The 33D Invader

Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.

Dec 5, 2014 — A film about garlic? Only Les Blank could pull it off. In this clip from a new supplement on our release Les Blank: Always for Pleasure, we get the story of how Blank’s pungent documentary Garlic Is as Good as...

Dec 5, 2014 — Earlier this week, we had a party for the release of our new book, Criterion Designs, at the Society of Illustrators in New York. Our friend the filmmaker :: kogonada brought the following video, in which Criterion artwork comes to...

Dec 3, 2014 — “We were just in London, clubbing, all those things people did in the ’60s in the middle of London,” British actor Francesca Annis recalls, in an interview on the new Criterion release of Macbeth, of “crossing paths” with director Roman...

Dec 2, 2014 — Les Blank’s documentaries focusing on musicians are wonderfully easygoing and authentic. Watching films like A Well Spent Life, a 1971 portrait of Texas blues guitarist Mance Lipscomb, one senses a relationship of total trust between subjects and filmmakers. In this...

Dec 1, 2014 — Agroup of rich Italians is on a cruise off the coast of Sicily when one of their number—a moody, unhappy young woman—disappears. Murder, kidnapping, accident, suicide? Her boyfriend and her close friend search for her, but the search turns into...

Nov 27, 2014 — Repertory PicksNew York’s Museum of the Moving Image is kicking off its series See It Big: Animation this holiday weekend. And what better movie for Thanksgiving time than one about an unrepentant poultry thief? Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, featuring...

Nov 26, 2014 — The famous Franky & Johnny’s is just one of many places in New Orleans you can get crawfish, a city specialty. But it’s the only one that Les Blank turned to when he was making Always for Pleasure, his invigorating...

Nov 25, 2014 — Features Director Michelangelo Antonioni made these famous remarks at the press conference following the May 1960 Cannes Film Festival premiere of L’avventura. They appear here in a translation published in the spring 1962 issue of the journal Film Culture. Today...

Nov 25, 2014 — More than just observational, Les Blank’s sensual documentaries are personal and participatory celebrations of American culture.