Both Erin Donovan and James Van Maanen volunteered to work their way through Criterion's recently released Agnes Varda collection. And while the odds are they'll more or less agree on the overall quality, each has their own unique takes on these films. We'll start with Le Bonheur (1965).

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Agnes Varda's third feature film examines the viability of monogamy in the age of free love and the search for happiness in a time of total unrest. Le Bonheur is similar in concept and cynicism to Jean Luc Godard's Pierrot Le Fou (both released in 1965, no less) but contains none of the bitterness of Pierrot. Varda's deep affection for each of her characters even as they make terrible choices that bring them to eventual doom makes a statement about sexual politics and the fleeting nature of human affection that feels modern even watching it forty-three years after it was made.

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Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****½

The pre-code era reigned in Hollywood roughly from the end of the silent era to the middle of 1934 when the Hays Code began cracking down on certain aberrant behavior in movies. In 2006, Warner Home Video released the tantalizing Volume One of its Forbidden Hollywood Collection, featuring two different cuts of the ultimate pre-code movie Baby Face (1933). That was a keeper, but pre-code fans know that there are dozens more films out there, and many not yet available on video or DVD. Forbidden Hollywood: Volume 2 has finally surfaced with -- count 'em -- five new films. Each one is more seductive than the last, though I'm afraid none of them quite rank with the astonishing Baby Face. The new set begins elegantly with two Oscar-winning Norma Shearer films, The Divorcee (1930) and A Free Soul (1931). Shearer was a star for a short while, with a strikingly angular, beautiful face (you can almost see the color of her eyes through the black and white film) and an astonishingly natural onscreen skill; her co-stars generally look clumsy in her presence. But her marriage to studio boss Irving Thalberg earned her a kind of scorn, and she didn't seem particularly suited to the limelight. She retired from film at the end of the 1930s and died in 1983.

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Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Even though Swedish director Alf Sjöberg made his first film--The Strongest--in 1929, it wasn't until the 1940s that he really focused on movies. Before that he was more renowned for directing plays for the Royal Dramatic Theater, establishing himself as one of Sweden's most important stage directors. It shouldn't come as a surprise then that Miss Julie, one of Sjöberg's most celebrated films, is an adaptation of August Strindberg's 1888 one act play of the same title.

Made in 1951, Miss Julie shared with Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan that year's Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival--an honor that Sjöberg had also received in 1946 for his Torment, Ingmar Bergman's first official screenwriting credit. According to several film reviewers, Bergman once admitted that Sjöberg was sort of a mentor to him. Whether or not that's fully accurate, in Miss Julie (for which Sjöberg himself wrote the script) one can certainly detect a resemblance to Bergman's affinity for disconcerting subject matters, and strikingly acute directing methods.

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Reviewer: Diana Slampyak
Rating (out of 5): ****½

The Postwar Kurosawa box set from Criterion's Eclipse collection shows an artist in tune with his country's plights, pronouncing them out loud and stimulating thought on what's to be done about them. We see an Akira Kurosawa not dealing with the samurai past, but with the there and then after the war. Themes such as economics, "insanity," protest, and privacy come into play in these often extremely powerful films, films we can still relate to. We might, for example, watch The Seven Samurai to get a sense of Japanese history, but we watch these films to not only understand Japan in the late '40s and early '50s, but also to correlate their events with those in our own lives. Thus, each film in this series should be watched with a critical eye ready to easily absorb the conflicts and trials within and see the validity of these today.

One Wonderful Sunday (1947) is a paean to poor, young lovers everywhere, a plight we all can understand and empathize with. Yuso (Isao Numazaki) and his fiancée, Masako (Chieko Nakakita), meet up for a usual Sunday date, only to discover that between the two of them, they have only 35 yen. Even that's not much in 1947, so they do what they can, finding free or nearly free things to do. Yuso remains mostly depressed as the more cheerful - and ever-resourceful - Masako invents ways to entertain him. First they go to an open house, where she tries to get him interested in playing house. But he'll have none of it. They eventually go see about renting a real apartment together, almost hook up in his apartment, and then run into an abandoned amphitheatre. As Masako cheerleads Yuso on to play baseball with some kids, take her for coffee and to a dancehall, and otherwise try to engage him and will away his depression, Yuso only becomes more sullen. Until, that is, they get to the amphitheatre and forces conspire to change his demeanor - and ours. Though a little hokey at the end, the film offers a very realistic view of post-war Japanese economics and the problems it forced upon the younger generation. Only Kurosawa could pull off this sort of romantic comedy with social commentary - and he does it nicely in this treasure. **** stars out of five.

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Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Early works in artists' careers can be fascinating, giving viewers a window with which to view later greatness, and that certainly is the case with the new Criterion Collection release of Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948). The crisp digital transfer will give fans of the venerated Japanese director the opportunity to see (the first viewing for some – this is the official region 1 debut on the DVD format; GreenCine previously offered an import) what the master called his first "real" film – that is, the first time he had complete creative control on a project. Perhaps more notably, it was his first collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, beginning one of the greatest cinematic collaborations in the history of film, which ran through 1965’s Red Beard.

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Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ****

Sansho the Bailiff is one of those rare films so superbly crafted there don't seem to be honorable enough words to describe it. It will make you feel grateful for your own life. This heart-wrenching masterwork, beautifully restored in its black and white glory by Criterion, won Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi his second Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1954. (Incidentally, that's the same year Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai came out--a stellar year for Japanese cinema.)

The film is set in 11th century feudal Japan, where the family of a certain provincial governor suddenly goes from being on top of society to having their lives turned upside down (and kicked while they're down). It all starts when the father, a benevolent ruler by all accounts, is forcibly removed from office and taken away, leaving the mother, Tamaki (played with conviction by Kinuyo Tanaka, who went on to become the first woman director in Japan), and her two children, Zushio and Anju, to fend for themselves. Things go wrong almost immediately when they encounter bandits out in the countryside who split up mother and children, eventually selling the mother into prostitution and the brother and sister into slave labor.

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Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): *****

Although not everyone will agree, to my mind few films yield as much satisfaction upon repeated viewings as recently departed Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 existential masterpiece L'Avventura. It gains on second and third viewing, because at that point you already know that the alluring yet troubled Anna (Lea Massari), who has mysteriously disappeared in broad daylight on a tiny island off the coast of Italy, [[**spoiler alert**]] will never be seen again (not that the characters seem too concerned about this by the end), and you see there is no hope of redemption for Anna's wayward lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti).

In addition, you will have realized this film is really an epic visual love poem to both Monica Vitti, who plays Anna's close friend Claudia, and who also succumbs to Sandro's apparently irresistible charms--as well as to the pure joy of cinema itself, a medium Antonioni obviously relished more as a canvas for his art than merely a vehicle to tell a linear narrative. In this way he can be compared to his fellow countryman Fellini, as was often the case throughout his career, although such comparisons are somewhat hollow-both men were inspired originals and therefore irreplaceable in their own right.

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Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): *****

Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, certainly the only MFA thesis film I can name that made the Library of Congress' National Film Registry on the first ballot, really is a national treasure.

Shot in Watts over a year of weekends for less than $10,000, the film has both a timelessness and an appropriate aimlessness to it. This is an everyday world, blue-collar and poor and real, where acquiring a used engine is an all-day proposition (and the moment where the men lose the engine in an accident is the one frustrating moment in the whole film for me). The main character is Stan (Henry Gale Sanders, one of the few professionals in the cast), a sensitive father of two who has become detached from his life, and from his wife, while working too long in a slaughterhouse. He comes home crabby, and you would, too, if you worked on the killing floors, cutting up sheep for a living, being poor and tired and trying to feed your family. The film is filled with indellible images: the boy wearing a hound-dog mask; the little girl (played by Burnett's real-life daughter) who, with her doll, listens and claps to soul music; the windshield-less car; the boys throwing rocks at trains and the battered ruins of abandoned buildings in South Central L.A. (and at each other); the silhouetted dance between Stan and his lonely wife.

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Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ** (add a half-star if you're seduced by gorgeous scenery)
DVD Quality Rating (out of 5): ****

As an enormous fan of much of the work of British stalwart David Lean, it pains me to say that there is so much wrong with the Lean-directed/Robert Bolt-scripted Ryan's Daughter (though the quality of the DVD itself is excellent) that it's difficult to know just how to begin cataloging it. Let's start with the fact that there is - maximum - one full hour worth of actual content here, yet the film drags on for well over three. The oft-used phrase "What were they thinking?" comes to mind throughout, but I cannot provide any intelligent answer. It's not that the movie lacks for themes, encompassing as it does W.W.I, the British occupation of Ireland, "the Troubles," informers, marriage, adultery and the dismal lack of sex education in the Ireland of this time period (the best of this "education," interestingly enough, comes via a priest). Yet the Lean/Bolt handling of all this, while adhering to the director's perfectly appointed style that combines expansive vistas and restrained emotions (this time, with more obvious sexuality than his movies usually possess), is surprisingly heavy-handed.

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The Life and Death of Col Blimp is not my favorite of Michael Powell’s films, but to me, this is like saying one Van Gogh is not quite as good as another – each film, each work, is a masterpiece in its own way, from a director who never made a weak film. And in Colonel Blimp, there is much to delight, much to revel in. What also occurred to me while watching the Criterion DVD is how a filmmaker who in many ways worked in a world, a time, a place so foreign to Americans in my generation, can still captivate so completely. With this particular film it takes a bit more time to become involved, but as with all of Powell's films is well worth the effort. What it has, too, is an absolutely magisterial performance at its center – that of Roger Livesey, who literally gave the performance of a lifetime as the film follows his Clive Candy over the course of 40 years, from his days as a young soldier to his last days as part of the old guard – as he ages, Livesey is never less than convincing throughout. Unlike a lot of more recent performances in which actors age through makeup and overacting, Livesey is extraordinary, making you forget he’s not actually aging. He would act in non-Powell films but it's his work in Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where I'm Going and particularly Blimp that he will forever (I hope) be remembered. (The DVD features a slight but insightful documentary about the film in which Stephen Fry does a rather keen and affectionate impression of Livesey)

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