Criterion Top Ten Lists

Mike Allred Comic-book rock star Mike Allred is best known as the creator of Madman, Red Rocket 7, and The Atomics. He may also be familiar to Criterion viewers from his illustrations for Seduced and Abandoned and Chasing Amy. Allred: "My list was determined mostly by ranking my top ten favorite films that Criterion offers—though the packaging at times may have subtly influenced my choice in moving a film up or down!"

Allison Anders "Wow, this assignment kicked my ass in a glorious way!" said Anders. "As with everyone before me, picking just ten Criterion classics is too daunting; so you have to find a system that allows you to play a favorite game, all the while knowing there are others you have left out that you love as much but maybe have less original things to say about." Allison Anders is the codirector of Border Radio and has also directed five other feature films, including Gas Food Lodging, Mi vida loca, and Grace of My Heart.

Ramin Bahrani Writer-director Ramin Bahrani’s first two feature films, Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2007) have won awards and acclaim all over the world, from Venice to Cannes to the U.S. Chop Shop also won Bahrani the Someone to Watch Independent Spirit Award in 2008. Bahrani is currently in postproduction on his third feature, Goodbye Solo.

Michael Barker Michael Barker and his copresidents at Sony Pictures Classics, Tom Bernard and Marcie Bloom, have brought out some of the best and most successful independent and international films of the last two decades, from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and House of Flying Daggers to Saraband, Capote, and Cache. Michael has also been an invaluable friend and supporter of Criterion, offering advice and suggestions, and occasionally helping us to secure the participation of some of the many filmmakers whose respect and admiration he has earned.

Steve Buscemi Buscemi’s latest directorial effort, Interview, an adaptation of the 2003 film of the same name by the controversial Dutch director Theo van Gogh, was released by Sony Classics in New York and L.A. in July 2007.

Jane Campion In honor of her introduction to the collection, with An Angel at My Table, we asked director Jane Campion to contribute a list of Criterion films that are on her mind at the moment. Campion's debut feature, Sweetie, is also available from Criterion.

Diablo Cody Diablo Cody is the author of Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, and the Academy Award–winning screenwriter of Juno.

Stuart Cooper "I have chosen ten titles from the Criterion Collection not because they are my favorites or necessarily the most important, but because they mean a lot to me personally and bear some relationship to my filmmaking career and the making of Overlord. My list is in no particular order," says British filmmaker Stuart Cooper.

Peter Cowie Peter Cowie has provided commentaries for around a dozen Criterion titles. His latest book, Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever, is available from Rizzoli.

Matt Dentler Matt Dentler is the producer of the South by Southwest Film Conference & Festival, in Austin, Texas (sxsw.com), as well as a curator for American distributor Film Movement and Canadian distributor Films We Like. He also hosts the weekly local PBS series SXSW Presents. In its summer 2006 issue, MovieMaker named him one of the 25 Coolest People to Know in Indie Film, an honor with which his girlfriend disagrees.

Gary Giddins In honor of his participation in our release of Louis Malle's jazzy noir classic Elevator to the Gallows, we invited music critic Gary Giddins to contribute a list of his ten favorite Criterion films.

Bruce Goldstein Recipient of a special New York Film Critics Circle award for visionary programming, Bruce Goldstein is the Repertory Program Director of New York's Film Forum, for which he has created more than 350 film festivals and spearheaded the rereleases of more than one thousand classic films, all in new 35 mm prints. In 1997, he founded Rialto Pictures, a distribution company specializing in classic rereleases. Because few have done more for classic film than Goldstein, we asked him to pick his ten favorite non-Rialto Criterion titles.

Jean-Pierre Gorin Writer and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin collaborated for many years with Jean-Luc Godard, on the Dziga Vertov Group films as well as Tout va bien. He also made three popular films, Poto and Cabengo, Routine Pleasure, and My Crasy Life.

David Hudson David Hudson lives in Berlin and translated screenplays until his blog, GreenCine Daily, swallowed him whole.

Rian Johnson We asked director Rian Johnson, whose "high school noir" Brick was one of the most acclaimed films of 2006, what his favorite Criterion releases were. Johnson wrote to us: "I'm a huge Criterion fan, like most filmmakers you work with, I'm sure. My first exposure to many of my favorite films came from Criterion laserdiscs back in college, and today I seriously follow your new releases the way most people follow bands."

Frank Kozik Credited with single-handedly reviving the lost art of the concert poster, Frank Kozik credits his career to his enthusiasm for Austin, Texas's growing underground rock scene in the mid-eighties. Find out more, at frankkozik.net and fkozik.com. In addition to the poster included with Dazed and Confused, Kozik also designed Criterion's cover art for Gimme Shelter.

Neil LaBute Neil LaBute, director of In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, and Nurse Betty, has contributed supplemental interviews to two Criterion DVD editions: Mike Leigh's Naked and Eric Rohmer's Love in the Afternoon, the latter available in our deluxe box-set edition of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales.

Christa Lang-Fuller Author and actor Christa Lang-Fuller married director Samuel Fuller in 1967. In 1981, they founded Chrisam Films, which Lang-Fuller has continued to run since her husband’s death, in 1997. She coedited Fuller’s autobiography, A Third Face, for Random House and is currently writing a new book and working on two screenplays.

Dennis Lehane Dennis Lehane is best known for his novel Mystic River, made into the acclaimed film by Clint Eastwood. When we discovered his love for Criterion, we asked him to write for us, and he did, contributing a terrific essay to our rerelease of The Wages of Fear.

Jonathan Lethem Winner of a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program genius grant, Jonathan Lethem is one of America's premier contemporary writers. His works include the novels Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, as well as a vast array of short stories and essays. He has also contributed essays to the Criterion releases of Robert Siodmak's The Killers, Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours, and the John Cassavetes: Five Films box set.

Richard Linklater Richard Linklater, whose groundbreaking Slacker we released in 2004, and whose Dazed and Confused we released in 2006, offers up his list of favorite Criterion DVDs. About his "ever-changing but current top ten," Linklater says, "I've been revisiting spirit-and-the-flesh titles, with a little comedy mixed in."

John Lurie John Lurie, whose band, the Lounge Lizards, was one of the most acclaimed jazz groups of the eighties and nineties, has recorded twenty-two albums and has acted in several films, including Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Lurie also wrote, directed, and starred in the television series Fishing with John, which was shown on IFC and Bravo. For the last four years, he has been concentrating primarily on his painting, which can be seen at strangeandbeautiful.com.

Kevin Macdonald Kevin Macdonald is the grandson of the filmmaker Emeric Pressburger (A Canterbury Tale, The Red Shoes). Macdonald's directorial credits include 2000's Academy Award–winning One Day in September, about the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and 2003's Touching the Void, which tells the story of two climbers' disastrous attempt to scale the Siula Grande, in the Andes, in 1985, and 2006's The Last King of Scotland, for which Forest Whitaker won a Best Actor Oscar.

Guy Maddin Canadian filmmaker and writer Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, featuring Isabella Rossellini as the narrator, made its U.S. debut on October 15, 2006 at the New York Film Festival. Maddin also contributed an essay on Kirk Douglas for our release of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole.

Patton Oswalt Patton Oswalt is a stand-up comic, the instigator of the Comedians of Comedy tour, and voice star of Pixar's Ratatouille. He wrote an appreciation of Allen Baron's film Blast of Silence in Sean Phillips's comic book Criminal (Phillips did the artwork for the Criterion edition). His next project is the independent film Big Fan, in which he has his first lead role.

D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus Filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker (Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop, The War Room) and Chris Hegedus (The War Room, Startup.com), creative partners and husband and wife, offer these favorites.

Bill Plympton Cartoonist, filmmaker, and animator Bill Plympton, whose illustrations have appeared in the pages of the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Vanity Fair, and whose short films became famous on MTV in the eighties, directed the documentary Walt Curtis: The Peckerneck Poet, featured on Criterion’s recent DVD release of Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche.

Rodarte Fashion designers from Pasadena, California, sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, together named Rodarte after their mother’s maiden name, first showed their clothing line during fashion week in spring 2005. Criterion asked the sisters, who’ve since become fixtures of the New York fashion world and whose clothes have been inspired by films in the Criterion Collection (from Late Spring to The Double Life of Véronique) to pick their ten favorite Criterion releases, and they happily obliged.

Nicolas Roeg "Oh! What have you done to me? What an impossible task. To pick ten titles from the Criterion Collection is difficult enough, but to put them in any kind of order would defeat Ockham's sharpest razor," exclaimed Nicolas Roeg, director of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, and Walkabout, all available from the Criterion Collection.

Tom Schnabel Music director at Los Angeles’s KCRW radio station, Tom Schnabel started the daily program Morning Becomes Eclectic in the 1980s, first bringing world music to U.S. radio with such artists as Buena Vista Social Club, Ravi Shankar, and Caetano Veloso. Schnabel is also currently the program adviser for the Hollywood Bowl and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

David Schwartz David Schwartz is the chief curator at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image.

Leanne Shapton An artist, art director, illustrator, and publisher based in New York City, Leanne Shapton designed the covers of the Criterion releases Kicking and Screaming and Cría cuervos . . . , and is the author of Was She Pretty?

Adam Yauch Adam Yauch is a founding member of the Beastie Boys. Recently he created a new division of his company Oscilloscope Laboratories called Oscilloscope Pictures (oscilloscopepictures.com) for the sole purpose of distributing films. He even hired two guys from ThinkFilm to come over to his new company. At first we were a little concerned that Adam intended to compete with Criterion, but then we thought it over and, honestly, we have been doing this for a long time and are not threatened by Adam’s new company. The groundbreaking DVD The Beastie Boys Video Anthology is currently available from the Criterion Collection. So right there that proves we have the upper hand.