I’ve recently been slowly buy surely building a (physical) film collection. Blurays mostly, but a good number of DVD’s too (a sprinkling of VHS as well). A big portion of the blurays I’ve bought this year have been from Criterion. The Criterion Collection is a well known film distributor that I’ve fallen in love with. In 2014 alone I went from 0 to 22 Criterions! as of now (1/24/15), they are:
- 12 Angry Men
- 3:10 to Yuma
- Ace in the Hole
- All that Heaven Allows
- Anatomy of a Murder
- Charade
- City Lights
- Foreign Correspondent
- It Happened One Night
- Jubal
- My Darling Clementine
- The Night of the Hunter
- Pandora’s Box DVD*
- Rashomon
- Red River
- The Red Shoes
- Seven Samurai
- The Shooting/Ride the Whirlwind
- Stagecoach
- Sweet Smell of Success
- To Be or Not To Be
- Trouble in Paradise (DVD)
*=is on it’s way from France.
It’s impossible to rank them as they cover so many genre’s and time periods. But once I reach the 50 mark I will try to do a top ten, to the best of my ability. This is my list from Criterion’s website, it will no doubt grow exponentially over the course of this year…unfortunately for my wallet.
The absolute-to-buy on my list for this year includes: Modern Times, The Palm Beach Story, Throne of Blood, Sullivan’s Travels, Odd Man Out, The Furies (DVD), The Man Who Knew Too Much etc…
Other distributors I like are Olive, MoC and Kino. Grapevine video has a special place in my heart too because they do some pretty cool stuff like releasing the silent serial ‘The Perils of Pauline‘. That serial is literally over one hundred years old. Yeah. That is a hundred kinds of awesome…
Criterion can get pricey so make sure to buy during the sales. Barnes and Noble has bi-yearly sales in July and November (they last a few weeks). The Criterion site has flash sales (that last for 24 hours) in February and September (usually). Makes it easier on the wallet when blurays are $20 or so for one versus $39~ or whatever the SPR is.
Thanks for reading and happy watching 🙂
The Lichee Club 
