Playtime (Criterion)

The Criterion Collection, A Continuing Series of Important Classic and Contemporary Films

Jacques Tati's gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of modern technology reached their creative apex with Playtime. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrush the endearingly clumsy, resolutely old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a bafflingly modernist Paris. With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, Playtime is a lasting testament to an age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.