mannequins, as zombies not yet informed that they are dead...the film's eeriness has not been adequately examined.”