My Criterion 40

Criterion is releasing a forty movie set this year, to celebrate their 40th anniversary.  It's supposed to be a sampling of some of the collection's best, and a good starting point for those just getting into world cinema.  I consider it a point of pride that I've already seen all forty, but most of these aren't films that I'd choose to own.  So today, for fun, I thought I'd put together my own forty-film collection of Criterion titles.

This is entirely  a fantasy exercise, and I know there are licensing issues that would make the inclusion of some of these films in a real set impossible.  Many of the original releases are out of print.  I'm going to play fair and only include titles with spine numbers, leaving out titles from the Eclipse series and the titles that have shown up on the streaming service.  I'm also leaving out shorts collections, television shows, and the Beastie Boys video anthology.  Single films only are eligible, though some will be from sets where they've been grouped with other titles.

By my own estimates, I've watched roughly 70-75% of the entire collection, which I think is good enough to make some decently well-informed selections.  

And now with all caveats covered, let's get to the list, ordered by spine number:  

10. Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg)

13. Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)

30. M (Fritz Lang)

61. Life of Brian (Terry Jones)

62. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer)

93. Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger)

101. Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman)

111. Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati)

198. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (R.W. Fassbinder)

306. Le Samouraï (Jean Pierre Melville)

316. Ran (Akira Kurosawa)

420. Happiness (Agnes Varda)

459. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel)

484. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 1975 (Chantal Akerman)

501. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)

519. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami)

573. The Music Room (Satyajit Ray)

591. 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet)

666. The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo Del Toro)

680. City Lights (Charles Chaplin)

691. Thief (Michael Mann)

717. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy)

765. The Black Stallion (Carroll Ballard)

779. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)

821. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick)

843. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson)

888. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)

918. The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov)

937. Dragon Inn (King Hu)

950. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder)

1023. The Cremator (Juraj Herz)

1025. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

1064. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho)

1094. Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles)

1153. Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra)

1154. Eve's Bayou (Kasi Lemmons)

1157. Daisies (Vera Chytilova)

1158. Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)

1191. The Trial (Orson Welles)

1215. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr)

So, my initial shortlist was over a hundred titles long, even when I limited myself to one title per director.  A lot of these titles are ones I've written about for "Great Directors" or ones that I probably will write about in the future.  I briefly considered disqualifying every film I'd written about for this blog, but that was going too far.  I did, however, disqualify everything in the existing Criterion 40 set, which knocked out several  titles, including "All That Jazz," "Bicycle Thieves," "The Night of the Hunter," "Do the Right Thing," "Sullivan's Travels," and "3 Women."

Availability was a consideration.  I don't believe that Netflix films like "Power of the Dog" have any other home media releases, while they seem to reissue "The Princess Bride" every time it has an anniversary.  Quality of the release was a consideration - I've seen some awful prints of older films, especially the public domain ones like "The Trial."  Criterion's restoration work is central to its purpose and identity.

Diversity was a consideration.  I was glad to find so many titles from female directors like Lucretia Martel, Kasi Lemmons, and Mira Nair had found their way into the collection over the last few years.  A few directors probably would have had films on this list if more of their titles were available.  I hope there's more focus on South American films next, which I wasn't able to represent at all.  I know I don't have enough documentaries or silent films and not a single animated film, but forty titles isn't a whole lot to begin with.  

And here are a few too many honorable mentions that were the hardest ones to cut:

6. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Renoir)

26. The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie)

49. Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini)

135. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock)

158. The Importance of Being Earnest (Anthony Asquith)

160. À Nous la Liberté (Rene Clair)

168. Monterey Pop (D.A. Pennebaker)

247. Slacker (Richard Linklater)

453. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai)

522. Red Desert (Michealangelo Antonioni)

561. Kes (Ken Loach)

544. Head (Bob Rafelson)

570. Zazie Dans Le Metro (Louis Malle)

576. Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang Dong)

645. The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita)

852. Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene)

982. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell)

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