Andrew Sarris

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard ranks among the most scathing satires of Hollywood and the cruel fickleness of movie fandom. Hotly pursued by repo men, impoverished, indebted "boy wonder" screenwriter Joe Gillis ducks into the garage of an apparently abandoned Sunset Boulevard mansion. The owner, imperious silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) inveigles him into helping her with a comeback script that she's been working on for years. Soon the cynical and opportunistic Joe becomes Norma's kept man. More melodramatic than funny, the screenplay by Wilder and Charles Brackett began life as a comedy about a has-been silent movie actress and the ambitious screenwriter who leeches off her.

An entertaining ensemble comedy about the extremes one man goes to circumvent Italian divorce laws, Divorce - Italian Style (Divorzio all'italiana, 1961) was a big hit in Italy as well as on the American art house circuit. Americans were undoubtedly drawn to the scandalous nature and then-steamy sexuality of its script, as well as to its thickly-lacquered Sicilian atmosphere - this is an Italian film full of exaggerated if funny Italian stereotypes. Criterion's supplements work to put the film into sociopolitical context, an important component of the film's and its director's reputation in Italy, but one generally lost on non-Italians.

Films made between 1968-1974 by the radical film collective the Dziga Vertov Group (Groupe Dziga Vertov), most notably including Jean-Luc Godard along with Jean-Pierre Gorin. Their films are defined primarily for Brechtian forms, Marxist ideology, and a lack of personal authorship. The group was dissolved soon after the completion of 1972's Letter to Jane.

Based on J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, tells the story of a boy, James Graham, whose privileged life is upturned by the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, December 8, 1941. Separated from his parents, he is eventually captured, and taken to Soo Chow confinement camp, next to a captured Chinese airfield. Amidst the sickness and food shortages in the camp, Jim attempts to reconstruct his former life, all the while bringing spirit and dignity to those around him.