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Lost in Criterion
by Lost in Criterion
The Adam Glass and John Patrick Owatari-Dorgan, attempt the sisyphean task of watching every movie in the ever-growing Criterion Collection and talk about them. Want to support us? We’ll love you for it: www.Patreon.com/LostInCriterion
Episodes
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Spine 714: The Essential Jacque Demy - Lola (1961)
This week we have our first film from Agnes Varda's husband Jacques Demy and our second film called Lola. Kicking off The Essential Jacques Demy boxset we have his feature length debut Lola (1961) a "musical without the music" except for one very musical number written by Varda. This week the...
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Spine 712: Scanners
Sometimes years of doing the podcast align in fun ways and we get to talk about David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981) in October without moving anything around. Scanners is a smorgasbord of body horror effects that starts with a bang and keeps going. But it's also a Parallax View-esque political...
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Spine 711: A Hard Day's Night
Pat is a huge fan of the Beatles, which he inherits from his dad, and which he this week fails to pass on to his own children. Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964) is a movie those kids should like; it's fun and funny, it's The Beatles just on the cusp of being THE BEATLES. Popular as...
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Spine 710: Judex
Georges Franju's homage to/remake of Louis Feuillade's 1916 serial, Judex (1963) is a dreamy tale of revenge full of contrivance and illogic and every single frame is a masterpiece. Encountering films like this is biggest reward of doing the podcast.
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Spine 709: Red River
Howard Hawks directs this grand western in which Montgomery Cliff maybe introduces Hollywood to The Method and John Wayne learns to act. It's a story about greed and America but it's not an open critique because it would be bad if we said America is bad. If nothing else John Wayne would quit the...
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Spine 708: Like Someone in Love
Since first watching Taste of Cherry way back at Spine 45, we have looked forward to each Abbas Kiarostami the Criterion Collection has shown us. Color us intrigued when we found out that Like Someone In Love (2012) was made in Japan. Unfortunately, Pat maybe gets a little hung up on the fact…
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Spine 707: Il sorpasso
With Il sorpasso (1962), Criterion once again shows us a single movie from a director we've never heard of and they will never mention again. As per usual, this is a great movie. An road trip through the effects of consumerism across class lines in post-war Italy, the film is a pretty clear...
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Spine 706: Master of the House
We are thrilled to finally have another film from our (second?) favorite Danish director. Master of the House (1925) is the earliest Carl Th. Dreyer we've seen and the last the Criterion has to offer us. When we watched our last Dreyer film, this one wasn't even in the Collection yet....
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Spine 705: Breaking the Waves
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…
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Spine 704: Riot in Cell Block 11
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…
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Spine 703: The Freshman
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...
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Spine 702: The Great Beauty
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...
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Spine 701: Persona
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...
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Spine 700: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Spine 700, can you believe it? We've been doing this for a long time. Criterion rewards our dedication with an overly full release of Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). Mark Gustafson is animation director of this animated movie, but this is less a Tim Burton's...
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Spine 699: A Brief History of Time
Every documentary the Criterion Collection shows us leads to a discussion on what documentaries are, what they can do, and what their relationship to truth can and should be. Inevitably as well the supplements to a Criterion Collection release of a documentary provide context that can reshape how...
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Spine 698: King of the Hill
Stephen Soderberg's third movie is the marquee release this week, King of the Hill (1993), an adaptation of A.E. Hotchner's memoir of being poor in Depression-era St. Louis. Also slid in here is Soderberg's fourth movie, The Underneath (1995), a remake of the Robert Siodmak's 1949 noir Criss…
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Spine 697: Tess
Oh boy, another Roman Polanski film. Tess (1979) is Polanski's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's 1890's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The film is well acted and well shot and we'd love to just talk about that but all the bonus material is about how Polanski was a brave genius making his first movie...
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Spine 696: Foreign Correspondent
Alfred Hitchcock's pre-war spy thrillers are interesting because on the one hand they're romps and on the other hand they're designed to subtly push the British public against Germany in a time when the film cannot openly call the bad guys German. This tonal dialectic really worked for us in The...
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Spine 695: Blue is the Warmest Color
Abdellatif Kechiche's adaptation of Jul Maroh's Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) offers us a lot to talk about, but Criterion's release offers no additional content to frame our conversation, which is extra weird considering the hundreds of thousands of words written on this film upon its…
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Spine 694: The Long Day Closes
According to director Terence Davies, he wasn't interested in presenting what happens chronologically next in a film, but emotionally what's next. As such The Long Day Closes (1992) is a stream-of-consciousness coming-of-age exploration of memory, budding sexuality, music, film, and musical…
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Spine 693: La Vie de Boheme
We fell in love with Aki Kaurismäki when we first watched Le Havre (2011, Spine 619), and are very excited to talk about the original film in which André Wilms plays Marcel Marx, another tale of immigrant rights but this one an ode to a Paris that no longer exists, a bohemian lifestyle that is...
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Spine 692: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) is a very fun movie and an overstuffed Criterion release. But perhaps a comedy of such epic proportions (and aspect ratios) needs an epically sized release.
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Spine 691: Thief
Having finished the World Cinema boxset, we had resigned ourselves that we would have to go back to doing some acrobatics to read Marxism into the films for awhile again, but little did we expect that Michael Mann's Thief (1981) isn't just a stylish heist film but is also (and moreso) a…
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Spine 690: The Housemaid
The first World Cinema Boxset draws to a close with Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960), a film whose influence you can clearly see in many modern South Korean directors' work, from Bong Joon-ho to Park Chan-wook. A sort of domestic horror film punctuated with a moral message ending that left us...
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Spine 689: Trances
This week the World Cinema Project boxset changes pace a bit with Trances, Ahmed El Maanouni's 1981 documentary on Moroccan avant-garde band Nass El Ghiwane. But it doesn't change pace too much, as this Nass El Ghiwane's music is firmly anti-colonial and the band members' interviews deliver overt...
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Spine 688: Dry Summer
It's becoming increasingly obvious that the World Cinema Project is Martin Scorsese's plot to smuggle openly Marxist films into the Criterion Collection, and Metin Erksan's Dry Summer (1963) continues the trend. Erksan imagines a world where one rich man can enclose those common goods that…
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Spine 687: A River Called Titas
Halfway through the World Cinema Project Vol. 1 boxset and the hits keep coming. This week it's all about the trauma of separation: familial and economic, but also in light of the Partition of India and Bangladeshi independence. Ritwik Ghatak's A River Called Titas (1973) is an intimidating work,...
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Spine 686: Redes
We continue through the World Cinema Project Vol 1 boxset with a 1936 film from Mexico, though with a rather international production crew, that presages Italian neorealism probably. Redes is among the more openly Marxist films the Criterion Collection has shown us, though I have a feeling that's...
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Spine 685: Touki bouki
This week we start the first Martin Scorcese's World Cinema Project boxset, a growing sub-collection - currently at 5 volumes - containing films from regions under-represented from the broader Criterion Collection. Or unrepresented at all elsewise. Volume 1, for instance, contains our first two...
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Spine 683: Nashville
Whew there's a lot to talk about this week: a Robert Altman film with two dozen characters all worth spending time with, interviews with the director across three decades that appear to show a man slowly more willing to believe in Auteur Theory about himself as time passes, and a lot to unpack...
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Spine 682: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
What if all the people in charge were actually criminals, but so insulated by power that no amount of clear evidence could lead to them being investigated? Crazy right? Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) is our only film from Elio Petri in the Criterion Collection, which is...
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Spine 681: Frances Ha
Greta Gerwig's writing and acting in the titular role go a long way to make us like our second Noah Baumbach film much more than our first. While Kicking and Screaming (Spine 329) was a little too Whit Stillman for us - and over half the podcast ago - we found 2012's Frances Ha much more…
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Spine 680: City Lights
Charlie Chaplin's first movie with synced sound (as opposed to his first film to feature onscreen dialogue) is the great silent film star saying no thank you to the concept of synced sound. City Lights is a great first start as we decompress from 24 Zatoichi films and relearn how to do the…
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Spine 679: Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Disc 9
We say goodbye to the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Boxet with film #25: Zatoichi's Conspiracy (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1973), and we end with neither a highlight or lowlight, but a solidly middling entry. It doesn't help that not only are we tired of this, last week's set contained both the best and...
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Spine 679: Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Disc 8
Our penultimate Zatoichi episode brings us one that is possibly the best Zatoichi movie, one that is not quite the most middling of the middle ones, and one that is quite probably the most infuriating movie the Criterion Collection has made us watch so far. Zatoichi and the One Armed Swordsman...
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Spine 679: Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Disc 7
Our itinerant samurai expert Donovan H. joins us for this set of three Zatoichi films, giving us some insight into Ichi's sword fighting style and what some of the movies we won't be watching say about Ichi's blindness. As for what we did watch: Kenji Misumi, who directed the first Zatoichi,...
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Spine 679: Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Disc 6
It's week six our wandering journey through the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman boxset and we get some of our favorites of the bunch. Zatoichi the Outlaw (Satsuo Yamamoto, 1967) is perhaps the most politically interesting of the films so far, introducing us to an teetotaling anarchist samurai...
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Spine 679: Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Disc 5
It is week five of the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, which means we are now halfway through! Fittingly for the halfway point, though how could the filmmakers have known, we get three films in which Zatoichi must refrain from violence (but doesn't). Kazuo Miyagawa is once again behind the camera…
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Spine 679: Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Disc 4
It's week four of nine of our trip through the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman boxset. First up is Zatoichi's Revenge (Akira Inoue, 1965) wherein Ichi faces off against bad guys who are actually maybe too evil for this series. Then it's the mercifully short Zatoichi and the Doomed Man (Kazuo Mori,...
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Spine 679: Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Disc 3
In week three of our boxset endeavor, we cover Zatoichi's Flashing Sword (Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964) which has a series highlight so far Underwater Zatoichi Attack; then Fight, Zatoichi, Fight (Kenji Misumi, 1964) which gives Zatoichi a baby, a phenomenal premise that paves the way for Lone Wolf and…
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Spine 679: Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Disc 2
It's week 2 of the Zatoichi boxset and we get our first taste of what will become a favorite aspect of the films moving forward: Zatoichi versus a corrupt government. That doesn't show up until movie six though, and we've got two others to talk about, too. First up is Zatoichi the Fugitive…
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Spine 679: Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Disc 1
Oh boy. Sometimes the Criterion Collection hears a whiff that there's two guys doing a Spine Number podcast and says to themselves, "What can we do to mess this up?" Normally, within the Collection, and therefore within our podcast, each Spine Number release is a single film (or maybe a couple)…
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Spine 678: La Notte
We kick off 2026 with a Michelangelo Antonioni film which totally bodes well. La Notte (1961) is the second of three or four films about middle class discontents in a rapidly changing world, and the last of the four that Criterion has decided to show us. It also caps off nearly two months of Lost...
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Holiday Special 2025: To Live and Die in L.A.
Every December, during the darkest times of the year in our part of the world, we take a little break from our unending Criterion Quest to gather with friends and watch a film that takes place during the winter holidays that is not at all a holiday movie. We may have found the platonic ideal of...
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Spine 677: The Uninvited
Lewis Allen only gets one film in the Criterion Collection but it's a pretty fun one. The Uninvited (1944) doesn't have great special effects for a haunted house flick, or especially bad ones which can be fun in their own right, but it does have an over-complicated story about family lies, two...
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Spine 676: I Married a Witch
René Clair was an early favorite among the filmmakers this project introduced us to. It was a lifetime ago what we watched Le Million (Spine 72), A Nous la Liberte (Spine 160), and Under the Roofs of Paris (Spine 161) but they have stuck with us. And indeed it seems like Clair had lived a…
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Spine 675: Journey to Italy
The third and final film in the 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman boxset is another film in a long list of looks at the class and culture of Naples, Italy across time - Rossellini's own Paisan, Rosi's Hands over the City (and his Neapolitan Diary), Garrone's Gomorrah, to name…
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Spine 674: Europe '51
The second film in our journey through the Roberto Rossellini Directs Ingrid Bergman boxset doesn't lead either our agnostic or Christian host to denounce the story's conversion narrative like last week's film. Instead, Europe '51 is a tale of a bourgeois woman reacting to tragedy by embracing...
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Spine 673: Stromboli
This week we start 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, a boxset containing three of the five films Rossellini and Bergman made together over the course of their 7 year relationship. We've already seen enough variety from Rossellini, chronologically before and after this set in...
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Spine 671: La Cage aux Folles
Sometimes Criterion shows us a single film from a director we'd never seen before and leaves us wanting for the rest of our project, so often actually that we call them "one and dones". But then sometimes Criterion shows us a movie by Edouard Molinaro and it's fine that they aren't going to show…
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How many episodes does Lost in Criterion have?
Lost in Criterion currently has 726 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Lost in Criterion about?
The Adam Glass and John Patrick Owatari-Dorgan, attempt the sisyphean task of watching every movie in the ever-growing Criterion Collection and talk about them. Want to support us? We’ll love you for it: www.Patreon.com/LostInCriterion
How often does Lost in Criterion release new episodes?
Lost in Criterion releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 726 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
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