It’s the most notorious alcove stocked with movies outside of your old video store’s nook full of pornos — the Criterion Closet! Famous people go in and rummage through the shelves of the venerable disc provider, highlighting their favorite flicks. But despite hundreds of film fans having access to the closet over the years, hundreds of films have never been selected, according to a list released by Criterion itself.
No one at Media Magpies has been invited to enter the closet, but that won’t stop us from imagining what we’d do if we got there — and in particular, thinking about which films that haven’t yet gotten any love that we’d immediately snap up. Below and in no particular order is a list of Magpies, the movies they’d pick and why. Tell us what you’d pick in the comments!
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was spun off into a successful sitcom, but the film itself is more sharp-edged and unsentimental than that. In Stephanie Zacharek’s terrific essay for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, she quotes an exchange between Ellen Burstyn and director Martin Scorcese. Burstyn, who liked the script but felt it needed some additional realism to really shine, asked Scorcese what he knew about women. “Nothing,” he said. “But I’d like to learn.” Alice shows that he did learn; he and Burstyn worked together to create this gem, a low-key, emotionally savvy story about a woman starting to learn what she really wants from life, and that it might be possible. Burstyn and child actor Alfred Lutter, playing her son Tommy, have a wonderful, caring chemistry that anchors the film, and Kris Kristofferson arrives late in the story as a love interest who might be her salvation, or her anchor. It might be Scorcese’s best movie, and it’s certainly my favorite. — Bridgett Taylor
Alphaville
The way that Alphaville conveys a bleak, neon-saturated landscape – the DNA of cyberpunk cinema – should have warranted its being a Criterion Closet pick. Now out of print, Alphaville mashes up genres (SF, noir, romance/melodrama) so freely that the film is a mid-60s cinematic wild card. From the opening that envisions galactic travel in a vintage Ford we are kept off balance. As the night-time streets of Paris are recognizable even as they become the routes through a futuristic city, director Jean-Luc Godard seems compelled to warn us that a dystopian future may be closer than it appears, even though the protests of May 1968 were a few years away. And for all of the heavy conceptual themes, such as the use of poetry to eventually defeat Alpha 60, an evil supercomputer (perhaps we could try it on AI?), what might be remembered the most are the luminous close-ups of Anna Karina – was this the face that launched a thousand starships? — John Bruni
I Walked With A Zombie
I can only assume the problem here is that people have never heard of I Walked With a Zombie. But you’d think the title would be enough to make you at least look. This movie, from 1943, is obviously about classic voodoo zombies, not Romero-style brain-eaters. It is directed by Jacques Tourneur, so you’ve got your eerie atmospheric filming going, too. In fact, it is, in a nutshell, Voodoo Jane Eyre, and who can resist that? It’s a bit paternalistic, of course—various white characters acknowledge using the tricks of voodoo to help those poor stupid black people who don’t know any better—but if you can get beyond that, it’s a heck of a film. — Gillian Nelson
Ran
My pick out of the Criterion Closet is Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece, Ran. It’s a little more understandable that it’s never been picked by anyone who’s actually been able to visit the Closet, as it’s been out of print for quite a while. Kurosawa and Shakespeare have always been a match made in heaven — both were among the best at taking a simple story and really drilling down into what the story was really saying. Kurosawa was a master of black and white filmmaking, but Ran shows he was equally adept at making a world explode with color. It may lose some of the psychosexual undercurrents by gender-swapping the children of King Lear, but Ran is more interested in the regrets and humiliations of age. We may get older, but we don’t always get wiser. — James Williams
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
If M is Fritz Lang pushing new sound technology to meet his artistic vision, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is Lang pushing his artistic vision to meet the possibilities of technology. The film, a sequel to the silent epic Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, keeps its titular villain behind closed doors at all times. All we get from him is his voice from behind a curtain. If you’ve paid attention to film history for the past 90 years, you know where this is going, but all the credit in the world to Lang for getting there first. Where M announced the presence of its villain through the use of sound, Mabuse reduces the villain to nothing but his sound. The film was so good that it was banned by the Nazis, though they did offer Lang a sweet job running their film studio. He fled to Paris immediately. — Not David Lynch
This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection
“What they call progress, it is when men point their damning finger at nature and proclaim conquest over it,” someone says toward the end of This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection. Progress comes to Lesotho in the form of a dam that will flood a small village and force the relocation of all its inhabitants, living and dead; this does not sit well with Mantoa, who has just learned of the death of her son and who has seen her husband and daughter and grandchild die before him, and refuses to see their graves disturbed and her home destroyed. Writer-director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese films Mantoa’s obstinance in slow sequences, placing a small elderly woman in open landscapes and confining rooms, a presence as unignorable as Yu Miyashita’s preternatural score. But the most enduring image in the movie is Mary Twala Mhlongo’s face, creased and implacable, beyond any heartwarming or hope yet refusing to give in. “It’s a senseless suffering, there’s no meaning to it,” Mantoa says of the grief she moves through. The film does not contradict her but Mosese’s portrayal of her denial of glib sentiment and perfidious progress is its own statement. Any resurrection is up to you. — Dave Shutton
Touchez pas au grisbi
Touchez pas au grisbi trades noir’s trademark shadows for a creamy luminosity, as if everything in its first two acts—the cigarettes, the wine, the pâté, the favorite song on the jukebox—is here to be savored. Jean Gabin’s civilized, world-weary gentleman thief is ready for a lifetime of the routine comforts he loves so well, but the plot inevitably comes in with incredible ruthlessness, until the bars of his signature tune feel more like the bars of a cage. I can never get enough of subtle genre shifts, and this unshowy transition from a chill hangout crime film to a bleakness that goes past words is one of the best there is. We watch a man become a shell. It’s a mark of the film’s earlier melancholy beauty that I still wind up thinking, At least he knew how to enjoy himself. — Lauren James
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Interesting how many classics no one took. I will grab Point Blank. As an adaptation of the first Parker novel, it works well enough, and certainly better than subsequent attempts to use the source material. As a movie, it’s really quite well done and large chunks of it stick in the memory. Also, Lee Marvin is closer to Parker than pretty much anyone else who’s ever in the part, but he’s also just Lee Marvin.
Trying to pick just one movie from the list made me understand better how many classics have gone unpicked!
Baffled as I am that nobody has ever picked Robocop (!?) I’ll have to go for The Shout, for all the reasons outlined here: https://www.the-solute.com/year-of-the-month-tom-vomas-morton-on-the-shout/
Honourable mentions to King of the Hill (“the one actually good Soderbergh film”, I announce to the Criterion camera, and am immediately torn limb from limb by rabid cinephiles) and Spellbound, the only Hitchcock film I’ve had to pause because it made me laugh so hard.
Robocop is one of the movies where I assume yes, a Criterion would be nice, but some people would already have it and therefore focused on other (perhaps more snobby) stuff.
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Four, Episode Eighteen, “Der Tag”
Frank: Can we have some quiet in here?!
Hawkeye: Quit bleeding so loudly.
Potter: You must have something in common.
Hawkeye: True. We hate each other.
Hawkeye: Brilliant devil, he’s got a one of a kind.
This has a great premise of Hawkeye and BJ having to be nice to Frank, and it has a great character reveal: Frank is just as miserable to be around when he’s happy. He’s so dedicated to dominating every conversation and so ill-informed that it makes it frustrating, and he’ll take any opportunity to humiliate others; great detail that he wins a game of poker despite barely knowing how to play and acts insufferable about it. Hawkeye and BJ escalate the conflicts between them and Frank, but there is a base unlikability to Frank. It’s interesting too, because it still feels realistic in a sense; Frank’s awfulness feels earned by the show.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Season Eighteen, Episode Two, “Dennis And Dee Don’t Get Rich”
Another instant classic. Biggest laugh was “YOU ARE WORKING CLASS AND WE HAVE MOVED ONNNNNNNN FROM YOU!”. In general this was a great one for both Dennis and Dee rage; great gag for making the person complaining about being told to calm down look even crazier for questioning it.
Gregory Scott Cummins is so good at making Luther and Donald very distinct characters.
The fact that you can instantly tell which is which in the final two scenes is fantastic. Especially love him playing Luthor in the Mummer’s outfit.
Captain Horatio Hornblower – Media Magpies gets results! And not for the first time, Lauren’s review reflects my feelings about the movie. Not flawless but generally entertaining and fun and well acted and some of the set pieces are pretty good. My main comparison point is not with Captain Blood but with Master and Commander, and of course a film from the 50s can’t quite compete with a 21st century budget. But I think I am glad we don’t actually see a flogging up close, which we might now, and even if the romance feels forced, there is at least a woman or two here, unlike Weir’s boys club. But beyond this, there is no way a Trekkie can watch this and not think about just how much Roddenberry was influenced by Hornblower. There are definitely similarly between Horatio and Kirk, but it’s Picard who is truly Hornblower in space, with that mix of absolute confidence and calculated distance from a crew that would follow him to the ends of the galaxy but won’t invite him to play poker. Plus Patrick Stewart comes closer to having Peck gravitas than Shatner could. And it’s funny that the two most well known adaptations of Moby Dick starred Peck and Stewart as Capt. Ahab, to some degree an bizarro Hornblower.
Barney Miller, the first season ends with two plots that don’t really mesh but that both work nicely. Plot A has Barmey’s wife bringing a seven year old Black kid who tried to mug here into the precinct, where Barney and Harris and a pimp waiting to make bail work to scare the kid straight. There are definitely issues with Black men written by a white man doing this, but it feels believable enough, and Todd Bridges (his first acting role on TV) is really cute and good as the kid. Plot B has Chano ending a bank robbery/hostage situation. By killing the suspects. And Chano is an utter wreck. No macho crap here as he struggles with his feelings and breaks down crying! We leave the first season with the characters better defined and the show’s desire to blend comedy, drama, and humanism coming through well.
Yay for shared Hornblower viewing!
And not for the first time, Lauren’s review reflects my feelings about the movie.
This will fall apart later today when you’ll see how much more I liked “The Hitch-Hiker,” alas, but no streak is perfect.
Seconded that it’s fascinating to see the seeds of Picard here (Kirk shares some of Hornblower’s tactics, but yeah, his particular aura of command and how he fits into the social structure of the ship are very different); it occurs to me that of course Roddenberry’s relative utopianism means Starfleet has no equivalent to the pressed sailor, and now I’m wondering if it bothered him to leave that kind of juicy story potential behind. Still, some things are eternal, no matter what degree of optimism the storyteller has, so Picard’s still always had plenty to deal with.
Roddenberry wasn’t big on interpersonal conflict within his crews anyway, certainly not on Next Gen. Though it was Kirk who had to be stern and authoritative with the bigoted crewman in “Balance of Terror,” an episode that was in some ways a grandson of Hornblower, if you say Napoleonic naval stories begat WWII naval epics which begat space war epics.
I forgot the A plot entirely, but Chano’s breakdown has really stuck with me. (For whatever reason, the first season didn’t seem to show up as much in syndication. Or I just liked Dietrich so much more than Fish I remember his episodes better. Either is possible.)
I can’t remember if the reruns were shown in any sort of order – and I watched the show as it aired from about season four – so I can’t tell you if whatever NYC station that had the rights ran a lot of season one. But I also have very strong memories of Chano breaking down. Though I remembered the TV stations reporting on the shooting as not the three network affiliates and a Japanese station but the three affiliates and a Spanish station. Maybe because even back then we had what became Telemundo and Univision.
Babylon 5, “The War Prayer”
Earth First advocates are attacking and branding aliens on Babylon 5, Sinclair’s doing a slow burn about it, and Ivanova’s newly returned-to-the-picture ex turns out to be one of the fascists stirring the pot. Vir’s young cousin also arrives with his girlfriend in tow, as both of them hope to escape arranged marriages back home.
That last subplot is minor, but it’s well-used to provide some further characterization for Londo and Vir, as Vir’s driven to assert himself for the first time (for a selfless and sentimental cause, which tells us about him) and Londo eventually (as befits his profession) finds a diplomatic way to smooth over the tensions in a way that upholds his culture’s norms while also appeasing his own not-so-buried sentimental streak. The “My shoes are too tight, but it doesn’t matter, because I have forgotten how to dance” line is good, but it’s less good when a version of it gets self-indulgently reprised later when Londo’s talking to the kids. Still, a nicely handled subplot.
The main plot is of course more about the not-so-slowly building fascism back on Earth, which is spilling out to Babylon 5. (Did they not see there’s a big praying mantis guy who can sell you black market goods? Do they not like this guy? I’m confused. I love him.) This all suffers a little bit from following the Psi-Corps material in the last episode, which butted up against some of the same concerns while being far more chilling in its presentation, but it’s solid. (Something very ironic about Jerry Doyle playing Garibaldi trying to console Ivanova about having once been close to someone who later slipped into fascism. I’m generally trying to ignore the Jerry Doyle of it all, but that winds up bitterly funny.)
Unfortunately, that self-indulgence in the dialogue is going to be one of its most consistent traits as it evolves over five seasons. Luckily, so is Londo’s sentimental streak; his story is that of a guy with a big heart that leads him down some terrible places.
I don’t know anything about Doyle outside of B5 – what’s up there?
Regrettably, he became a regular pundit on a couple of right-wing networks (Fox News and Newsmax). He died in 2016, though, so he’s not currently making the world any worse. He’s very good as Garibaldi, so he should’ve just stuck to that.
Utopia, S1E1 – Yes, the UK version. This is already early 2010’s – or really 2000’s coded – as the last era where you could plausibly depict people meeting off of an active forum (okay, besides this one) and what seems like a vaccine-based conspiracy that isn’t a right-wing fantasy. Some clumsy pilot dialogue but I like the setup here, which reminds me of Grant Morrison, and the show’s strong color scheme deliberately evokes the comic books that these characters are obsessed with. Speaking of the early 2010’s, hey, scary Eastern Europeans with accents!
Dead Snow- This is the rare foreign horror movie that is BEGGING to be remade Stateside given that the director has a fun premise – Nazi zombies – and does not do anything with the rich, fucked up subtext of a fascist threat that truly can’t die. Very regrettably shot on digital in that murky 2000’s style too and with dumb college students. The last third does pick up a lot though.
Nazi zombie / horror movies do seem to go more for the mindless splatter than the actual terror, don’t they? A bit odd really. Dead Snow 2 is definitely not what you’re looking for in that regard but it does continue to build from the end of the first one in a fun way, a good example of the “more is more” school of sequel-making.
Have to respect bringing (I assume) dead Soviets into things!
Better Dead Than Red Snow?
Rather Red Than Yellow Snow?
Police Story 3: Supercop – the other film in my new Jackie Chan box set that I haven’t seen before is Police Story 4: First Strike, but obviously due to the extremely important and cohesive plots in these movies I felt like I needed to see the third one first. I’ve never found the Police Story films to be my favourites among Chan’s work, there are others that balance the action and comedy better for me, but they do have some of the best pure stunt madness and this one is no exception on that front. It also throws Michelle Yeoh into the mix and she’s fantastic, I really need to see more of her earlier work. But really most of this film is build up, with an absolutely killer last 15-20 minutes of non-stop action, in the “I can’t believe nobody actually died” subgenre. Good shit, basically.
Year of the Month update!
This September, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 4th: Gillian Nelson: Moose Hunters
Sept. 6th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Lenin in October
Sept. 18th: Gillian Nelson: Pluto’s Quin-pup-lets
Sept. 20th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Hobbit
Sept. 22nd: Lauren James: Stage Door
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich
And there’s still time to write up any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001 for this month!
TBD: James Williams: Millennium Actress
Aug. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Disney’s California Adventure
Aug. 27th: Cori Domschot: The Mummy Returns
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures
My pick would easily be Le Trou (1960, Becker). A prison escape movie so tightly focused on the process of the plan that it makes ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ feel loose and improvised. From the director of Lauren’s pick to boot. The film’s co-screenwriter, who based it on his own failed jail break in the 1940s, was also the scariest loking motherfucker I ever saw at a film Q&A, and I’ve seen Peter Stormare and Udo Kier!
This was on my shortlist too, maybe the best prison break movie I’ve seen. I should really bump “Grisbi” up the watchlist.