Holiday Affair is my vote for most underrated classic Christmas film. I mean, I get why it’s overlooked—it’s sort of bonkers, with Robert Mitchum as a department store toy salesman/proto-beatnik, plus the 40s fondness for Freud creeping into some weird Oedipal stuff with the kid. But mostly it’s just delightful…

I get the feeling that Man Who Came to Dinner and and Auntie Mame share a similar issue. They both came from popular plays about prickly characters. Originally there may have been more balance between the central characters and their antagonists, but then the central performance became so dominant that by the time…

Remember the Night is great, and maybe actually benefits from a code-enforced ending that you wouldn’t expect in any other era (maybe benefits cause it depends on how much you want a straight happy or a melancholy ending to your holiday fare). I can’t stand The Man Who Came to Dinner though. Woolley’s the worst human…

I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953)

“imperialnrussia not being historically associated with strong cavalry”

Yeah, Kiss Me, Stupid is another good example of a sour Wilder. I can tolerate it because it has some good jokes and Novak and (especially) Farr almost make the women work (and it’s reputation isn’t inflated, unlike Some Like It Hot). But it really feels like Wilder is going “I’m just saying... most guys would sell…

I used to feel the same way, but I’ve grown a bit on Wilder as I’ve seen more of his films. I like him best when he shows how characters are trapped in some greater system, which explains their selfish or cruel actions: The Apartment (corporate patriarchy), Sunset Blvd (Hollywood), Avanti (American social moors),…

His Shakespeare adaptations. Love’s Labour’s Lost and As You Like It are extremely underrated. Dead Again is also good. Peter’s Friends is a British, gen-x version of The Big Chill with a great cast (Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Imelda Staunton), which makes it insufferable but somehow very watchable.
 
And…

Yeah, Criterion does a weird thing where you have to click on a “collection” and then the video. The upside is that the collection also shows bonus features like intros, interviews, and commentaries when available.

As far as I can tell, the films streaming free are the ones on the highlighted in the top banner on the “Now Playing” site: https://www.criterionchannel.com/browse

I mean, the film ruining May’s career is industry bias against female directors, sure, but the film’s bad reception owes a lot more to critics having their knives out for Warren Beatty.

Superman was released in December 1978, so it made most of its money in 1979 but is still usually considered a 1978 film. Likewise, Kramer vs. Kramer was released in December 1979 and made most of its money in 1980.

Agreed. Godard’s 64-66 work, more than the commonly criticized early stuff, is easily his most misogynistic period: Masculin Feminin, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Une Femme Mariée, and especially his shorts in this period. His usual male/female dichotomy increasingly portrays women as vapid, image-obsessed symbols…

It’s to Godard’s credit that, despite his overt misogyny, his female characters feel like “subjects” responding to the director’s/camera’s gaze rather than passive “objects.” There’s a sense that, even though Godard sees women as some mysterious “other,” he’s making an honest effort at trying to understand them as…

The Denzel Magnificent Seven remake is basically The Bernie Bros Movie, and opens with an evil mining magnate sneering out lines like “This country has long equated democracy with capitalism, and capitalism with God. So you’re standing not only in the way of progress and capital, you’re standing in the way of God!”…

I think there’s a decent number of people who think “Edelweiss” is the Austrian national anthem, so I can imagine there’s some slight resentment due to that.

I also remember being scared as a kid, but mainly because I had no clue what was going on in those scenes. VHS did not do any favors to night scenes.

I remember the Nazi stuff really confusing me when I saw this as a kid (maybe 6 or 7?). I think I knew that Nazis had done terrible things and that the swastika was their symbol, but had no clue what Austria was as a geopolitical entity and no idea why people were happy the Nazis were showing up there.

That’s Paint Your Wagons, not Cat Ballou. Lee Marvin is also still pretty drunk and violent in Cat Ballou, just to further differentiate.

The World is probably the easiest entry point for its hook: a theme park in Beijing full of replicas of famous world landmarks, staffed by workers who have never left China. Plenty of the surreal-in-the-real long takes Jia made his early name on, and not too much knowledge of China needed: rapid change, globalization…