13 Important Lessons This Year’s Movies Can Learn From the Criterion Collection

The Criterion Collection is an ever-expanding accumulation of canonical works of cinema. Yet Criterion’s selections don’t only represent deliberate attempts to construct a pristine archive from cinema’s past, but also force a conversation with cinema’s present. These releases (and the cult of anticipation that develops around them) produces a distinctive contrast between the best of cinema history against the spoils of the current moment. And while 2013 did introduce us to some very good films (three of which made it into the Collection), the best selections of cinema’s past always have a lot of instructive lessons to offer the smorgasbord of cinema’s present. So here are some useful pieces of advice that we think current filmmaking should take from this year’s crop of Criterion releases. High Concept Isn’t the Same Thing as Mainstream With bloating budgets and the globalization of the American film market, mainstream domestic movies are getting more stale and homogeneous. Contemporary American movies should inject a healthy dose of weirdness, irreverence, and perhaps even socio-political critique along the way. Alex Cox’s Repo Man shows what can happen if you look at big city alien invasion movies from a canted angle. A cult hit with a killer soundtrack and perhaps the funniest death scene ever realized in an American movie, Repo Man is the best work of West Coast punk cinema (a surprisingly expansive subgenre) and a not-so-gentle reminder of how often current movies have sacrificed unhinged fun in favor of surgical safeness. By Repo Man’s standards, the […]



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