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

L' Age D'Or (1930) marks not only Luis Buñuel's feature debut, but also the ill-fated ending of a rather unusual, yet extremely creative, collaboration. Having enjoyed a successful cooperation while making their much talked about short Un Chien Andalou (1928), Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, two of the most well respected surrealist artists of the era, attempted to replicate their experience. Sadly, well before L'Age was completed their friendship was fractured for good.

Supposedly, when the film opened for the first time in Paris it started a riot, which eventually led to it being banned by the French government. Even though L'Age makes little in the way of sense, at least in the linear, plot driven and conventional way that mainstream movies do, one can easily understand why it inspired such strong reactions.

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

Director Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990) suffered for his art. Nearly age 40, and bored with documentaries and other films that were Soviet-approved, he balked and began making films for his own pleasure. From there, he suffered years of butting heads with the authorities, arrested, prohibited and otherwise hounded, he managed to squeeze out only a few more films in his career. Now Kino Video has released a four-disc box set of essential Parajanov films: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), The Color of Pomegranates (1968), The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988); watching his breakthrough feature Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors reveals an undeniable sense of joy -- and even release -- in every frame.

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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: Elizabeth Hille
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Nicholas Roeg's 1973 supernatural thriller, based on the short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don't Look Now remains creepy. Set in wintertime Venice, the film slowly chronicles the dismantling of Laura (Julie Christie) and John's (Donald Sutherland) guilt in the aftermath of their young daughter's drowning. Without giving too much away, the bare bones of the plot is simple: The child drowns in her red raincoat in their backyard, the couple go to Venice because John has work there as an architect restoring an old church, Laura meets two elderly sisters—one has the gift of second sight—and begins spending time with them, which alleviates some of her grief. John's unhappy about this and it adds tension to their marriage.

While it's true that time might have tamed some of the film's eroticism and terror, time has not eroded Roeg's ability to create labyrinthine anxiety and atmospheric tension though his direction and editing. The decaying, claustrophobic streets of Venice provide the perfect setting for how guilt is disintegrating the couples' psyches, albeit in different ways. Critics of the film have complained about its pace, calling it plodding, but without the slowness, the actors wouldn't have been able to carefully reveal the cracks in how the shared grief affects Laura and John together, and separately. Roeg incrementally induces paranoia without the viewer realizing exactly why she's getting creeped out.

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Reviewer: Jonathan Marlow
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Czech surrealist, filmmaker, painter and celebrated animator Jan Svankmajer has crafted a number of fantastic films over the decades but arguably none finer than his latest, Lunacy, now finally available on DVD. Adapted loosely from the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade, Svankmajer's "philosophical horror film" explores the ripe territories of the infamous Theatre du Grand Guignol where inmates don't merely take over the asylum but surround us everywhere. Although seemingly set in the eighteenth century, the film accurately embodies our contemporary culture of collapse.

Actors Pavel Liska and Jan Triska, unfortunately little-known in this country, are used to great effect as the proverbial cat and mouse of the tale. But who is the cat and who is the mouse? Lunacy is Svankmajer's masterpiece, surpassing even his exceptional Faust in pure inventiveness.

(See also Michael Guillen's concise review.)

Posted by at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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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Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

How odd to discover Tickets the same day that Terence Rafferty's interesting piece on "auteur-itis" appeared in The New York Times (as referenced on Greencine Daily). Rafferty tells us of the war between the director (Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu) and the screenwriter (Guillermo Arriaga) of Babel and 21 Grams over the question of who's really the auteur. Perhaps this tiresome twosome can muster the intelligence and humility to watch Tickets, an auteur-less inspiration that makes use of three different directors (Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach), three different writers (Olmi, Kiarostami and Paul Laverty) and three different cinematographers (Olmi, Mahmoud Kalari and Chris Menges) to create a surprisingly seamless film that parcels out four stories amongst these nine world-class moviemakers (including the writers and cinematographers here).

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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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Carl Theodor Dreyer made only four sound films in his luminous career, in addition to some classic silents, but he made an impact on film history like few others. As Gary Morris wrote in his excellent essay in Bright Lights Film Journal, "These were independent works, shot mostly with actors unknown outside Denmark, dismissed as perverse and uncommercial and thus poorly distributed beyond Europe. Dreyer's slow, deliberate, gorgeously lit stories about vampires, witch trials, resurrection, faith, and infidelity were mostly rejected as old-fashioned even when they debuted; and it's true that he worked in conservative forms like the chamber play, and with demanding stylistic strategies like the long take. But more than any director, Dreyer is sui generis, and his films now appear among the most daring in cinema, with a visionary power that makes them unique."

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