Live stream preview

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Start your free trial Learn more

Already subscribed? Sign in

Portraits of Artists

Routine Pleasures

1h 19m

Directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin • 1986 • United States

What do a club devoted to model trains and the legendary film critic and painter Manny Farber have in common? These two lines intersect in Jean-Pierre Gorin's lovely and distinctly American film, which takes as its subject the desire to re-create the past (the locomotive aficionados' elaborate worlds in miniature, Farber's teeming canvases) and expands to something richly philosophical and surprisingly funny. ROUTINE PLEASURES is a masterful meditation on America's landscapes, real and imagined.

Up Next in Portraits of Artists

  • Christo’s Valley Curtain
    26:18
    Christo’s Valley Curtain

    Christo’s Valley Curtain

    Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Ellen Giffard • 1974 • United States

    Nominated for an Academy Award, CHRISTO'S VALLEY CURTAIN celebrates the Bulgarian-born artist's dramatic hanging of a huge orange curtain between two Colorado mountains. Since the late 1950's, Christo's large-sca...

×