July 2025 on the Criterion Channel: Dylan, Foxx, the Stones, and the Myth of ‘Serious Cinema’
Don't be scared of the word "Arthouse", it encompasses everything from Michael Mann's 'Heat' to young Bob Dylan to Audrey hepburn and Gidget
Have you ever had a non-mainstream/non-Hollywood film change your life?
A guide to new films on the Criterion Channel can feel a little intimidating. After all, they are the prestige label for film releasing, with a catalogue of giant names in the field of arthouse cinema. But with the label “great cinema” comes a great truth: most filmmakers are in it to attract the widest audiences possible. The filmmakers of the French New Wave adored mainstream American movie releases, and obsessed over them in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma.
They wanted to make films that expressed their vision, but they also pushed to get them shown at festivals like Cannes and Berlin because they wanted international distribution to send their movies back overseas. The late, great Agnès Varda made serious documentaries, fiction films that explored serious subjects like gender politics and “the male gaze,” and films that broke across forms. She also went to California for a few years and made movies there.
I grew up in central Queens in the 1980s and 1990s. We were film snobs of a sort you don’t hear much about; my friends and I adored action films. We only knew about anything outside mainstream Hollywood movies via parodies done on television sketch comedy shows.
There was an automatic assumption that anything involving subtitles, or black-and-white Europeans from the 1960s was going to be boring, tough to get through. And other than my attempts to watch Fellini (I’ve yet to stay awake all the way through), as an adult I found those assumptions to be utterly false.
Most of my recommendations for this month across the Criterion Channel’s new offerings are those with broad appeal, starring rock bands, directed by the mighty Michael Mann, and more. Let’s dive in:
The Mythmakers
65 Revisited (Bob Dylan) — D.A. Pennebaker
Pennebaker’s 1967 road doc Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back (also on Criterion as part of a Pennebaker collection) remains a landmark in personality-first documentary filmmaking. A fly-on-the-wall look at Bob’s 1965 tour behind The Times They Are A-Changin’ gets a rare close look at a young man who normally played a character, wore a mask between himself and the world that had already anointed him a prophet in his early 20s.
It’s a look at the often mundane life of a star in a way that few docs even attempt to capture. The attempts to write while chaos roils around him, the hangers-on, the unraveling of a relationship, and the standard tour’s sheer repetition of “same shit, different hotel room.” All this and the iconic “cue card” music video for Subterranean Homesick Blues.
So yes, 65 Revisited is exactly what the title promises — outtakes, lots of concert footage, and an alternate SHB video filmed on a rooftop. It’s not essential viewing, and I think it’s included as a bonus disc on Don’t Look Back’s anniversary release. But if you’re a casual Dylan fan or a completist, it’s still worth a look.
Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965 (The Rolling Stones) — Peter Whitehead
To be fully transparent, I’ve only ever seen this 1967 film as a bootleg a friend rented from the late, great Kim’s Video on First Avenue decades ago. It was intended as a screen test to see if the Stones’ greasy charm could translate to the screen for a string of Beatles-type hit films (spoiler: it did not).
As a document of one of the great rock bands of their era, it’s not only an extensive look at a group of young men who are about to cross the threshold fully into international superstardom on the back of the heroically jaded (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Footage also includes hotel room jams of Beatles tunes (every documentary following any artist on tour should include footage of their hotel rooms — it’s such a big part of the life and an indicator of where they are in their careers) and these young icons killing time on the road.
Sympathy for the Devil (The Rolling Stones) — Jean-Luc Godard
Even die-hard Stones fans will have to ask themselves how much of Godard’s self-reverence as an artiste they’re willing to sit through to watch an otherwise absorbing look at the construction of their album Beggars Banquet, which features the titular track.
There’s an unflinching look at the unraveling of the band’s founder Brian Jones as he sinks further and further into the louche life of booze and drugs, and Black Panther members in a junkyard reading the poetry of Amiri Baraka. I have a fairly thick and thorough collection of Baraka’s poems, and if you don’t have someone to read them to you, you can simulate the experience by having it thrown at your head.
All of this while someone (I assume Godard) goes on in voiceover about Marxism. It is absolutely worth watching once.
Rock and Roll Circus (The Rolling Stones) — Michael Lindsay-Hogg
With a dearth of Beatles-style films on the horizon, future Let It Be director Lindsay-Hogg convinced the Stones to play host to a lineup of friends in this 1968 simulated concert in a circus setting.
The idea of watching a John Lennon/Eric Clapton/Keith Richards supergroup perform Beatles music in a Stones-headlined show that featured The Who sounds like an amazing idea. I say, it sounds like an amazing idea. But by the time the headliners actually got onstage 15 hours into filming, they were exhausted — and so was the audience.
The film was shelved, and legend had it because Mick was furious that The Who had upstaged them. I’d heard about this for a very long time, and when it was finally officially released it was — okay. But again, this is a film you want to watch once.
The Vibe Crimes of Michael Mann
Manhunter (1986)
Before The Silence of the Lambs, there was Michael Mann’s singular 1986 vision of Hannibal Lecter — here spelled “Lecktor” (because… Michael Mann reasons, that’s why). An adaptation of Red Dragon (and — sorry — a superior one), it stars Succession’s Brian Cox as the famed cannibal conversationalist, helping William Petersen’s FBI profiler find “The Tooth Fairy killer.” This was a box office bomb, so it makes sense that Jonathan Demme reframed the series as horror, but the bones of the story work as a typical Mann neo-noir about men on the edge.
(Fun fact: David Lynch almost made this movie.)
Heat (1995)
What can be said about this face-off between Pacino and De Niro that hasn’t been written in a million film school essays? The diner scene is justly the film’s centerpiece, but looking beyond that, this remake (of an early TV film L.A. Takedown that Mann also wrote and directed) puts the pedal to the metal and doesn’t take the pressure off until everyone who needs to be dead is dead.
A classic meditation on toxic masculinity and the inability of driven, successful men (like Michael Mann) to connect with the people in their lives has sold a million unframed posters to a million college freshmen to hang in a million dorm rooms.
Miami Vice (2006)
Your mileage may vary with this Jamie Foxx/Colin Farrell remake of Mann’s hit show that defined the neon-drenched ’80s. But it’s got charismatic leads, decent action, and a pace that — once it picks up — leads to an enjoyable couple of hours viewing. Is it essential Mann? Perhaps not. But it’s still a fun ride in a fast car.
Art Films Can Be Films About Art
The Punk Singer (2013) — Sini Anderson
To be rigorously honest, I haven’t seen this look at the life of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman Kathleen Hanna, but as a longtime fan (I saw Bikini Kill live come set up at an open mic I was performing at in a downtown LES theater, rip through three songs, and then leave — a great experience), I’m trusting that this look at her music, her career, and her marriage to Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz will be worth watching.
Crumb (1994) — Terry Zwigoff
Speaking of rigorous honesty, I need to start this recommendation of this intimate portrait of the legendary underground cartoonist Robert Crumb with a disclaimer: my friends are in a band with Crumb, and he signed a release allowing me to use some of his art in a student film I made, so I’m disposed to like the guy anyway.
That being said, there’s no denying that this by-turns harrowing and hilarious look at Crumb’s personal life and the massive dysfunction of his family (his sisters refused to participate, then sent a demand that Crumb pay them thousands of dollars for his “crimes against women”) is not for the tenderhearted, nor anyone triggered by mental illness and suicide. If you can handle it, this film illuminates and illustrates the intense, earth-bending pressures that form an artistic diamond like Crumb.
Basquiat (1996) — Julian Schnabel
In this biographical film, Schnabel, in his directorial debut, takes a look at the life of postmodern artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Portrayed here by Jeffrey Wright, the film veers into hagiography at times with its enthusiastic portrayal of Basquiat as a rags-to-riches success story and a doomed genius too beautiful to live in this world.
If that sounds like a flippant way to describe a movie I’m recommending, I’ll add that most biographies of the recently deceased — with living family members and estates who have to sign off on allowing their work to be used in a movie — tend to fall into this trap. Basquiat has a lot of love in it, and it comes through, making this a singularly cozy film to watch.
Popular Arts
Roman Holiday (1953) — William Wyler
This Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn light comedy is an excuse to watch two of Hollywood’s most beautiful people run around reconstructed post-war Rome, wearing stylish clothes and generally rehashing the story of the glamorous princess who wants to get out into the world undercover and see how people really live. The only reason the story matters is that it was cowritten by the great, then-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, who injected his usual flair for scene construction and witty banter into what could otherwise be another genre retread. Highly recommend.
Gidget (1959) — Paul Wendkos
People make fun of Sally Field for her acceptance speech after winning her second Best Actress Oscar for Places in the Heart in 1985, famously emotionally declaring, “You like me!” While this might have baffled the casual viewer, she was expressing relief that she had the industry’s respect.
It’s easier to understand her sentiment when you remember that before winning her first Oscar for the 1980 classic Norma Rae, she was considered something of a punchline in the industry for co-starring in lowbrow nonsense like Smokey and the Bandit, as well as the hit series The Flying Nun and the one-season-wonder Gidget, based on the film series launched by this 1959 Sandra Dee beach comedy.
Gidget is about Dee’s titular boy-crazy character who’s hung up on a surfer named Moondoggie and — look, it’s not Citizen Kane, but it’s also an appealing comedy with gorgeous actors and gorgeous Southern California scenery.
Excellent job! Incredibly taut and enticing.