The arrival of December means another year has passed, awards season is in full swing, and domestic flights are more expensive. Fortunately, this also means a new series of programs on The Criterion Channel. This month, collections honor films about football, snowy westerns, and more. Let’s look at seven of the best deals.
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It Happens Every Spring (1949)
Available: December 1 | Realized by: Lloyd Bacon
Cast: Ray Milland, Jean Peters, Paul Douglas
One of this month’s collections pays homage to classic wacky comedies. It’s Depression-era twists on the traditional romantic comedy. At the time, they served as counter-programming to the relatively grittier film noir populating American cinemas. They even share surface stylistic qualities. Crisp dialogues, predominantly male casts punctuated by a full, unadorned female lead. It happens every spring is a bit of a high-level slimy comedy. A scientist accidentally – and in a goofy way, you might say – discovers a chemical that repels wood. Excited, he takes the next logical step in his career: pitching for a professional baseball team. No points for guessing that hijinks ensue. They serve as an amusing example of the comedic sensibility of the time and a dignified and early entry into the canon of sports comedy.
Ride to the High Country (1962)
Available: December 1 | Realized by: Sam Peckinpah
Cast: Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Mariette Hartley
Director Sam Peckinpahthe second directing effort of and his classic debut, Ride the High Country is a western. Although it wasn’t released until the early 1960s, it’s a bit of a tribute not only to the genre but to the period it represents. It takes place when the Wild West was colliding with the age of the automobile. His tone is elegiac. With its two veteran lead actors, its energy is nostalgic for the end of an era. It’s about three cowboys hired to escort a pile of gold to its final destination. Those who have attempted the journey without mercenaries were assassinated. Along the way, tension is thrown into the fire in the form of supporting characters with competing agendas, culminating in a shootout no less satisfying to be obligatory. Peckinpah would look more into this kind of violence with his later works (The Wild Band and straw dogsin particular), but High Country is very captivating with what it has, and very poetic to boot.
Available: December 1 | Realized by: Sydney Pollack
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Bill Murray
Before there was RuPaul’s Drag Racethere was Tootsie. It’s a comedy that its star, Dustin Hoffman, suggested it played like a drama. Regardless of genre, it was one of the most culturally influential hallmarks of the 1980s, but without the candor legs that keep other 80s films in the collective consciousness. It’s the story of a struggling actor who, in a fit of desperation, auditions for a female role, featuring as a woman. He gets the job, a regular gig on a soap opera. Deceptions of erroneous identities, genders and intentions then occur. There are a lot of great actors going full throttle here: Hoffman, Jessica Lange (who won an Oscar for his work), Bill Murray, Geena Davis, and Sydney Pollack (who also directed). Apart from performances, Tootsie uses farce (and sincerity) to comment on romance, sex, and the idea of being a “good man.”
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Available: December 1 | Realized by: Robert Altman
Cast: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois
Like the other westerns on this list, McCabe and Mrs. Miller brings mournful poetry while making sure it wouldn’t be a box office hit in its time. Directed and co-written by Robert Altman, it immerses the tropes of its genre in an early 1970s cinematic climate mired in the anxieties of the Vietnam War. It’s not about heroic gunmen posing as prime examples of manhood on the loose and more about opportunism, capitalism and vice. His heroes are of the “anti” variety. In many ways it’s almost impressionistic, with its ambient dialogue, Leonard Cohen Canadian ballads and landscapes on the big screen. It makes great use of competing color palettes and a plot whose machinations seem almost incidental. Promise of the genre, revisionist or not, it ends with a violent shootout, and justice is done to the villains as well as to the anti-heroes.
Marx can wait (2021)
Available: December 5 | Realized by: Marc Bellocchio
Marc Bellocchio is an Italian director who has been making films professionally since 1965, when he was in his twenties. His movies are often thoughtful, unconventional family dramas. Sometimes it’s about crime families or, as is the case with his excellent 2009 Benito Mussolini drama To winthe parents of a child conceived out of wedlock. Marx can wait is a drama about the director’s own family. It differs from his other works in that it is a documentary. Bellocchio grew up with a twin brother, Camillo, who began to suffer from discouragement in his late twenties. Marco tried to bring his brother into the radical politics of Karl Marx and other authoritarian thinkers of the proletariat to distract him from his impotent thoughts. Camillo didn’t take the bait, telling his twin that “Marx can wait”. Shortly after, Camilo died by suicide. This documentary made 50 years after the death of his twin is the story of the spectral grief that grows in the absence of his brother. The director’s siblings attempt to make sense of the tragedy and how it changed the trajectory of their emotional lives. Interspersed with footage from the telegenic Camilo, marx is an exorcism and a tribute. Its sadness is effective and its filmmaking is appropriate.
Available: December 14 | Realized by: Nathalie Alvarez Mesen
Cast: Wendy Chinchilla Araya, Ana Julia Porras Espinoza, Daniel Castaneda Rincon
Costa Rican drama Clara alone is like a magic realist Carrie without bloody prom. There are, of course, many other differences. On the one hand, Clara, our protagonist, is 40 years old. She was born with a curved spine and grew up in a poor village whose inhabitants believe Clara laid eyes on the Virgin Mary. This miraculous testimony gave her a reputation as a spiritual healer and mystic. A reputation played by her very religious mother, whose domineering and condescending presence keeps Clara trapped in a childish state of mind. Prisoner of her own life, in the shapely body that her mother refuses to allow her to operate on to remedy it. The triggering incident is the arrival of Santiago, who occasionally hires the family’s shiny white horse for tours. His presence ignites a sense of want in Clara, which in turn engenders a need to rebel. The film is the story of Clara coming into her power. The striking visuals alone are worth watching, but its sense of magical mystery is what keeps it afloat.
Available: December 21 | Realized by: Lone Scherfig
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike
If a film prize existed, An education probably got nominated for it. He cemented Carey Mulligan as an elite actress and is just another example of why 2008 and 2009 were such great years in film. It’s a coming-of-age story about a suburban girl whose fears include being doomed to a boring life, but also failing in her lofty educational and career goals. She meets a con artist and falls in love with him, just like we do. Thus begins the education of the film’s title. She sees that her new love’s crimes pay off very well, and it turns the story into a whirlwind of moral compromises and pressing romantic developments. An education has things to say about the grief that forces you to grow up, but also about class disparities and gender roles. The kinds of things women in the early 1960s learned they could aspire to and how men were able to use those prescribed limitations to their advantage.
The Best New Movies On The Criterion Channel In December 2022 – CNET