There’s a Criterion Channel series paying tribute to director Jonathan Demme that, as short as it is, makes clear that Demme is due for a major reappraisal. It includes only four films — Something Wild (1986), Married to the Mob (1988), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Rachel Getting Married (2008) — but each demonstrate both his confidence in mixing genre elements freely as well as his commitment to centering his films on engrossing characters and the actors who play them. This means his early movies especially seem loose and rangy but also kinetic and exciting.

Much like his peers Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, Demme started his career shooting exploitation movies like Caged Heat (1974) and Crazy Mama (1975) for producer Roger Corman. He found an early champion in critic Pauline Kael, who began the trend of defining Demme as a “humanist” director in the mold of Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game), one who tended to portray a wide range of characters of various classes, races, and backgrounds without condescension, appreciating their struggles and idiosyncrasies. Demme, who died in 2017, soon broke out of the exploitation underground and had a long career with a major influence on contemporary filmmakers. Paul Thomas Anderson was once asked during a Criterion Channel interview what filmmakers had influenced him the most, and he named as his model and hero “Jonathan Demme, Jonathan Demme, and Jonathan Demme.”

Even while omitting a few of Demme’s greatest works, such as Melvin and Howard (1980) and the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense (1984), Criterion’s series attests to boldly creative qualities Demme had that seem to be in short supply in recent Hollywood cinema.