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Last month David Fincher’s Gone Girl made a smash at the box office. As if plugged directly into the Zeitgeist, it seemed as if everyone had a take on the film’s views on gender, the media and marriage. Gone Girl was a sensation that turned the camera inward, revealing our discomfort with the institution of marriage. While the butt of many jokes, marriage is perceived as an important pillar in our understanding of families, social values and personal happiness. Yet, it remains behind closed doors. We understand marriage within the realms of our own experience, our parents, our friends and our own marriages. Yet, we are only ever truly familiar with our own intimate relationships and even that is under debate. If anything, Gone Girl shows that within marriage there are two sides to every story. Marriage is veiled with a certain air of mystery and the question...

Like Night of the Hunter, Tod Browning’s Freaks or Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers, The Road to Yesterday can be ranked among the UFOs of cinema. It’s place in the heart of Cecil B. DeMille’s work proves to be in itself very distinctive. We know that, during his entire life, DeMille had virtually only one producer—Paramount (the former Famous Players Lasky)—just like Minnelli was MGM’s man and Corman American International’s. Sixty-three of his films (out of seventy) were produced at Paramount. And, oddly enough, it is among the seven outsiders, situated within a brief period from 1925 to 1931, that his best activity is to be found (I’m thinking of Madam Satan, The Godless Girl, and The Road to Yesterday)–his most audacious undertakings. To top it off, for this uncontested king of the box office, his best films were his biggest commercial failures.

For the month of June, I’m trying something a little different for my (more or less) weekly review column here on CriterionCast.com. Going with the old tradition of June as the ideal month for weddings that I alluded to just about a year ago, in my second installment in this Journey through the Eclipse Series that covered Ernst Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo, I’m going to focus on the theme of Marriage. I’ve selected a few titles that concern themselves in various ways, and from the perspective of different cultures and times, with that venerable institution. That basic human phenomenon of coupling up and sealing the relationship with a set of vows is one that we can all relate to in some way, even if we haven’t taken that walk down the aisle (or in whatever other situation our culture and whims might lead us to arrange.

There is a terrific series titled ”Auto-Remakes” starting today at Anthology Film Archives in New York. The series, which runs through March 31, pairs films made and remade by the same director (in the way Michael Haneke did recently with Funny Games). C. Mason Wells, one of the programmers, writes “Anthology surveys the history of auteurs who – per Ken Jacobs – returned to the scene of the crime. Whether out of dogged perfectionism, playful abandon, or, yes, monetary gain, they changed their own films from black-and-white to color, from documentary to reenactment, from tragedy to comedy, from silent to sound, from noir to Western, from video to celluloid – reimagining the same stories, characters, or ideas with new collaborators, technologies, and formal strategies.”

What’s interesting about the pairs of posters for these films is that they are markedly similar. Aside from the casting, you can’t tell much about what differentiates the original and the remake,...