THE B-SIDE: The Criterion Collection B&N Sale – July Picks

A working guide for cinephiles, obsessives, and anyone who wants to stare at grainy French faces in 4K

In case you aren’t a cinephile ( by which I mean, you smell normal), the Criterion Collection is a “boutique label” that has been specializing in releasing art films since the advent of laserdisc lo these many years ago. And if you’re too young to remember when you sometimes could barely follow the action visually on crappy VHS transfers, laserdisc was actually a pretty good home video system – like giant DVDs that could comfortably store half a movie on each side. In comparison to the only other alternative, VHS, it was visually clear and the audio actually replicated movie theater sound.

I’ve been told I have a digressive writing style which is fine for a blog but not for producing literary work. So I digress: When I was a young man, my friends ran a small black box theatre downtown and they’d somehow gotten hold of an old laserdisc player. One night in 2002, after the last show, a few of us hung out and watched Apocalypse Now, a movie I had never seen before. I can tell you there’s …