If you are a movie maven, you know about the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion. Since the days of Laserdiscs, Cri­te­ri­on has made a name for itself by amass­ing a vast and thor­ough cat­a­log of indie films, art house flicks and the occa­sion­al block­buster. They dis­trib­ute DVDs of direc­tors as diverse as Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Jane Cam­pi­on, and Stan Brakhage.

For their web­site, Cri­te­ri­on has asked a num­ber of film­mak­ers, writ­ers and oth­er cul­tur­al fig­ures to come up with their Top 10 Cri­te­ri­on movies ever. They are fas­ci­nat­ing, illu­mi­nat­ing and often sur­pris­ing.

The late, great band Son­ic Youth – which made a name for itself for its loud, growl­ing gui­tars and end­less lay­ers of noisy feed­back — picked some remark­ably qui­et, med­i­ta­tive movies: Yasu­jiro Ozu’s con­tem­pla­tive late mas­ter­piece Float­ing Weeds tops the list and Chan­tal Aker­man’s three-hour long min­i­mal­ist mas­ter­piece Jeanne Diel­man, 23, quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles comes in at num­ber two.

Like­wise, low-bud­get hor­ror leg­end Roger Cor­man picked Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni’s high art mas­ter­piece L’avventura as his top pick. “Nev­er has ‘wait­ing around’ been so glo­ri­ous,” he writes.

Less sur­pris­ing are Mar­tin Scors­ese’s picks. He puts Rober­to Rossellini’s Paisan at num­ber one and Michael Pow­ell and Emer­ic Pressburger’s Tech­ni­col­or mar­vel The Red Shoes at num­ber two. Scors­ese has on mul­ti­ple occa­sions declared his love of the for­mer and was cen­tral to get­ting the lat­ter restored.

Edgar Wright – direc­tor of Scott Pil­grim vs. the World and last summer’s apoc­a­lyp­tic com­e­dy The World’s End – proud­ly picked Bri­an DePal­ma’s Blow Out as his top movie. “I have heard peo­ple call them­selves Bri­an De Pal­ma apol­o­gists,” he writes. “I am proud to say that I am a huge fan with­out any caveats.”

And The Exor­cist direc­tor William Fried­kin reveals him­self to be a fan of Alain Resnais, plac­ing both Night and Fog and The Last Year at Marien­bad high on his list. His praise of the recent­ly depart­ed French New Wave icon’s most famous movie is also an elo­quent defense of any chal­leng­ing movie.

I’ve seen Marien­bad at least twen­ty times over the past fifty years, and I don’t under­stand one scene of it, but what a fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence. I don’t 
under­stand the Grand Canyon or Schoenberg’s Trans­fig­ured Night, either, but they con­tin­ue to move me.

You can see all of the Cri­te­ri­on top ten lists here. Oth­er fig­ures on the list include Jonathan Lethem, the Beast­ie Boys’ Adam Yauch, James Fran­co, Lena Dun­ham, Guiller­mo del Toro, Wes Ander­son, John Lurie, Brie Lar­son, Don­ald Fagen & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

I’ve often called doc­u­men­tary my favorite kind of film, know­ing full well that the label des­ig­nates less a defined genre than a use­ful­ly mal­leable descrip­tion. What does a doc­u­men­tary have? An unscript­ed, non­fic­tion­al sto­ry; inter­views; footage can­did­ly shot — maybe. It may also include script­ed, staged, fic­tion­al mate­r­i­al, and may treat real events in a fic­tion­al­ized man­ner or search for the real­i­ty in events cloud­ed by fic­tion. For fine exam­ples of the last, see the works of Errol Mor­ris, four of which — A Brief His­to­ry of Time on Stephen Hawk­ing (above), Novem­ber 22, 1963 on JFK, They Were There on IBM, and Wern­er Her­zog Eats His Shoe on, well, sub­ject obvi­ous – you can see right here in our col­lec­tion of 200 free doc­u­men­taries online. And speak­ing of Her­zog, the oth­er liv­ing film­mak­er doing the most to push out­ward the bound­aries of doc­u­men­tary, we have From One Sec­ond to the Next, on the dan­gers of tex­ting while dri­ving, and Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog, on his own life and work.

But cin­e­ma had the doc­u­men­tary long before it had the likes of Mor­ris and Her­zog, and our col­lec­tion includes a diver­si­ty of such pic­tures from all over the past cen­tu­ry. 1958’s Ansel Adams: Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, for instance, pro­files in motion the prac­tice of the man whose work in still imagery antic­i­pat­ed, in many ways, the mod­ern nature doc­u­men­tary. Doc­u­men­tary films have arguably pro­vid­ed the rich­est means of view­ing every kind of cre­ative mind at work, from Alfred Hitch­cock (The Men Who Made the Movies: Hitch­cock, Dial H for Hitch­cock) to James Joyce (The Tri­als of Ulysses) to Joni Mitchell (Woman of Heart and Mind) to Charles Bukows­ki (Born Into This). Some of them even came as ear­ly entries from not-yet famous direc­tors, includ­ing Stan­ley Kubrick (Day of the Flight, Fly­ing Padre, The Sea­far­ers), Jean-Luc Godard (Oper­a­tion Con­crete), and Kevin Smith (Mae Day: The Crum­bling of a Doc­u­men­tary). Nobody can ever say where the doc­u­men­tary form will go next, but watch these 200 and you’ll have a pret­ty fair idea of all the excit­ing places — geo­graph­i­cal, intel­lec­tu­al, per­son­al, and artis­tic — it’s gone already.

See our col­lec­tion of 200 free doc­u­men­taries online, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion of 635 Free Movies Online.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Sure­ly you’ve seen Stan­ley Kubrick­’s ver­sion of A Clock­work Orange. But have you seen Andy Warhol’s? Antho­ny Burgess’ 1962 nov­el of the robust cul­ture of teenage vio­lence in our freak­ish dystopi­an future caught the eye of not just the man who had pre­vi­ous­ly made 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that of the man who had pre­vi­ous­ly made the eight-hour still shot Empire as well. Warhol and Kubrick­’s sen­si­bil­i­ties dif­fered, you might say, as did the means of pro­duc­tion to which they had access, and a com­par­i­son of their Clock­work Orange adap­ta­tions high­lights both. Using three shots in this 70-minute film instead of Empire’s one, Warhol cre­ates, in the words of Ed Howard at Only the Cin­e­ma, “a strange and intrigu­ing film which, like most of Warhol’s movies, often toes the line between slow and down­right bor­ing, a piece of “alien­at­ing, atti­tude-based cin­e­ma” that “pro­vides no easy plea­sures,” “replac­ing the con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive dri­ve with a clut­tered mise-en-scene of bod­ies.” For all its cheap­ness, Warhol’s  lo-fi cin­e­mat­ic ren­di­tion did at least come first, in 1965 to Kubrick­’s 1971 — plus, you can watch it free on Youtube above.

“Vinyl is such a loose adap­ta­tion of the source nov­el that even peo­ple who have seen it should be for­giv­en for not real­is­ing that it is built on Burgess’s lit­er­ary scaf­fold,” says the web site of the Inter­na­tion­al Antho­ny Burgess Foun­da­tion. “The film is pre­sent­ed as a series of images of bru­tal­i­ty, beat­ings, tor­ture and masochism all per­formed by a group of men under the gaze of a glam­orous woman. In its pre­oc­cu­pa­tions with pornog­ra­phy and vio­lence, it bears many of the oblique hall­marks of Warhol’s work, along with a famil­iar cast of Fac­to­ry reg­u­lars such as Ger­ard Malan­ga, Edie Sedg­wick and Ondine. The fin­ished film is dis­turb­ing, con­tains unsim­u­lat­ed vio­lent acts and is not very audi­ence-friend­ly.” Either a strong dis­rec­om­men­da­tion or a strong rec­om­men­da­tion, depend­ing on your pro­cliv­i­ties. And if none of that draws you, maybe the sound­track includ­ing Martha and the Van­del­las, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and the The Isley Broth­ers will. Did Warhol pay to license their songs? Giv­en that he cer­tain­ly did­n’t look into obtain­ing the rights even to A Clock­work Orange, some­thing inside me doubts it.

You can watch Three More 1960s “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol — Sleep, Eat & Kiss — in our 2011 post. They are oth­er­wise list­ed in our col­lec­tion of 635 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol Cre­ates Album Cov­ers for Jazz Leg­ends Thelo­nious Monk, Count Basie & Ken­ny Bur­rell

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

Andy Warhol Shoots “Screen Tests” of Nico, Bob Dylan & Sal­vador Dalí

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Last year, I had a chance to inter­view Steven Soder­bergh for Side Effect, his final the­atri­cal fea­ture before his sup­posed retire­ment. Dur­ing our dis­cus­sion, he mused on the future of cin­e­ma.

There’s a new gram­mar of cin­e­ma out there. I’m con­vinced that there’s anoth­er sort of iter­a­tion to be had, and I don’t know what it is … I feel like we’re not tak­ing advan­tage of how sophis­ti­cat­ed we’ve got­ten at read­ing the images. It’s not about the num­ber of images or how fast those images come. It’s about load­ing each one with so many pre­ex­ist­ing asso­ci­a­tions that the audi­ence is doing a lot of work. No one has real­ly chal­lenged them before to mine all of these asso­ci­a­tions they have from see­ing the images their whole lives.

When he was say­ing this, I con­fess that I had a hard time imag­in­ing what he was describ­ing. But last week, Soder­bergh uploaded a video to his web­site that might be what he had in mind – a mashup of Alfred Hitchcock’s mas­ter­piece Psy­cho (1960) and Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake (1998). (You can watch a frag­ment above and the long, com­plete mashup here.)

For much of the piece, Soder­bergh alter­nates between a scene from the orig­i­nal and one from the remake – Anne Heche, who plays Mar­i­on Crane in Van Sant’s ver­sion leaves her apart­ment for work and in the next scene, Janet Leigh shows up at the office. At oth­er moments, he cuts back and forth with­in the scene; at one point the Mar­i­on from the remake is at a traf­fic light and sees her boss from the orig­i­nal movie. And dur­ing a few key points in the film — like the famed show­er scene, which you can see above — Soder­bergh does some­thing dif­fer­ent. That sequence opens with Heche dis­rob­ing and lath­er­ing up. But when the killer starts stab­bing, Soder­bergh jar­ring­ly over­lays the orig­i­nal movie over top the remake, cre­at­ing a dis­con­cert­ing kalei­do­scop­ic effect.

If there were any movie laden with “many pre­ex­ist­ing asso­ci­a­tions,” it would be Psy­cho. All of Hitchcock’s sim­mer­ing voyeurism, fetishism and gen­er­al psy­cho­sex­u­al weird­ness come to a boil in this movie. Ever since it came out, film­mak­ers from Dou­glas Gor­don to Bri­an De Pal­ma have been try­ing to unpack its pow­er.

When Van Sant unveiled his movie in 1998, audi­ences and crit­ics alike were baf­fled. “Why both­er,” seemed the gen­er­al con­sen­sus. Indeed, Van Sant seems to have pulled off the envi­able feat of snook­er­ing a Hol­ly­wood stu­dio into fund­ing a big-bud­get con­cep­tu­al art film.

By inter­cut­ting the orig­i­nal with the copy, Soder­bergh forces the audi­ence to reap­praise both by cast­ing the great­ness of Hitchcock’s movie and the odd­ness of Van Sant’s effort in a new light. You can watch the entire mashup here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Who Direct­ed the Psy­cho Show­er Scene?: Hitchcock’s Film & Saul Bass’ Sto­ry­boards Side by Side

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watch­ing Psy­cho (1960)

Alfred Hitch­cock Tan­ta­lizes Audi­ences with a Play­ful Trail­er for Psy­cho (1960)

21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.