Criterion Annnounces November 2011 Releases
The Criterion Collection has officially announced their November line-up, which includes an exceptional assortment of titles from some of cinema’s most revered filmmakers. Criterion has announced The Three Colors Trilogy, a Sidney Lumet classic, some long awaited Blu-ray upgrades, and Sabu! Fanny and Alexander, 1982 (November 8th, 2011) High-definition digital restorations of the television and […]
Blu-ray Review: The Battle of Algiers
First released in 1967 against a backdrop of violence in American cities, The Battle of Algiers (Battaglia di Algeri, La) was hailed by the Black Panther Party and other radical leftist groups as a handbook for urban revolution. In 2003, the Pentagon hosted a special screening of the film, in hopes it would shed light […]
Blu-ray Review: Léon Morin, Priest
Aiming for a wider audience in 1961, the often overlooked director Jean-Pierre Melville (Les enfants terribles, Le samourai) adapted Beatrix Beck’s autobiographical novel The Passionate Heart. Set in a French village during World War II, Léon Morin, Priest is about a young woman falling in love with a handsome, radical young priest who’s fully aware […]
Blu-ray Review: High and Low
Best known for his samurai films, director Akira Kurusawa also made some fine crime films. One of his best is 1963’s Tengoku to jigoku, in Japanese, or High and Low, in America. Kurosawa loved western cinema, often taking his cues from the Hollywood western and film noir. Elements of the American western are readily apparent […]
Criterion Announces October 2011 Releases
Criterion has revealed a new batch of titles, all of which will street in October. These include Zoltán Korda’s 1939 epic The Four Feathers, Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman and Island of Lost Souls, a 1932 Erle C. Kenton tale based on H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. As part […]
Blu-ray Review: Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Long before Disney’s 1991 animated triumph, Jean Cocteau filmed Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bete) in 1946, in France. Before the days of CGI, and modern creature makeup, Cocteau simply dazzles. Known primarily as a poet and a painter before the release of the film, Cocteau’s version of the much-filmed Jean-Marie Leprince […]
Blu-ray Review: The Music Room
In its long history, India has gone through many changes. In his 1958 film The Music Room, writer/director Satyajit Ray deals with the familiar conflict between the nobility and the unpedigreed rich, between those who dwell in the past and those who welcome the future. Based on the short story Jalsaghar by Tarashankar Banerjee, Ray […]
Blu-ray Review: Naked
Like other films by British writer-director Mike Leigh—Life is Sweet (1990), Secrets & Lies (1996), Vera Drake (2004)—Naked is a tough, unflinching look at class conflict, sexual insecurity, and identity crisis in working class England. Naked is by no means an easy thing to watch. At the center of it all, is a young man […]
Blu-ray Review: People On Sunday
One of the last silents produced in Germany, 1930’s People On Sunday involved five young filmmakers, unknowns at the time, who would later become Hollywood heavyweights. Originated from a reportage by Curt Siodmak (screenwriter, The Wolf Man, I Walked With a Zombie), and turned into a screenplay by Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment), shot […]
Blu-ray Review: The Makioka Sisters
Based on Junichiro Tanizaki’s epic novel Sasameyuki (‘A Light Snowfall’), The Makioka Sisters covers the complex relationships of four sisters from a haughty upper middle-class Osaka family. The year is 1938. The two eldest sisters, Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi) and Sachiko (Yoshiko Sakuma), are married. Yukiko (Sayuri Yoshinaga) must marry before her younger sister Taeko (Yuko […]