Criterion Month Day 9: Viridiana

Viridiana (1961)

I’ve written a few times about Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel and his distaste for the bourgeoisie. What I haven’t delved into is the equal disdain Buñuel had for the Catholic Church. Born and raised in a strict Catholic environment, Buñuel lost his faith at age 16 after reading Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Influenced by Darwin’s ideas and what he saw as the hypocrisy and corruption of the Church, Buñuel became an atheist. Though he still carried a fascination with the icons and rituals of the faith, and how to subvert them. I mean, this is a guy who, at one point in this film, depicts a crucifix that’s revealed to be a flick knife. If that isn’t the perfect representation of religious hypocrisy, I don’t know what is.

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Criterion Month Day 8: Breathless

Breathless (1960)

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.

Has there ever been a more damning indictment of romantic French cinema than Michel’s line here in Breathless? When I think about pretentious French movies, it’s exactly that: a man and a woman in black and white, both monologuing into the void about whatever the fuck instead of having anything that could possibly resemble human connection. So I guess it took a film critic making his first movie to put that shit on blast. It’s stuff like that that makes Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless still an exciting movie to watch 66 years after its release.

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Criterion Month Day 7: Ashes And Diamonds

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

For my first foray into the career of Polish director Andrzej Wajda, I’m starting at the end. Not at the end of his career, as he would be a presence on the international film stage even into the ’80s, but more because I’m starting at the end of a trilogy. Wajda’s films A Generation in 1955 and Kanał in 1957 preceded Ashes and Diamonds as commentaries on the effects World War II had on Poland, and all three have appeared together in an early Criterion box set that is now out of print. But Ashes and Diamonds seems to be the most acclaimed of these three films, so it seemed like a good place to start. The film certainly feels like a continuation of something, as there’s an impeccable amount of craft behind it, which managed to slip in some anti-communist sympathies despite being filmed in communist Poland. Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 6: Cairo Station

Cairo Station (1958)

One fun thing to be reminded of each year when we do Criterion Month is that film is such a rich, wide-ranging, and diverse medium that there are always new pockets of great filmmaking around the world to discover. Namely, I chose to watch Cairo Station for not much reason other than that it was a film produced in Egypt, a country that I don’t believe has been represented yet in Criterion Month. So after watching the film and doing a little bit of digging into its production, I was surprised to find that Egypt actually had a pretty thriving film industry during the mid-20th century, on par with Bollywood.

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Criterion Month Day 4: Summer with Monika

Summer with Monika (1953)

From Terence Malick’s Badlands to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, one of the most beloved sub-genres cinema’s great auteurs inevitably explore is stories about young lovers on the run. Ingmar Bergman went there when he was 35, a bit before all the big titles in his filmography, but nonetheless Summer with Monika did achieve its own unique sort of infamy: two years after its Swedish release, a Time magazine article about “Sin & Sweden” inspired an edited-down version of the movie to be released in the US, where it was a poster child Swedish exploitation films. Hard to believe that was ever a thing! Against all odds did Ingmar Bergman of all people make an early erotic masterpiece? And can a movie from 73 years ago still titillate audiences in 2026?

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Criterion Month Day 3: Night and the City

Night and the City (1950)

There are plenty of directors that are closely associated with the film noir genre, from John Huston to Billy Wilder to Edward Dmytryk. However, there was really only one great noir director who found themself completely severed from the country that produced the majority of the great noirs. Jules Dassin first made a name for himself in the genre in Hollywood with fellow Criterion Collection entries 1947’s Brute Force and 1948’s The Naked City, but was blacklisted due to being a former member of several American communist party associations in his younger years. This is how Dassin ended up directing his later films in Europe, such as heist classic Rififi. While Dassin was in the midst of being ousted from Hollywood, he made a sojourn to Britain to direct Night and the City, a film fittingly about a desperate man with more than a few walls closing in on him.

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