As we enter the summer of uncertainty with how the world will rebuild after the pandemic, Criterion has continued its release of more classic films for the closet. If you’re a charter subscriber to the Criterion Channel or a regular buyer from Criterion.com, then you should have gotten an email giving a $10 discount on any online purchases. I used mine for The Great Escape. Here are some of June releases you can consider giving a buy with.

The Camerman (1928)

Buster Keaton was still dueling it out with Charlie Chaplin in who was the funniest on the silent screen when talkies made its introduction to the movies. In what was the last great film from Keaton, and in his first film of a deal with MGM (which Keaton called “the worst mistake of my career,” Keaton plays a portrait photographer who falls for a secretary and rivals another cameraman for her heart. The photographer, a novice with a movie camera instead of a still, goes out to areas where things are happening and has some mishaps, even though the secretary clearly is helping him get the scoop because she likes him back. Keaton constantly fought with MGM executives over control of the production, having 22 different writers assigned to help make the script which Keaton threw out all the time. A fire in the MGM vault was thought to have destroyed the negative, but a print was found in Paris and went under restoration to preseve the movie’s charm.

Tokyo Olympiad (1965)

This was the right time for its release because of the Olympics returning to Tokyo this year, but COVID-19 pushed it back a year and rightfully so. It’s never too early to start watching these incredible documentaries about the Games and Kon Ichikawa’s montage of the 1964 Summer Olympics is one of the greatest about sports in history. Because of Akira Kurosawa’s controlling nature, the committee opted to go with Ichikawa, who didn’t just shoot cameras filming the events, but assembled a rhythm of athletic achievement on the players themselves instead of a blanket covering of everything that happened. The link here is a two-hour version from the Olympics’ YouTube page, but Criterion and the Channel has Ichikawa’s full 2:52 minute version.

An Unmarried Woman (1978)

Paul Mazursky’s feminist-driven dramedy follows a recently divorced woman, played by Jill Clayburgh, who received an Oscar nomination for her performance, as she rebuilds her new life as a single woman by addressing everything that was changing of the time: a woman’s place in the world, older men seeking younger women, sex, and bouncing back from adversity. It is about liberation founded as the 1970s altered society, making things permanent and continuing to progress from hereon. Besides Clayburgh’s nod, the film was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture.

Come And See (1985)

Rome Open City. Kanal. The Bridge. Saving Private Ryan. The Thin Red Line. These are some of the greatest European Front World War II movies ever made in the world. Add this Russian shocker to it, one that rattles viewers to the core and doesn’t just end innocence, it burns it into ashes. Director Elem Klimov said he stopped making movies after this because there was nothing else he wanted to say, especially after his wife’s sudden death. The title comes from The Book of Revelation in the Bible, and its passage is exactly what you will witness. An apocalypse only the Russian front could not have foreseen or have imagined, especially if you’re a boy.

Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019)

Yup. We’re already getting the treatment to such an underappreciated film, but if you’re Neon, and you have Parasite, any other year, this would be the one getting awards recognition. Céline Sciamma made this forbidden love affair such an intoxicating follow for men & women, gay and straight, courtesy of Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel giving such moving performances that may have been too moving for the Cesar Awards, so they just awarded Roman Polanski again, pissing off everyone, and leading Sciamma and the ladies to walk out in protest. When production begins again after this virus subsides, American cinema should take note and hire Sciamma to do something to revive what will be a nearly bankrupt industry.

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It is the 50th anniversary of an amazing biopic of a legend in war, leadership, and cantankerous behavior. With the story of General George S. Patton, leader of the Seventh Army in North Africa and Italy and of the Third Army in France and Germany, it was hard to not make his life into a movie. With the stellar George C. Scott in the titular role and Karl Malden as General Omar Bradley, director Franklin J. Schaffner cultivated the iconic character of a man who was larger than life and made his views and ambition so obvious that even the Army thought he was too much. All one has to do is watch the opening monologue of him standing in front of a massive American flag and give his legendary speech to the Third Army in 1944 before the invasion of France.

The script was written by Edmund North and Francis Ford Coppola, the latter who was about to shoot The Godfather, but Paramount had little faith in him until he and North won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Patton’s family declined to help, so the script was written from multiple books about Patton, including a biography from Gen. Omar Bradley, who was still alive and consulted with the production. Some who knew Patton argued that Bradley’s input made Patton look too cartoonish (the two Generals disliked each other) and that it was a character study more than a true biopic. Most of the film was shot in Spain with some location shooting in England, Morrocco, and Belgium.

Compared to other World War II films, it is about the person and not the action upfront. It’s about the moments of genius, such as his march up from Sicily to the mainland, being the first to get to the key city of Messina, which is portrayed as a race of which side would get there first. It’s also about moments of madness, such as him slapping shell shocked soldiers which Patton considered as being cowards instead. Patton was stubborn and profane, not afraid to tell off someone as he does in the scene by calling his Soviet counterparts, “sons of bitches.” Ego is very much high in how Patton is portrayed like a wild cowboy who believed only he could muster the support for a full tackle of the Nazi plan, such as his leadership in The Battle of the Bulge. And George C. Scott could not have made it more articulate as, “Old Blood and Guts.”

It was no surprise it won 7 of its 10 Oscar nominations, including Picture, Director, Actor, and Original Screenplay. It was also no surprise that George C. Scott turned down his Oscar, having once declined his nomination for The Hustler. He stated that he hated the voting process and how studios advertised to voters, in which Scott described it as, “a goddamn meat parade.” He was in New York shooting The Hospital with his wife and watched a hockey game rather than the Oscar telecast and the Oscar was accepted by Director Schaffner. Where the statue is, no one knows. It’s possible with his estate, but it also could be with the George C. Marshall Foundation, which was given the Best Picture statue weeks after winning. But Scott would return to play the General in The Last Days of Patton in 1986, which focused on his last weeks alive following the car accident in which he suffered injuries that would be fatal.

It’s still a massively impressive film and one that raises the stature of the great General Patton and his Army. He is one of the most controversial figures in American military history but remains an icon for his defense of his men and his tenacity to boost morale for the push. Even if he rubbed people the wrong way with his vocabulary and temper, Patton’s story has been memorialized by the film and cemented George C. Scott’s status as a true American acting ace of his generation.

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Seeing a movie like Casino (1995), 21 (2008), or Uncut Gems (2019) does bring the attraction of what people will do when it comes to placing a bet on a card, a ball, or the spin of a wheel. Even if we don’t gamble, it becomes fascinating when you read into the lives of professional gamblers and those who know the backstories to how it was once run (Vegas was first ruled by mobsters) and how they are played today. Thanks to the cinema, these stories put to light some of the intrigue, backstabbing, passion, and risk that is enwrapped in the gambling lifestyle.

Gilda (1946)

Rita Hayworth made her mark permanent in the titular role, the center of a love triangle including her husband, the wealthy casino operator Ballin (George Macready), and the small-time gambler Johnny (Glenn Ford), who is hired by Ballin to overlook his illegal casino operation. Hidden in Argentina and away from the war, conflict comes with Ballin’s dealings and the obvious love between Johnny and Gilda, who makes her first appearance by coming up from below the frame and throwing her hair back. It’s a film noir with sex appeal and Hayworth’s rendition of “Put The Blame On Mame,” while wearing a strapless black dress is an iconic moment in film noir.

Bob Le Flambeur (1956)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s gangster film follows an ex-con who has spent his past twenty years of freedom being a professional gambler, but by this time, he is broke. Breaking his streak of being straight, Bob and his friend, a croupier in a casino, plan a heist to raid the casino’s safe of its millions of francs. Even with the team hired and the plans set, things begin to crumble within the party, but Bob suddenly finds himself suddenly on a lucky streak. Melville would start his niche of gangster flicks in his career and focusing more on the thievery, but Flambeur is one of his more merciful films towards his protagonist with its ironic twist of luck. Co-star Daniel Couchy is here in this documentary talking about the film; put on the CC and you can see it in English.

Bay Of Angels (1963)

In his second film before turning to color with his romantic approach, Jacques Demy covers the opposite direction from Flambeur’s starting point. A young man wins big at roulette, travels to Nice, and meets a woman who is an addict to gambling, even preferring it over love. It is a thrill, win or lose, but it empties the woman’s soul and tests the man’s attraction to helping her. They are the sole subjects of the movie and it is their emotions that drive the story rather than the results at the table, which is reflective of how a lifestyle can suddenly become a toxic mental state. So, here’s a PSA to say if you or someone you know as a gambling problem, there is help for that.

Hard Eight (1996)

What a great film for Paul Thomas Anderson to make his debut with. With the reliable Phillip Baker Hall as Sydney, John C. Reilly as his protege, Gwenyth Paltrow as a cocktail waitress attracted to the protege and Samuel L. Jackson as a sketchy security specialist at a casino who finds out he has a connection to Sydney. It’s a short PTA film, only Punch Drunk Love is shorter, but it captures the same feeling, the same jazzy mood Anderson always puts into his work. The film’s title comes from a great scene in where Sydent places a big bet during a game of craps against a cocky gambler, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and wins by rolling a double four.

Owning Mahowny/The Cooler (2003)

Two films the same year sent us in the casino in different time periods bringing in sudden romance and the pitfalls of owning your life to enforcers of the casino and the law. First, there is the true story of Owning Mahowny, a fictional version about a bank employee from Toronto in the early 1980s who embezzles millions of dollars to fuel his gambling habit in Atlantic City. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the trustworthy assistant bank manager who hides his problem, even from his girlfriend, played by Minnie Driver.

In The Cooler, William H. Macy plays a casino employee whose personal string of bad luck makes him perfect to stand at tables to cause bad luck for the players. In his case, the man has no sex life and is indebted to a ruthless casino boss (Alec Baldwin in an Oscar-nominated performance) because his own gambling debts were paid off by the boss. But luck seems to change when he falls for a waitress, played by Maria Bello. Both great indies from a simpler time around the same hostile environment.

Follow me on Twitter: @brian_cine (Cine-A-Man)

Here we are into May and still listening to the orders to stay-at-home. My home state of Florida is among the worst hit, so I kept on going up and down the platforms getting into new stuff. After all, it’s not just the Criterion Channel, even though there are some movies up here anyway. As we are erroneously told to drink and inject disinfectants, see protestors want their “freedom” back, and get used to the fact that this is a normal right out of Contagion we have to accept, the feast for my eyes, now constantly strained by watching the screen for a long time, still gives me pleasure and recommendations for what we can do to shave off boredom stuck in our homes. On the second month of lockdown, COVID-19 gave to me:

Shaft (1971; Criterion Channel)

I had never seen the original although Isaac Hayes’ Oscar-winning music was a cultural piece of Blaxploitation. Ernest Tidyman, a white man who would win his own Oscar for the script to The French Connection, wrote the original novel before he adapted to the screen with Gordon Parks as director. It shows masculinity through violence as the private detective works to rescue the daughter of a Black gangster who has been kidnapped by the Italian mob. In context, the film encompasses the post-Civil Rights Movement feelings of being excluded in certain areas, so the black community had to make it in their way, and showed Black men as strong as whites, even with its misogynist tinglings.

Jesus of Nazareth (1977; Amazon Prime)

Being the bad Catholic that I am, I had to see one movie of faith for Easter and it was Franco Zefferrelli’s three-part miniseries that I found to be feasible since I had not seen it, but was aware of the all-star cast it had. But even with the major names of Anne Bancroft, James Earl Jones, Ernest Borgnine, Stacy Keach, Ian McShane, Lawrence Olivier, Claudia Cardinale, and more, it is Robert Powell in the titular role that gives the life of the forenamed son of God a presence that glows from the start and evens up with the acting legends he stands beside. I actually prefer Powell’s Jesus than Jim Caviezel’s Jesus. It is an epic worthy of its 382 minutes running time.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987; YouTube)

It is not Superstar, based on the SNL skit featuring Molly Shannon. It is an illegal short film by Todd Haynes that has been a cult film because of its legal status. Before becoming a major director with movies like Safe, Far From Heaven, and Carol, Haynes was in New York working with his long-time producer, Christine Vachon, on various short works to build up the finding and credibility to move onto larger projects. Like Karen Carpenter, he was from Southern California, and his interest in following women in tragic circumstances started here with the singer’s untimely death from anorexia. First off, Hayes mainly uses Barbie dolls – yes, Barbie dolls – to represent the characters and intercuts with archive footage of their performances. Synthesizer sounds come in during scenes of duress, the documentary feel of the movie gets broken with sudden flashes, and inserted in are brief scenes of spanking. Why? No explanation. Just Haynes fucking with us? Maybe.

However, adding to its cult status was that Carpenter’s brother successfully sued Haynes for copyright infringement because of the unauthorized use of their songs. Thus, many copies of the film were taken away for destruction, but one good copy is with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who agree to never show it to avoid being sued. I say “good” because the bootlegs survive in its rough videotape quality that can be seen on YouTube. No, seriously. This is a link right here and, by the time this piece is released, maybe it is taken down, but if not, enjoy this act of illegal viewing and civil disobedience about a truly tragic figure in music.

Dead Ringers (1988; Amazon Prime)

I could never find online or on DVD David Cronenberg’s acclaimed psychological thriller, but after stumbling across it on, “The Prime,” it turned out to be a magnificent vintage Cronenberg film and maybe his best of the 1980s. Jeremy Irons plays identical twins, Elliot and Beverly, both are gynecologists with a successful practice that share the same seduced women without revealing who is who, but then find their equilibrium splitting when one develops an attachment to a patient and becomes addicted to painkillers. As the other twin helps, the two go into a spin that ends in Cronenberg’s usual macabre finish. The body horror genre is his touch and he makes it beautiful, now going into another area that scrambles the mind of what can be made out of it. When Irons won his Best Actor Oscar for Reversal of Fortune just a couple of years later, he thanked Cronenberg.

Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters (1985; Criterion Channel)

Paul Schrader said what Taxi Driver was to him as a writer, this imaginative retelling of Japanese author Yukio Mishima is to him as a director. That is they are best works on both sides and it does act up as just a regular biopic. Using Mishima’s novels to build up his life and his conversion to ultranationalism, Schrader and his brother, Leonard (who co-wrote the script) make Mishima a man of conflicting ideals, a highly masculine man who saw Japan as weak and ashamed of its roots while also acknowledging his discreet homosexuality, something followers of Mishima has denied and kept the movie from being released in Japan. Above, Schrader talks about why he was interested in Mishima, as well as the legacy of Taxi Driver a decade after its release.

Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020; Netflix/Pop TV)

Right as this show came to a close, I started to watch the series from the start. While I’m not into the Christopher Guest/Eugene Levy films, as familiar as I was into Levy and his common co-star, Catherine O’Hara, I wasn’t if I’d follow it. But Eugene and his son, Dan, made cross-border magic both Americans and Canadians can share its love for. We’d probably have no sympathy for the spoiled kind we see on TV to lose it all without warning, as it happened to the Rose family, but to be reduced to living in an old, creepy motel in a small town with its funny name (like the real-life town Fucking, Austria – pronounced ‘fooking’) and even a more odd entrance poster is where comic gold comes from. And my favorite character of all of this is the motel’s owner/desk manager, Stevie. Watch the series, people.

Unorthodox (2020; Netflix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zVhRId0BTw

Loosely based on the memoir by Deborah Feldman, it’s an emotional journey because of the radical break from fundamental Judaism into a new country, a new language, and an entirely liberating lifestyle. A teenage woman in an arranged marriage living in the ultra-Orthodox section of Brooklyn where Yiddish is the main language before English runs away and flies to Germany where her mother, who also fled the community, lives in. As she makes friends and experiences things never seen in her old neighborhood, her husband comes down to find her and bring her back. It’s only four episodes, but without making anyone the villain, they push out the intimate feelings and deep conflicts a religion can have for any individual born within it.

Follow me on Twitter: @brian_cine (Cine-A-Man)