The Criterion Collection Newsletter

Mike Allred drawing from Seduced and Abandoned

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.

"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!"

Click here to read Allred's thoughts on his top ten selections.

1. Charade

2. The Man Who Fell to Earth

3. Seven Samurai

4. Le samouraï

5. 8 1/2

6. The Killer / Hard Boiled

7. Black Narcissus / The Red Shoes

8. Time Bandits / Brazil

9. Gimme Shelter

10. The rest of the Criterion catalog

If....
La jetée / Sans soleil
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
Sweet Movie
The Two of Us
and Eclipse series 3: Late Ozu


We have four great new titles this month—and a great new deal to tell you about. Starting today, our friends at Amazon.com will begin a special promotion: 35% off on selected Criterion DVDs. Thirty titles, from Seven Samurai to Kicking and Screaming and so much in between, will be on sale until June 4. Click here to see all the Criterion films included in this promotion. Don’t miss this opportunity to build your Criterion library. As always, happy viewing!		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. "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!" Click here to read Allred's thoughts on his top ten selections. 1. *Charade* 2. *The Man Who Fell to Earth* 3. Seven Samurai 4. Le samouraï 5. 8 1/2 6. The Killer / Hard Boiled 7. Black Narcissus / The Red Shoes 8. *Time Bandits* / Brazil 9. Gimme Shelter 10. The rest of the Criterion catalog If.... La jetée / Sans soleil WR: Mysteries of the Organism Sweet Movie The Two of Us and Eclipse series 3: Late Ozu

STREET DATE: 5/22	Director Kenji Mizoguchi was notoriously demanding on set, and never more so than on Sansho the Bailiff, his epic tragedy about slavery in feudal Japan. Mizoguchi forced Kinuyo Tanaka to go on a Spartan diet in order to play the suffering mother, Tamaki. Yet the night before filming the famous scene in which she calls out for her lost children, Tanaka broke her regimen and ate a steak. The next day, Mizoguchi confronted Tanaka and sent her off to run laps around the studio until she was believably exhausted.
STREET DATE: 5/15	Jean-Pierre Melville’s suspenseful tale of French Resistance fighters, *Army of Shadows, made in 1969, finally received its U.S. theatrical release in 2006, from Rialto Pictures. Thanks to the star turns of Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret, Melville’s powerful direction, and the cool cinematography of Pierre Lhomme, the film attracted huge audiences for more than three months straight in New York City. It was such a revelation that the New York Times, Premiere, LA Weekly, and Film Comment* all named it the best movie of 2006, and the National Society of Film Critics named it best foreign film of the year—over Volver and Pan’s Labyrinth. Not bad for a thirty-seven-year-old movie.
STREET DATE: 5/22	As Steven Soderbergh, who recorded a commentary track for our two-disc special edition of The Third Man, can attest, Carol Reed’s noir has been a major influence on many filmmakers. His own The Good German owes a great debt to Reed’s images and Graham Greene’s brilliantly cynical script. Yet some homages aren’t so obvious, such as an episode of the mid-nineties animated series Pinky and the Brain, entitled “The Third Mouse,” which featured a somewhat cheesy rendition of Orson Welles’s famous cuckoo-clock monologue: “In Italy, under the Borgias, they had thirty years of murder, bloodshed, warfare, and produced indigestible pasta, boring operas, and the Fiat. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The Swiss bank account, the best cheese in the world, and Heidi."
STREET DATE: 5/15	It’s surprising to recall that the radical Shohei Imamura was trained by the stately Yasujiro Ozu. Yet Ozu could be just as perverse. In an interview featured in the booklet accompanying Imamura’s serial-killer drama *Vengeance Is Mine, the director remembers an incident on the set of Tokyo Story*, when he was assistant director. Imamura’s mother had just died of a cerebral hemorrhage, so during the filming of the scene in which the grandmother dies, also of a cerebral hemorrhage, Imamura was so overwhelmed that he ran off the set, nearly in tears. Ozu, always pursuing the truth, insistently followed him, questioning, “Have I got it right?”

	French new-wave trailblazer Alain Resnais will not be slowed down—his sixteenth feature film, Private Fears in Public Places, is currently enjoying a successful theatrical run from IFC First Take. So it’s the perfect chance to become acquainted with this one-of-a-kind auteur. And what better place to start than at the beginning: his devastating debut feature, the unforgettable political love story Hiroshima mon amour, a benchmark of French cinema, written by Marguerite Duras.

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