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The power of an important story told with passion and unflinching clarity always transcends the bonds of time. This explains the durability of Shakespeare’s plays when they land in the right hands, and it explains Edward Berger’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s fierce anti-war novel, “All Quite on the Western Front,” which is nominated for the best picture Oscar.

Nearly a century ago, director Lewis Milestone triumphed in one of the first Oscar competitions with his Universal Pictures version of the 1928 tome, filmed, remarkably, completely in and around its Hollywood Studio home.

Today, “Front” is registering with voters who are seeing the horrors of war in Europe live and in color as it sadly unfolds again with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

When Milestone filmed his “Front,” WWI was a decade behind the voters, who had just roared through the 1920s and hadn’t yet confronted the...

Austrian born G.W. Pabst remains one of the most celebrated figures of German language cinema in the Weimar Republic, his enduring works featuring Louise Brooks enjoying continual circulation, while Criterion recently resurrected notable works Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (1931). But before emigrating to the United States like contemporaries such as Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch or Fritz Lang, Pabst was detained in 1938 France, forced to return to Nazi Germany, where he would make two films at Ufa for Goebbels’ propaganda machine, the second of which would be the obscured Paracelsus (1943), a biopic on Swiss born alchemist/physician/philosopher Theophrastus von Hohenheim, revered as the ‘father of toxicology’ during the German Renaissance.…...

Portraits of boundless humanity are increasingly rare these days, both in the real world and the fictional ones creatives form. As the world becomes more and more polarized, borders get tighter and tighter and people in positions of power fight tooth and nail to keep that for fear of “the other” getting an inch more respect than they previously had, it’s hard to think that one should turn to a pair of films nearly a century old for inspiration. However, that’s exactly the case with regards to a pair of new DVDs and Blu-rays released by The Criterion Collection.

Not often talked about in the conversation of great humanist (or maybe more so moralist) filmmakers, German auteur G. W. Pabst made a name for himself with films like Pandora’s Box and Three Penny Opera, but a pair of lesser known masterworks are the subject of Criterion’s admiration,...

Released just a dozen years after the events time-stamped in the film’s title, Westfront 1918 offers a grim perspective on the experience of German soldiers in the final months of World War I. Adapted from a wartime memoir novel by director G.W. Pabst, best known in recent times for his silent movies starring Louise Brooks (Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl), this early sound film offers an episodic narrative based around a series of anecdotes that ring very true to life for anyone who’s taken the time to read up on the terrifying anguish and unfathomable chaos of trench warfare.

Utilizing an approach that’s been repeated innumerable times over the decades, we encounter four men and track along with them as they each do their best to survive the ever-unfolding madness that surrounds them. The Lieutenant is, of course, the nominal officer of the quartet,...

A brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal are all joining the Criterion Collection in 2018. “The Breakfast Club” is getting the Criterion treatment next January, as are a new edition of “Young Mr. Lincoln,” “I, Daniel Blake,” “Westfront 1918,” “Kameradschaft,” and four films by Claude Autant-Lara.

More information — and, as always, cover art — below.

Read More:Criterion Collection Announces December Titles, Including ‘Election’ and ‘Monterey Pop’

“The Breakfast Club”

“What happens when you put five strangers in Saturday detention? Badass posturing, gleeful misbehavior, and a potent dose of angst. With this exuberant film, writer-director John Hughes established himself as the bard of American youth, vividly and empathetically capturing how teenagers hang out, act up, and goof off. ‘The Breakfast Club’ brings together an assortment of adolescent archetypes — the uptight prom queen (Molly Ringwald), the stoic jock (Emilio Estevez), the foul-mouthed rebel (Judd Nelson), the virginal bookworm (Anthony Michael Hall...