Anthony Bourdain's 10 Favorite Criterion Collection Movies Are Bona Fide Classics

We may have gotten to know him as a chef, but Anthony Bourdain became known and beloved as a kind of lover of life. Through shows like “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain met with all manner of interesting people, shared his frank and insightful observations, and yes, ate a lot of great food.

Bourdain struck me as a guy who wanted to know a little about a lot, and he wanted to curate the best version of every experience on the table — and that includes film. Heck, he called “Ratatouille” the best food movie ever made, so you know he’s got cinematic taste.

Before every celebrity made a stop at the Criterion Closet as part of their publicity tour, Bourdain contributed a top 10 list to the Criterion Collection in 2011, listing his 10 favorite films available from the boutique home media label. Bourdain’s list, like all of our favorites, is revealing of what he likes, dislikes, finds fascinating, and wants to see explored about humanity. It’s also, by happenstance, a great primer to some of the great art cinema available from Criterion.

So, for fans of the late, great chef, good cinema, or those who want to keep expanding their life, enjoy Anthony Bourdain’s favorite movies from the Criterion Collection.

“This is a superb and uncompromising adaptation of George V. Higgins’s bleak masterpiece of low-level criminality—and possibly Robert Mitchum’s finest performance.”

That’s high praise for star Robert Mitchum, a prolific actor known for iconic, and often intimidating roles in classics like “Out of the Past,” “The Night of the Hunter,” and “Cape Fear” (both versions!). In some ways, Mitchum’s work here feels like a career retrospective, a tired and queasy deconstruction of the heavies he’s played in countless noir and crime thrillers before.

His Eddie Coyle is a small-time crook who gets caught up in bank robberies and double-crossing allies who too quickly turn into enemies. Like many of the best movies of the 1970s, the work is cynical and borderline nihilistic, and director Peter Yates (who made an iconic 1960s crime flick, too, with “Bullitt”) gives his schlubby character actors ample room to mumble and discover their way through emotionally taxing truths.

“Georges Franju’s eerie, face-transplant melodrama has stuck in my memory since the first time I saw it as a freaked-out kid on late-night TV.”

Bourdain calls this flick a “melodrama,” which I suppose is technically true. But the genre signifier I would use is straight-up “horror,” full stop, no guardrails.

“Eyes Without a Face” concerns a maddened plastic surgeon, Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), who’s trying desperately to give his disfigured daughter Christiane (Édith Scob) a face transplant by any means necessary — and that includes kidnapping and murdering young women for their skin. Can Inspector Parot (Alexandre Rignault) bring the doctor to justice, or will Christiane have a sudden change of conscience?

It came out in 1960, the same year as “Psycho,” and like that better-known Alfred Hitchcock film, Franju’s work features shocking depictions of still-disturbing violence and an unprecedented focus on the psychological ramifications of inflicting horrors on others.

I might even argue “Eyes Without a Face” is more influential on our spate of contemporary elevated horror than “Psycho” (including Guillermo Del Toro’s work), especially with its surrealistic touches, artfully slow-paced filmmaking style, and obvious allegory of generational trauma between family members. While it might be impossible these days, with streaming services and Criterion Blu-rays and consumer choice, Bourdain’s initial discovery on late-night TV is an ideal way to experience what feels like a particularly nightmarish midnight movie, a work that dazes, confuses, and stays in one’s head.

“The film that politicized me overnight. It’s riveting, multidimensional agitprop with a compelling documentary feel—still relevant and still the best of its kind.”

Movies are so powerful, and I love how Bourdain expresses that concisely here. We all know, intellectually, that war is hell, history is distorted by the victors, and that guerrilla sects of fighters have complicated reasons for their acts of rebellion. But seeing a film, especially one that blends a documentary aesthetic (and real footage) with the inherent emotional power of narrative filmmaking techniques, makes it all feel real.

Directed by the always-incendiary Italian master Gillo Pontecorvo, “The Battle of Algiers,” one of the best movies of the 1960s, surveys the war between France and its colony Algeria, which ultimately led to Algerian independence. Pontecorvo cast a litany of non-professional actors to play his Algerian fighters, all representing real members of the real National Liberation Front. As such, the movie has an arresting sense of authenticity and vitality, one that states with its whole chest that none of us are free until all of us are free.

“I could watch the work of Wong Kar-wai (and the brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle) all day long. I don’t have to understand what’s going on . . . I don’t care. Beautiful people, photographed beautifully. His films are the best, most romantic out there.”

Yes, movies are powerful tools of political expression. But movies are also “vibes only.” And I love Anthony Bourdain’s distillation of Wong and Doyle’s endlessly gorgeous aesthetics into beauty and romance, plain and simple.

Though if you do engage with “what’s going on,” you’ll find lots of beauty in “Chungking Express,” which is just beauty of the most cutting, melancholy order. Two vignettes depict handsome policemen (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, giving great face) wrestling with enigmatic women (Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong, respectively) in response to heartbreak. These newfound couplings spark a renewed curiosity in life’s most minute details, expressing the idea that attraction and connection can, and should, be fostered in every nook and cranny of human existence.

Thus, it makes perfect sense as a film Bourdain would love, as he spent his career examining what little things cause the biggest connections among human beings.

“Easily the ugliest, greasiest, darkest, and most influential noir of its day. Love it.”

“Kiss Me Deadly” is the best Robert Mitchum film Robert Mitchum never starred in. If, like Bourdain, you like your noir as brutal and bleak as possible, you’ll wanna give this one a watch, posthaste.

All your favorite noir tropes are present in Robert Aldrich’s work: A tough-nosed private eye with the incredible name Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is embroiled in a scheme involving murder, stolen identities, horror-tinged mental asylums, and a mysterious box with glowing contents (a MacGuffin you see influence later movies like “Pulp Fiction” and its whole “what was in the briefcase?” question).

Aldrich guides us through these familiarities not with comforting warmth but blunt force trauma. Elements of the picture even touch horror, both of the physical and psychological, and even surreal kind. It’s a movie that portends doom for all of its characters, and by extension, all who watch it – and you’ll love being caught up in its fiery explosion.

“Nagisa Oshima will probably be remembered best for his groundbreaking and beautiful hardcore film ‘In the Realm of the Senses,’ but this is a wonderful one. Breathtakingly shot, with a fantastic, memorable score, and great performances by David Bowie, Tom Conti, and ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano.”

First, Bourdain is correct about the score. Written by the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto, it is moving, haunting, gorgeous, aching stuff. Even if you don’t watch “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” I insist you listen to the main theme and see if your eyes remain dry.

Second, Bourdain is correct that Oshima’s most notorious film is “In the Realm of the Senses,” also in the Criterion Collection, featuring unsimulated acts of sexual perversion and finding some incisive truths about human desire along the way.

But “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” the quieter and more accessible of the two, is the superior Oshima picture to highlight. It’s a coming-of-age film crossed with a war film, starring Tom Conti as Lt. Col. John Lawrence, captured in a Japanese POW camp during World War II. Lawrence learns much about the complexities and atrocities of humanity through his experiences with fellow prisoner Major Celliers (David Bowie) and camp staff member Sergeant Hara (Takeshi Kitano).

And if Mr. Bourdain’s word isn’t enough for you, it’s one of Christopher Nolan’s 10 favorite movies of all time.

“One of the funniest goddamn films ever made — with an amazing performance by the brilliant Richard E. Grant.”

Grant is always delivering powerful pieces of performance, high-wire acts of broad comedy and deep sadness, in works as eclectic as “Saltburn,” “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” and “How to Get Ahead in Advertising” (a recent addition to the Criterion Collection). But his film acting debut (one of the best ever), “Withnail and I,” might remain his masterpiece, and if you have a particularly fiendish, cynical sense of humor (as Bourdain seemed to), you’ll laugh throughout.

Grant plays one of the title roles — Withnail, an unemployed actor — who takes a holiday at his uncle’s cottage with his roommate, the other title role — “I,” an unemployed actor played by the Doctor himself, Paul McGann. From there, writer/director Bruce Robinson flings these characters through a cavalcade of alcohol, hurt feelings, and uncomfortable interactions with Withnail’s uncle, Monty (Richard Griffiths, Vernon Dursley himself).

“Withnail and I” is simultaneously a comedy and a tragedy, a deeply sad look at two lost souls getting lost together that invites us all to laugh with (at?) the shared misery of human existence.

“A hard, unflinching look at what it was like to resist during wartime France. Personally, I prefer ‘Bob le flambeur,’ but any Melville is good Melville. And this is very, very good.”

The “Melville” Bourdain refers to is director Jean-Pierre Melville, known for many influential crime flicks like “Le Samouraï,” “Le Cercle Rouge” (one of the best heist movies of all time), and yes, “Bob le flambeur” (shout out to Bourdain for negging the Criterion Collection in his list). In 1969, he released “Army of Shadows,” another Bourdain pick that uses boots-on-the-ground neo-realism to look at war. In this one, set during World War II, French resistance leader Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) and his cell of underground soldiers fight against Nazi occupation using guerrilla tactics, uneasy alliances, and avoiding capture, torture, and death.

With his crime movies, Melville’s style reads “cool,” the antecedent to filmmakers like Michael Mann or Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s fascinating, therefore, to see this kind of style stripped for parts and applied to something as notorious as the French occupation during World War II. It makes the viewer realize that none of his protagonists, including our dear gambling friend Bob, were ever “cool.” They’re fundamentally empty, fighting to survive, trying to beat a rigged system. War is hell, and hell is other people. How French.

“Mamet’s best film. Joe Mantegna’s best film. A suspense film about the big con. With a tight, delightfully convoluted script, great dialogue—and Ricky Jay!”

I tend to agree with Bourdain that “House of Games” is not just an ’80s thriller you definitely need to see, but the best David Mamet-directed film. It almost plays like a Jean-Pierre Melville picture, in that it’s an ice-cold, dialogue-driven thriller about humans using each other to get whatever they can out of each other.

Dr. Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) is a successful psychologist struggling with unfulfillment herself. When helping a patient leads her to a criminal underworld of con artists, led by the cool Mike Mancuso (Joe Mantegna), she learns the ropes and likes what she sees — but is this house of games doomed to fall on itself?

Bourdain’s right; Mantegna is incredible. But I’ll give a special shoutout to Crouse, our anchor character. She plays the twists and turns wonderfully, and cannily incorporates what we know about female characters in noir movies to subvert our expectations.

Also, I love that Bourdain shouted out the late, great Ricky Jay! Jay was a talented, inventive, and influential magician who parlayed that success into storytelling and acting, knocking out supporting roles in works like “Boogie Nights” and “The Prestige.” Here, Jay plays the first mark for Crouse to con her way through, and his scene raises the temperature immediately.

“It’s simply one of the best films ever made—and it perfectly conveys everything you need to know about film. The scene of the convicts watching cartoons is a timeless, classic, and life-enriching moment.”

Released in 1941, and named as one of AFI’s top 100 greatest movies of all time, “Sullivan’s Travels” comes from rat-a-tat screwball comedy mastermind Preston Sturges and stars Hollywood icons Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. It’s about — ready to get meta? — a Hollywood director who’s tired of making screwball comedies, so he goes on the road as a transient to gain inspiration. Along the way, he meets Lake, playing an aspiring actress, and we’re off to the races.

As Bourdain alludes, “Sullivan’s Travels” is, indeed, a case for finding the enriching qualities of every part of life, no matter how seemingly trivial they may seem. It’s not hard to imagine Bourdain seeing himself in McCrea’s character, or in Sullivan’s screenplay. Bourdain was a bon vivant and a raconteur, a man who lived for connections with his fellow man, a man who elevated what many look down upon. I don’t know about you, but I am grateful for his travels.