Criterion Corner

Criterion Corner: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (#452)

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Most people, when asked to think about spy movies, will think of James Bond, of Sean Connery or Roger Moore or Daniel Craig. They’ll think of shootouts and stealth and suave secret agents bedding exotic beauties.

The novels of John Le Carré, inspired and informed by Le Carré’s own work for both MI5 and MI6 in the mid-20th century, are as far from James Bond as one could imagine – though it is just about possible to bend them into something more Bond-like in the name of entertainment, as happened for instance with the TV adaptation of The Night Manager that was released in 2015. As written, Le Carré’s stories are often less thrillers, though they can be thrilling, than tragedies, infused with existentialism, paranoia and a Kafkaesque sense of inevitability. And these are rarely as much in evidence as they are in Martin Ritt’s 1965 adaptation of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.

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Criterion Corner: Japan Edition

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Readers may have noticed a certain pattern over the last couple of Criterion Corner instalments, including the recent not-quite-Criterion Corner post: Japanese ghosts and ghouls in search of revenge and out for ears, farting Japanese pre-teens on a silence strike courtesy of Yasujiro Ozu, the precariousness of the relationship between human beings and nature in a Japanese mountain village. Obviously the main reason for me watching and writing about these was that they’re all good, interesting films – but there was another reason too: we’d been planning to visit Japan for a while, and that visit finally happened over the last few weeks, so in addition to rigorous training at the Duolingo dojo (I can now say that Ken is cool and Naomi is cute in Japanese!), we’ve also been going through some of the Japanese films on my DVD and Blu-ray shelf, including a number of Criterion releases, though barely scratching the surface, and ordering a few additional movies in the process. I.e. while this post is dedicated to a few Japanese films (each treated in shorter format than is usually the case with my Criterion Corner posts), it is likely that a few of the future posts in this series will also be Japan-bound, though probably not all of them in sequence. Already as it is, my Letterboxd account is likely to tell me at the end of the year that a remarkably large percentage of the films I’ll have watched in 2025 will have been Japanese.

So, without much further ado:

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(This is not a) Criterion Corner: Evil Does Not Exist (2023)

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It would be futile to assign a genre to Evil Does Not Exist, beyond the most generic catch-all there is. Yes, the film is a drama, but what does that mean? To be honest, the more I think about Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to the award-winning Drive My Car (2021), the less I can shake the impression that it is a horror film.

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Criterion Corner: Kwaidan (#90)

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Ghosts, demons, spirits: who doesn’t like them and the ways they make life more interesting? Kwaidan is full of them, in various shapes: supernaturally-propelled hair taking revenge on a bad husband, an ice spirit taking on human shape and marrying a human woodcutter until he breaks a promise, nobility and soldiers killed in a long-ago war employing a blind monk for his storytelling skills, and ghostly visitors taking umbrage at being drunk by a samurai when they appear to him in a cup of tea.

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Criterion Corner: The Three Musketeers / The Four Musketeers (#1263)

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Every now and then I’m amazed at how pop culture doesn’t actually require you to have seen, read, heard or played something for you to have, or at least think you have, a fairly clear idea what it is. I’m sure I’ve seen snippets of versions of Alexandre Dumas’ Musketeers stories, but I don’t think I’d seen an entire Musketeers film – let alone watched a series or read any of the original novels – until a few weeks ago. (Not even Douglas Fairbanks’ silent-era original.) Nonetheless, I had quite a concrete image in my head: four friends in dashing 17th century outfits, wielding swords (but not muskets – go figure) and getting into swashbuckling adventures, rescuing damsels and foiling the wicked plans of scheming authority figures.

What I didn’t expect: that the three Musketeers (feat. D’Artagnan) would basically turn out to be The Beatles from A Hard Day’s Night… in dashing 17th century outfits, wielding swords (but not muskets – go figure) and getting into swashbuckling adventures, rescuing damsels and foiling the wicked plans of scheming authority figures.

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Criterion Corner: Night Moves (#1255)

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When you think of Gene Hackman and neo-noir, what comes to mind? For most people – including me -, the answer is simple: The Conversation. And obviously there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that choice: Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film is unarguably one of the best, most iconic paranoia thrillers of the 1970s and a great showcase of Hackman’s talents. But sometimes a film’s reputation can be so enormous, it eclipses other films that are also deserving of recognition.

Arguably, Night Moves (1975) is one of those films.

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Criterion Corner: Something Wild (#563)

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a conventional yuppie who, if you look at him from the right angle, reveals a streak of disaffection with his life bumps into a free-spirited young woman. She introduces him to the wild side of life, and they embark on a whirlwind romance. All together now: can you say “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”?

If you rolled your eyes at this, rest assured: that was pretty much my first reaction to Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild – so much so that after about half an hour I ejected the Blu-ray and watched something else instead. For those first 20-30 minutes, I felt more and more that I really didn’t need yet another take on that particular well-worn cliché. Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels) and Lulu (Melanie Griffith), as she calls herself to begin with, weren’t endearing to me: I found them and their idea of what breaking free from convention looked like grating. It’s one thing to watch teenagers who believe they’re the first ever to break free from the bonds of social mores; it’s quite another to watch two supposedly grown-up people behaving like those teenagers. There’s something to it that is smug and self-satisfied and, frankly, a bit boring.

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Criterion Corner: The Elephant Man (#1051)

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Was The Elephant Man (1980), David Lynch’s follow-up to his first feature Eraserhead, my first Lynch? I’m not sure: it’s possible that I saw Twin Peaks first, at least the first half or so of the series, in a German dub, or perhaps I caught Blue Velvet on television late one night. It is even possible that I watched Eraserhead first and am repressing that traumatic memory. But The Elephant Man is often brought up as a good way to get started on Lynch: it tells a fairly straight-forward story, one that is based (albeit loosely) on the life of Joseph Merrick, a man suffering from severe deformities who lived in late 19th century London. You can see what would have drawn Lynch to the material, but the resulting film does not have the expressedly avant-garde edge of Eraserhead or of many of his later works. Aside from The Straight Story, it’s probably the film by Lynch that I would recommend first to people who haven’t seen anything else by him, unless I knew that they were into surrealist art.

But does that make The Elephant Man less Lynch, somehow?

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