The Criterion Collection

Starting in November, you can own five Criterion Blu-ray titles, three classics (The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Third Man, and The Last Emperor) and two brand-new releases, Bottle Rocket and Chungking Express. Click here for the Blu-ray titles currently available for preorder.

We wanted to let you know that a number of retailers are currently offering special discounts on The Last Emperor. Amazon.com, Buy.com, Bestbuy.com, and Tower.com will continue their promotions of the special edition DVD through August 31. So check these deals out now!

The great American film critic Manny Farber died on Sunday night, August 17, at the age of 91. “The liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country every produced,” wrote Susan Sontag of the hugely influential Farber, who began writing on film in the early 1940s and was the critic first for The New Republic and then for The Nation and Time. He was an early champion of the works of Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and Samuel Fuller, and famously coined the term “termite art” (as opposed to the insufferable “white elephant art”) to describe work that “goes forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity” (Phillip Lopate said of this statement, “Farber could have been talking about his own writing”!). Farber later turned more to avant-garde cinema. His writings on film were compiled in several collections, including Negative Space. Farber was also a painter, and his art can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.