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In the opening scene of the 1957 western The Tall T, a man on horseback is spotted from afar by a boy and his father, prompting the elder homesteader to fetch his rifle. The audience shares their uncertainty, seeing this figure through a telephoto lens from a great distance, but when the stranger gets closer to the ranch, he’s recognized by the boy as an ally.

It’s the film’s hero, Pat Brennan (Randolph Scott), a fellow rancher, and the gun is therefore set aside. The Tall T is the first in a series of westerns grouped under the name Ranown (after producer Harry Joe Brown and Scott’s production company) that director Budd Boetticher made in the late ’50s and concluded with the release of Comanche Station in 1960, and in this inaugural scene, Boetticher establishes a crucial theme and visual pattern of this spiritually unified set of potboilers.

How many movies are roundly better than Martin Scorsese’s After Hours? Whatever the number (seriously: six?) it is now surely among the greatest in the Criterion Collection, which will add a 4K Uhd edition in July––sufficiently packed with features, among them a new interview between Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz, who I assume will expand on her main talking point (New York used to be different). Breathless, as established a title as they have, is also getting an upgrade that fortunately retains all features from their earlier release, while Carl Franklin’s One False Move scores 2,160 pixels.

But the most purely sizable July offering is their Budd Boetticher 4K Uhd set, Criterion’s first such, boasting five films: The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station. Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman “only” getting Blu-ray seems small in comparison, but few restorations from...

Next month’s lineup at The Criterion Channel has been unveiled, featuring no shortage of excellent offerings. Leading the pack is a massive, 20-film retrospective dedicated to John Huston, featuring a mix of greatest and lesser-appreciated works, including Fat City, The Dead, Wise Blood, The Man Who Would Be King, and Key Largo. (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre will join the series on October 1.)

Also in the lineup is series on the works of Budd Boetticher (specifically his Randolph Scott-starring Ranown westerns), Ephraim Asili, Josephine Baker, Nikos Papatakis, Jean Harlow, Lee Isaac Chung (pre-Minari), Mani Kaul, and Michelle Parkerson.

The sparkling new restoration of La Piscine will also debut, along with Amores perros, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth, Cate Shortland’s Lore, both Oxhide films, Moonstruck, and much more.

See the full list of August titles below and more on The Criterion Channel.

Abigail Harm,...

Cinema is a kind of uber-art form that’s made up of a multitude of other forms of art including writing, directing, acting, drawing, design, photography and fashion. As such, film is, as all cinema aficionados know, a highly collaborative venture.

One of the most consistently fascinating collaborations in cinema is that of the director and actor.

This article will examine some of the great director & actor teams. It’s important to note that this piece is not intended as a film history survey detailing all the generally revered collaborations.

There is a wealth of information and study available on such duos as John Ford & John Wayne, Howard Hawks & John Wayne, Elia Kazan & Marlon Brando, Akira Kurosawa & Toshiro Mifune, Alfred Hitchcock & James Stewart, Ingmar Bergman & Max Von Sydow, Federico Fellini & Giulietta Masina/Marcello Mastroianni, Billy Wilder & Jack Lemmon, Francis Ford Coppola & Al Pacino, Woody Allen & Diane Keaton, Martin Scorsese & Robert DeNiro...

The “adult” Western – as it would come to be called – was a long time coming. A Hollywood staple since the days of The Great Train Robbery (1903), the Western offered spectacle and action set against the uniquely American milieu of the Old West – a historical period which, at the dawn of the motion picture industry, was still fresh in the nation’s memory. What the genre rarely offered was dramatic substance.

Early Westerns often adopted the same traditions of the popular Wild West literature and dime novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries producing, as a consequence, highly romantic, almost purely mythic portraits the Old West. Through the early decades of the motion picture industry, the genre went through several creative cycles, alternately tilting from fanciful to realistic and back again. By the early sound era, and despite such serious efforts as The Big Trail (1930) and The Virginian (1929), Hollywood Westerns were,...

From award-winning writer Steven Peros, author of the play and screenplay for The Cat.s Meow (directed by Peter Bogdanovich) and twice-published Samuel French playwright, comes Footprints, a haunting, hopeful and unforgettable mystery. The film chronicles a young woman.s journey of discovery in one day, from sunrise to sunset.

Sybil Temtchine (Ten Benny, Passion of Ayn Rand) stars as a young woman who wakes up at dawn on the footprints and handprints of the famed Grauman.s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood with no idea who she or how she got there.  Upon awakening, she wonders if she isn.t, in fact, lost in a dream.  And perhaps she is.

Regardless of whether she is dreaming or wide awake, Our Gal sets off on her journey, from one person to the next, one famous locale after the other. Among the Hollywood fringe denizens with whom she comes into contact are...

With on-demand and digital options threatening to make physical discs obsolete and the extremely impressive Blu-Ray format currently doing little but reissuing favorites from studios' increasingly picked-over vaults, the golden age of DVDs might be over. But we still easily found 10 items that make the format seem far from dead. 1. The Films Of Budd Boetticher (Columbia) Practically since the invention of the DVD, fans of classic westerns have been clamoring for the release of the seven films director Budd Boetticher made with star Randolph Scott between 1956 and 1960. In 2006, Paramount released a nice edition of the first film in the series, 7 Men From Now, and this year Columbia followed suit with the five in their vaults: Buchanan Rides Alone, Comanche Station, Decision At Sundown, and the two masterpieces Ride Lonesome and The Tall T. The set adds a superb feature-length documentary about...