31Aug10
In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim provides some context for the work of Maurice Pialat, whose first film, L’enfance nue, is out on Criterion DVD: “Recognized in France as one of the major filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century, Pialat (1925–2003) belonged to the same generation as Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and the other leading figures of the French New Wave.” Lim goes on to call the feature debut of this chronicler of the lives of wayward, fragmented people “one of the most moving films about childhood ever made” and “one of the most tough-minded . . . It establishes the searching sensibility that would characterize Pialat’s cinema, bruisingly alive and fully in the moment.”
Slant’s Fernando Croce also deems L’enfance nue to be the brilliant herald of a great career, plus makes a intriguing connection to another Criterion release: “Maurice Pialat’s piercing first feature introduces the Gallic master’s mix of laceration and delicacy . . . The film is remarkable for its vivid, uncondescending snapshots of working-class life and, in its loving observation of Marie-Louise and René Thierry (real-life foster parents more or less playing themselves), the fullest portrait of an elderly couple since McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow.” DVD Town’s Christopher Long is even more unstinting in his praise, exclaiming “This is a fantastic film. L’enfance nue deserves to be considered one of the great debut features of the last half century, a thunderbolt heralding the arrival of a distinctive visionary. Damn it, I can’t resist saying it: L’enfance nue is a masterpiece.”
More praise from DVD Talk.
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Press Notes
23Aug10
The exceptional early Hollywood movies in the new DVD collector’s set 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg have been unavailable for so long that their reemergence is being treated by critics as a cinema event. In the New York Times, Dave Kehr reviews this “must-have boxed set” and gives a little background on the legendary Vienna-born, New York–raised auteur who gives it its name, calling him “an avant-garde filmmaker who found himself, by fluke and only for a short while, at the controls of the Hollywood machine.” Kehr digs in further, positing, tantalizingly, that “his films’ unreal settings, languorous rhythms, and perverse eroticism were not designed to engage and arouse an audience but rather to reflect the private concerns of their creator. For once, the Dream Factory seemed to be producing actual dreams.”
The Los Angeles Times’ Dennis Lim has a favorite in the set, the working-class romance The Docks of New York: “For a movie that’s more than eighty years old, it feels almost impossibly fresh, filled with small gestures and images—a spontaneous kiss between two women, a threaded needle seen through the weepy heroine’s eyes—that are as sublime and alive as movie moments get.” The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney finds Underworld to be a blast, explaining, “It’s the granddaddy of all gangster pictures, yet it’s not like any other gangster picture. Al Capone’s Chicago it’s not.” And Matt Hough, at Home Theater Forum, deems The Last Command “Von Sternberg’s masterpiece.” Hough has words of praise not only for the director (“von Sternberg’s painterly use of lighting, people placement, and sets both small and grand are all terrific”) but for its star, Emil Jannings: “Jannings won the first Academy Award for best actor, and there’s no denying his astonishing performance was fully deserving of the honor.”
More praise from the Globe and Mail and Paper.
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Press Notes
17Aug10
Our twin releases of Terry Zwigoff’s Louie Bluie and Crumb (the former never before available on DVD) are cause for celebration not only for fans of their idiosyncratic director but also for aficionados of fascinating real-life characters. “Both are incredibly original biographical documents of eccentric artists,” writes Neil Karassik in Eye Weekly. “Both films tackle race, sexuality, and the idiosyncratic lifestyles of their respective subjects with an intimate eye that remains unrivalled. While they often enter dark and loopy territory, each is a mesmerizing representation of an immensely fascinating man.”
Not that the two pictures are carbon copies of each other: “The loose-limbed Louie Bluie is Zwigoff’s most affectionate film, filled with infectious music and winning anecdotes from its subject, a world-class raconteur,” per Dennis Lim for the LA Times, while Crumb, Zwigoff’s “signature work,” “achieves a harrowing intimacy and complexity, both of which would likely have eluded a fiction filmmaker or a more squeamish documentarian.”
Many critics are simply enjoying the perverse pleasures of Crumb all over again. “Crumb is seminal among the history of documentaries,” writes Pop Matters’ Sabadino Parker, and it is “engrossing, eye-opening . . . Both a scintillating underground-art history and a harrowing family tragicomedy,” according to the Baltimore Sun’s Michael Sragow. Others are just now discovering the appeal of the long-out-of-circulation Louie Bluie—like DVD Town’s Christopher Long, who calls it “an amazing film that deserves your consideration” and “pure joy from the first frame to the last . . . Its only flaw is that there isn’t enough of it.”
More from DVD File, Austin 360, and the Express Night Out.
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Press Notes
9Aug10
Stuart Galbraith eats up Abdellatif Kechiche’s delectable The Secret of the Grain, calling it in a DVD Talk review “the kind of intimate family drama that you don’t merely witness—by the time the film is over it’s almost as if you’ve personally shared in its characters’ experiences . . . Gradually you begin to realize just how richly layered and multifaceted it is.” Galbraith places this “hypnotically engrossing” film in the website’s prestigious Collector Series.
Michael Atkinson, writing for IFC.com, is similarly appreciative, calling The Secret of the Grain “the kind of movie you’d hope film pros could make regularly, to fill our empty, sugar-shocked bellies, but they’re difficult and rare.” And, he says, “Kechiche’s film covers an enormous amount of cultural territory, but it never rushes. Rants and ordeals and meals are experienced in more or less real time, with the first late-afternoon family meal lasting an extraordinary twenty minutes of laid-back, jabbering, mouth-stuffing conversation.”
More from DVD Verdict (“richly compelling”) and Film.com (“Belongs in your collection if you’re a fan of French cinema . . . and couscous”).
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Press Notes
4Aug10
The Red Shoes has rendered DVD Verdict critic Gordon Sullivan articulately inarticulate: “I feel utterly incapable of communicating the profound joy the movie elicits in me, and find there’s no way to describe how essential the movie is without resorting to shopworn phrases.” He goes on, “With that said, if you have any inclination toward dance, classic cinema, fairy tales, or Technicolor, and you haven’t seen The Red Shoes, it should absolutely be a priority.”
The passion and vibrancy of Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece, now available on Criterion Blu-ray and DVD in a new high-definition master from the award-winning 2009 digital restoration, continue to leave critics awestruck. Home Theater Forum’s Matt Hough exclaims, “One of the most magnificent art films of the twentieth century, The Red Shoes remains unmatched.” DVD Town’s Christopher Long agrees: “The Red Shoes has not lost its power to astonish in the sixty-plus years since its initial release.” And according to Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun, “The Red Shoes is ecstatic entertainment.”
More from Artforum, Hollywood Chicago, and Film.com.
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Press Notes
29Jul10
A compelling reason to check out the splendid comedies in our new Eclipse Series 22: Presenting Sacha Guitry, from DVD Town’s Christopher Long: “The appeal of Sacha Guitry´s cinema in one word: wit,” he writes in a review of the set. “Whether he was born with it or cultivated it, Guitry was blessed with wit in spades.” Long goes on to laud the way the director, who started in theater, took to the fledgling film medium: “Guitry not only embraced the visual possibilities of cinema, he practically squeezed the stuffing right out of them.
More from the Los Angeles Times’ Dennis Lim, who praises these “dazzling comedies,” and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who calls the films in the set “effervescent, extroverted,” adding “Partisans of the long take may marvel at those that Guitry uses to preserve the performances: he routinely lets the camera run for two or three minutes at a stretch in the service of the actors’ theatrical virtuosity and, above all, his own.” Also, Nicolas Rapold peeks at this "quartet of playful 1930s works" for Artforum.
2AUG2010: Dave Kehr in the New York Times: “His work represents some of the most purely pleasurable filmmaking imaginable, an inexhaustible storehouse of wit, joy, sensuality and wisdom.”
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Press Notes
21Jul10
“The most beautiful Technicolor movie ever made,” writes critic Ty Burr in a Boston Globe review of the new Criterion release of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. “More than that, Narcissus is a stunning emotional masterpiece about faith, lust, madness, and humility.” Burr’s piece on this bewitching tale of faith-challenged British nuns attempting to build a school in the Himalayas goes on to say, “Powell, the subversive fantasist of British cinema, later referred to Narcissus as ‘my most erotic film,’ and he wasn’t kidding: it still holds the power to shock.”
Also worth a read is Gary Dretzka’s review for Movie City News, in which he muses about Narcissus’s stunning and influential visual effects: “For all of the excitement generated in Hollywood by digital, hi-def, and 3-D technology, it’s sometimes worth remembering that some Pleistocene filmmakers got it right the first time, and their work continues to inspire contemporary artists . . . No better example could be provided than Criterion Collection’s sumptuous Blu-ray release of Black Narcissus.”
More from Blu-ray.com.
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Press Notes
15Jul10
In his five-star review of Criterion’s new DVD and Blu-ray special editions of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, Time Out New York’s Joshua Rothkopf muses about the unmistakable impact Antonioni’s sixties portraits of spiritual desolation have had on popular culture, whether we’ve realized it or not: “Whenever two elegant characters are separated by distance and ennui—maybe it’s a perfume ad, maybe a movie—that’s the impact of Antonioni . . . When Austin Powers poses his fashion models (‘Pout, baby!’) or when soundman John Travolta pieces together a murder mystery in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, that’s Antonioni again.” Red Desert hails from this enormously influential period, of course, and Rothkopf suggests that it may be a good introduction to the Italian director’s work for those younger viewers who know his influence better than his films: “This was Antonioni’s first film in color, a decision he didn’t take lightly. (Whole fields are painted subtle shades.) Yet gorgeous as it is, Red Desert may have even more resonance with a generation enraged by environmental rape.”
And here’s what Paper, Cinematical, Slant, and DVD Talk have to say about the release.
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Press Notes
29Jun10
“It’s hard to imagine The Leopard looking much better on home video than it does in the new high-definition version,” writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times this week. What he’s referring to, of course, is Criterion’s new Blu-ray release of Luchino Visconti’s opulent epic, available today. In his in-depth review, Kehr guides us through the 1963 film’s long history of restoration and rediscovery, before taking a closer look at the movie itself, which he calls the director’s “last great work,” concluding, “Visconti achieves a near-perfect balance of personal drama and historical perspective.”
For more on this masterpiece, see the Los Angeles Times, DVD Talk, and Blu-ray.com (which calls it “a prime contender for a Blu-ray release of the year”).
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Press Notes
28Jun10
“Jim Jarmusch outdoes himself with Mystery Train,” exclaims Michael Rubino in a DVD Verdict review of Criterion’s new Blu-ray and DVD editions of the American auteur’s quirky trip to Memphis. “It’s a classic independent film whose storytelling convention and atmosphere are only outdone by the bizarre characters filling the screen. It’s an ode to the early apostles in the religion of rock, a pilgrimage to a forgotten American landmark, and just a fun movie worth checking out.” According to Joseph John Lanthier in Slant, “Jim Jarmusch managed to abreact his interest in pop music, spectral Elvises, interlocking story lines, and cheesy TV in one brilliant, poetic burst.” And Paper’s Dennis Dermody writes, “The film is luminously photographed by Robby Müller, and there is a funky, deadpan humor and wit to the movie that always leaves me violently ecstatic every time I watch it.”
There’s more from Stomp and Stammer’s Steve Dollar, who uses the occasion to pay tribute to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (who appears as the desk clerk in the film), “one of the freakiest musical personas of all time,” and Chris Herrington of the Memphis Flyer, who calls Mystery Train a “landmark work of made-in-Memphis cinema.”
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Press Notes
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