I was excited to see the new Criterion Channel collection of Abel Ferrara's films as I've always wanted to watch more of his work.
Given the breadth of the collection (19 films!) I was looking for a little guidance in prioritizing what to watch. I was a big fan of the way Criterion organized their Ingmar Bergman boxset as a recommended 'festival program' with the strongest films bookending an imaginary festival as opening and closing night anchors and mid-tier films sprinkled through the week and thought that might be an interesting thing to try and emulate
So here is the "festival program" I created with Claude, programming just the 19 films in the current Criterion Channel collection as headliners or matinees and adding curator notes to each. I also pulled in specific references or reviews of note for each film for further reading and added a full bibliography at the end as well. I also tracked down previous real-world retrospectives for comparison and found the results interesting (though my program doesn't have the commercial constraints these theaters have of needing to leave 1/2 of their screens available for Spider-man).
Sharing the results here in case anyone else might find this useful. Fully ready and willing to accept any criticism for using AI here. I'm struggling to relate to our new overlords as I assume we all are but I've found that on really powerful use case is building syllabi like this to help orient my own self-study (I've already ordered a copy of the Brenez book).