Lost in Criterion

We are thrilled to finally have another film from our (second?) favorite Danish director. Breaking the Waves (1996) is the first film Lars von Trier made after establishing the Dogme 95 framework, but he mostly ignored that to make a 1970s period piece about patriarchy, religious and otherwise, in rural Scotland.

The back story on Don Siegel's fantastic Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) is pretty crazy, and I promise we do eventually talk about it this week. But this is a message picture about prison reform, so we have to spend some time talking about the history of prison reform, and how there's no reforming a system that's designed to disappear human beings.

We get Harold Lloyd's classic silent college movie The Freshman and a handful of shorts on this week's episode. Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer direct the feature, among the most popular silent comedies in history for good reason, even if its relationship to higher education is very of its time. Do you know enough about football to understand comedy football? Harold Lloyd didn't think so, but still made this stellar movie.

Paolo Sorrentino's 2013 film The Great Beauty is in line with many an Italian film we've seen, a story of a middle aged man having an existential crisis. Like many a Fellini film, this crisis is also a crisis of art, a crises of self as expressed in art. Oh and parties. So many parties. A positively Slurms MacKenzie level of parties.

Given the rate of Bergman releases in the Criterion Collection it surprised us to realize that we haven't seen a film from the man in nearly two years. And what a surprising Bergman to come back to. Persona (1966) seems to be Bergman recognizing his place in the world cinema while also having or recovering from another breakdown. It starts with like 10 minutes of experimental film, and the thesis for this experiment is "Oh you want another Bergman film?" And the weirdness continues through the rest of the movie.