"Imagery so lush and intense, matched with the most beautiful Morricone score, make this Malick film—found and made in the editing room—a breathtaking ninety-four-minute montage of early twentieth-century rural life that remains unsurpassed as an example of a searching New Hollywood mastery."

"Is there a greater, more suggestive and bittersweet movie title than All That Heaven Allows? (Well, yes, there is, Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . , but that’s another story and another great Criterion disc.) Sirk dug beneath the surface of idyllic American small-town life in the 1950s, and the surface has never been more beautiful than in this Technicolor nightmare of conformity and the repressive nature of community and family life. It’s Freud vs. Walden, as pettiness, jealousy, and repression pair off against a bohemian vision of rural tranquility. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose brilliant essay on Sirk is included as an extra, remade the movie as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and it was also the model for Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven and Sanaa Hamri’s not-too-shabby Something New."

"A shocking parable for authoritarian populism. There’s nothing else like Canoa. Although Cazals and cinematographer Álex Phillips Jr. use only static shots, the movie is structurally fleet, shuffling chronology and cycling between faux-documentary, historical re-creation, and purely dramatic modes. I can’t think of anything else that so successfully fuses dyed-in-the-wool radical filmmaking and horror. There’s a wry on-screen narrator who creates this Brechtian distancing effect and manages to sound sinister while providing facts and statistics about life in rural communities, and by the end we’re in something like the Jonestown machete massacre. Ostensibly less outré yet harder to swallow than Salò, this is an unsettling, essential gem."