Smart Words About Cinema
French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris 1923-1928 (Flicker Alley) presents of the stateside DVD debut of five silent classics from Film Albatros, a French studio founded by Russian artists: The Burning Crucible, Kean, The Late Mathias Pascal, Gribiche, and The New Gentlemen. Three of the films star Ivan Mosjoukine, the great Russian actor who fled [...]
“Jubal” (Criterion) “3:10 to Yuma” (Criterion) Delmer Daves was a Hollywood pro with a long career and an impressive filmography. He established himself as a screenwriter with a series of light comedies and romantic melodramas (including the original 1939 Love Affair) before stepping behind the camera with the World War II adventure Destination Tokyo. Like [...]
As the story goes, Ray Harryhausen was inspired to explore the possibilities of stop-motion animation after seeing King Kong with his best friend. That said friend was Ray Bradbury makes the story irresistible. That Harryhausen went on to apprentice under Willis O’Brien, the very man who sculpted and animated the king of the jungle and [...]
Pierre Etaix (Criterion) Circus acrobat, clown, cabaret star, artist, actor, and for a brief time director, Pierre Etaix (pronounced eh-TEX) is one of the great comedy treasures of France. It wasn’t meant to be a secret, but his relatively small body of work as a director—he made five features (four comedies and a documentary) and [...]
Jackie Chan’s landmark action spectacles “Police Story” and “Police Story 2″ debut on Blu-ray stateside this week on a double-feature disc (reviewed on Videodrone here). These films were blockbuster smashes in Hong Kong and international hits everywhere except the U.S., and they changes the course of Hong Kong film industry. If you like this brand [...]
“Man may select a wife – but he should be careful whose wife he selects.” The Circle, based on the 1921 play by W. Somerset Maugham and directed by Frank Borzage in 1925, is a fascinating and ultimately moving film that defies expectations. It slips between high melodrama and drawing room comedy, with jabs of [...]
Gate of Hell (Criterion), aka Jigokumen, was one of the very first color films made in Japan, and the first color Japanese film to be seen in the west. The 1953 samurai tragedy won the Grand Prix at Cannes (the first Japanese film to receive the award) and a special Academy Award for Best Foreign [...]
“This story is true. I give it as it is, without embellishment.” That’s an understatement of an opening remark. A Man Escaped (Criterion) is a mesmerizing meeting of opposites: a prison escape thriller directed by the austere, introspective Robert Bresson. Based on the memoir by Andre Devigny, a member of the French Resistance imprisoned and [...]
I’ve been waiting quite literally for decades for a widescreen release of Sam Fuller’s China Gate (Olive) on home video. Long overdue on disc, it has never been made available widescreen on video of any kind, relegated to pan-and-scan on the long out-of-print VHS release and on every TV or cable showing I’ve ever found. [...]
Created by author S.S. Van Dine in 1926, Philo Vance was a gentleman detective, a man of culture and high society manners, and he became one of the most popular screen sleuths of the thirties, before the invasion of the tough guy private eyes and hard boiled cops of novels and film noir. There were [...]
Zero Dark Thirty (Sony) has been praised as the best American film of 2012. It’s also been accused of justifying American torture of detainees and turned into a political football by members of congress demanding an investigation into the intelligence provided to the filmmakers by the administration. That’s testament to the complexity of the film [...]
Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence (20th Century Fox Cinema Archives) Glenn Ford made his feature debut in this 1939 populist drama, a road movie about riding the rails across America in what would be the final years of the Depression. While he’s fourth billed (behind Jean Rogers, Raymond Walburn, and Marjorie Rambeau), he’s the [...]
This is Not a Film (Palisades Tartan) is one of the bravest films of recent memory. While Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was under house arrest awaiting appeal — he had been prosecuted for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic” and sentenced [...]
Silent Souls, the meditative third feature from Russian filmmaker Aleksey Fedorchenko, is described as a road movie, and it is, though the journey itself is as much ritual as it is travel. But it’s also a spiritual journey, a remembrance, a rumination on a life and a cultural identity, a symbolic odyssey that recalls the [...]
Holy Motors (Vivendi) is a film that almost defies description. From its enigmatic opening scenes, which sends the viewers into a mysterious voyage a la Alice through the looking glass that ends up in a movie theater, Holy Motors is a celebration of the magic, imagination, and primal power of the movies. Director Leos Carax [...]