Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

It’s the last day of 2008, and all the balloting is finally done. Here’s a rundown of how Criterion rated in the best-DVDs-of-the-year polls:

The Sight & Sound list included Criterion’s “gripping morality tale” Death of a Cyclist, the “incredibly beautiful” The Lovers, the “demented Western” The Furies, and Pierrot le fou, with its “glorious HD transfer.”

Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone each picked out a favorite Criterion release for their respective tallies, the “extravagantly emotional yet movingly thoughtful” Brand Upon the Brain! for the former, and Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, which critic Peter Travers added “looks definitive on BD,” for the latter.

For the Popular Mechanics list of “20 Must-Have Blu-ray HD Epics,” Glenn Kenny cited the “breathtaking” The Third Man, as well as The Last Emperor, which, he wrote, “has been given one of the most gorgeous hi-def renditions ever, by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.” And New York magazine’s annual “Culture Awards” DVD top ten named the “essential” Bottle Rocket (number eight), the “heartbreaking” Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women (number six), and the triumvirate of Walker, White Dog, and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (all tied at number three, as “three of the 1980s’ most overlooked films”).

At IFC Film News, Michael Atkinson took an unusual approach to the annual list-making games, highlighting the best films that “first saw American screens (big or small) on digital video in 2008, be they brand new or decades old.” His favorites included Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le deuxième souffle, William Klein’s Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, and Larisa Shepitko’s “refreshing, heartfelt character portrait” Wings, the latter two from our Eclipse line (Series 9: The Delirious Fictions of William Klein and Series 11: Larisa Shepitko, respectively).

Dave Kehr, at the New York Times, also took a liking to Eclipse. “The most exciting Criterion releases of 2008 came from the company’s new no-frills line, Eclipse, which has been able to move beyond the established art-house classics into less familiar territory,” he wrote, naming Series 10: Silent Ozu—Three Family Comedies and the Shepitko set in particular.

And the Miami Herald called out Mishima: “It’s hard to find a disc released by The Criterion Collection that doesn’t put most other DVDs to shame in terms of the quality of the transfer or the supplements accompanying the film. But the company’s release of Paul Schrader’s 1985 drama Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters was an exceptional production, even by Criterion's standards.”

And finally DVD Movie Central has issued its annual movie awards, and Criterion racked up a few: Best Overall DVD and Best Restoration (70s/80s) for The Last Emperor, Best Re-Issue for Chungking Express, and Best DVD Producing Studio.

Thank you all for watching. Here’s to a great 2009. And, as always, happy viewing!

Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, released earlier this year in a Criterion special edition DVD, begins a one-week theatrical run today at New York’s Film Forum, in a new 35 mm print, and this dazzling, thoroughly unconventional biopic of the controversial Japanese writer Yukio Mishima is getting everyone talking again. “Schrader’s brilliant, baroque biopic comes close to being the filmmaker’s crowning achievement,” proclaims Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. “It’s fetishistic, lyrical, narcissistic, and, at key moments, borderline berserk. In other words, the movie captures its subject to a tee.” Time Out New York’s David Fear calls the film Schrader’s “most formally disciplined work, its textures made more shimmering by the Philip Glass score. A final, enraptured flourish from the age of the Hollywood auteur.” Schrader himself stopped by WNYC radio’s Leonard Lopate Show to discuss the rerelease (as well as the concurrent theatrical premiere of his new film, Adam Resurrected). Click here to listen to a podcast of that program.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Paul Schrader

1985

120 min

Color & Black and White

1.85:1

Criterion Blu-ray editions debut next week—with Chungking Express, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bottle Rocket, and The Third Man—and the reviews are already coming in. “Chungking Express, Criterion’s first Blu-ray release, is nothing short of magnificent,” say the folks at the “source for everything related to Blu-ray,” Blu-ray.com. “The video and audio treatments are superb and exactly what I was hoping to see and hear. I really feel like we are entering a new era where important cinema will finally be treated with the deserved attention no other format has been able to secure.”

At the Digital Bits, editor Bill Hunt answers his own question, “Is this first Blu-ray disc release from the Criterion Collection worth the wait?” with a resounding, “I’m delighted to say . . . absolutely!” He continues: “Simply put, this is one of the most deliciously filmlike images I’ve seen on Blu-ray to date . . . If Chungking Express is an indication of the kind of picture and sound quality we can expect on future Blu-rays from Criterion, then I can’t wait to see the next one. BRAVO!”

On The Man Who Fell to Earth, Blu-ray.com had this to say: “The contrast, as expected, is incredibly strong. In fact, the Blu-ray transfer impressively outdoes the standard DVD version with its strong and very detailed visuals, where Anthony B. Richmond’s cinematography simply shines.”

Over at the HDRoom, the Blu-ray Bottle Rocket also makes the grade: “Long story short, this film looks beautiful in high-def. It is not scrubbed, hyper-realistically sharp, or artificially polished like many recent releases . . . It presents a gorgeous filmlike quality.”

And Washington Times film critic Sonny Bunch, in a piece that also includes an interview with Criterion technical director Lee Kline, focuses on the Carol Reed classic: “The sewers of Vienna haven’t looked this good in a long time. Thanks to Blu-ray technology and classic-DVD distributor the Criterion Collection, Joseph Cotten’s famous chase of Orson Welles through the Viennese sewer system in The Third Man finally has been restored to the crisp beauty director Carol Reed envisioned.”

Update (22DEC08): Interview magazine has a “Blu Crush” on all four of Criterion’s new, “essential” Blu-ray releases but hones in on “the quartet’s most inspired facelift,” The Third Man: “Criterion’s transfer approaches the beauty of bygone celluloid—its jaw-dropping richness is like luxurious whole milk after a life of the skimmed stuff.”

Bottle Rocket

Wes Anderson

1996

91 min

Color

1.85:1

Chungking Express

Wong Kar-wai

1994

102 min

Color

1.66:1

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Nicolas Roeg

1976

136 min

Color

2.35:1

The Third Man

Carol Reed

1949

104 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Janus Films’ new 35 mm color restoration of Federico Fellini’s beloved reminiscence Amarcord has begun its nationwide tour and is reminding some critics of the director’s, shall we say, colorful sense of humor. “Kids, dogs, wisecracking old men, and well-proportioned female derrières take up a significant portion of screen time,” notes Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir of Fellini’s bawdy late-career return to childhood, which he otherwise characterizes as “a highly complicated work of memory and fantasy, a grand, theatrical blend of comedy and tragedy that addresses both what he loved and what he hated about the provincial Italian character,” and one that “captures the great Italian director at the peak of his cinematic powers.” In Time Out New York, David Fear calls Amarcord a “fun-house tour through Fellini’s mind” and “memoir as a montage of dirty jokes, historical ironies, sentimental educations, and some of the most lyrical imagery the maestro ever concocted.”

In Artforum, Darrell Hartman uses the occasion of the film’s reissue to muse on the origins and meaning of its title: “The neologism he eventually settled on (a play on “I remember” in Romagnese dialect) carries an appropriate perfume of the unfamiliar and the untranslatable . . . As with the choice of title, he can’t help giving the whole thing a whiff of richness and mystery.”

For Lance Goldenberg, in the Village Voice, Amarcord “remembers” not only Fellini’s ribaldry but also a classic era of art house moviegoing: “Back in the days when art houses were temples of cinema and auteurs their living gods, few filmmakers cast longer shadows than Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman,” he writes, also referring to a simultaneous weeklong run of Fanny and Alexander in New York. “Time and changing tastes took their inevitable toll on both art houses and auteurs, but everything old is new again this week.”

Amarcord

Federico Fellini

1974

123 min

Color

1.85:1

Fanny and Alexander — The Television Version

Ingmar Bergman

1982

312 min

Color

1.66:1

“In its blunt, bludgeoning way, White Dog ranks among the toughest and most probing examinations of racism in American cinema,” writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times this week, on the occasion of Criterion’s special edition of the long-unreleased American cult classic. “Fuller’s brute-force direction gives this outrageous allegory the hyperbolic treatment it demands.”

Now that Fuller’s rough-and-raw fable, about a dog trained to attack black people, has been let out of its cage, critics are chomping at the bit to write about it. In the New York Post, Kyle Smith calls White Dog “an unsettling piece of work so far ahead of its time that, even today, films about racism—for instance, this fall’s flop The Express—seem trifling by comparison.”

Fangoria picked up on the film’s near horror-level imagery, which, Scooter McCraw writes, “is elevated by the thoughtful intelligence of an auteur who is looking to supply more than just cheap and easy thrills.”

And in the current issue of Film Comment, Lisa Dombrowski, author of The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill, has a historical piece on the production and studio suppression of the film (not available online). She describes White Dog as “an impassioned attack on racial hatred and every inch a Fuller film,” also explaining that “Fuller was not a maker of typical social-problem films, and rejected treating subjects with sanitized white gloves and the fixation on uplift with which liberal Hollywood carefully crafted most pictures addressing ‘difficult’ issues.”

And don't miss writer-director Curtis Hanson talking about writing White Dog, tonight, live, at 9:00 p.m., on blogtalkradio.

Update (19DEC08): Michael Atkinson discusses Fuller’s “smacked-face style” and this “Frankenstein tale” at IFC.com. And Entertainment Weekly calls White Dog “an inspired accomplishment by one of our greatest pulp philosophers.”

White Dog

Samuel Fuller

1982

90 min

Color

1.78:1

Leamas, Alec Leamas. Okay, so he might not be as much of a household name as a certain martini-swilling secret agent. But while a new James Bond film is currently in theaters, critics last week were showing their allegiance to Richard Burton’s classic sixties cold-warhorse upon the release of Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold on Criterion DVD. The film, adapted from John le Carré’s best seller, writes Michael Atkinson at IFC.com, “hews so closely to the dishonest and soulless quotidian of spy work that the effect is thoroughly grown-up, a bracing whisky shot after drinking gallons of James Bond–brand pink lemonade.”

In the New York Times, Dave Kehr also pits spy vs. spy: “Released the same year as Thunderball, the fourth of the phenomenally successful James Bond films starring Sean Connery, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold consistently positions itself as a rebuke to the glamorous, action movie ethos of the Bond films: no fancy gadgets or bikini-clad beauties here, only a pinched and dingy universe in which the moral compass spins without direction.” Of course, one doesn’t have to pick sides, but Spy will leave you shaken and stirred.

Update (5DEC08): The Austin Chronicle chimes in on this “thriller by way of kitchen-sink drama.”

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Martin Ritt

1965

112 min

Black and White

1.85:1

Criterion’s release of 10 Years of Rialto Pictures has critics giving thanks to the esteemed distribution company this holiday-time. Introducing his interview with Rialto cofounder Bruce Goldstein, Glenn Kenny asks, “Where would we cinephiles be without Rialto Pictures? More to the point, where wouldn’t we be? It’s through this distribution company’s work that we’re able to see gorgeous new prints of stone classics such as Reed’s The Third Man, Godard’s Contempt, and Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, not to mention timeless entertainments such as Dassin’s Rififi and Honda’s Godzilla. Without Rialto, Jean-Pierre Melville’s monumental Army of Shadows would have never gotten its belated American premiere. And so on.” Mick LaSalle also sings the praises of Rialto Pictures, at SFGate, as does Screen’s Peter Stamelman, who calls the ten-film box set, “an indispensable purchase for high school, university, and public libraries.” It also made the New Yorker’s list.

Army of Shadows

Jean-Pierre Melville

1969

145 min

Color

1.85:1

Contempt

Jean-Luc Godard

1963

103 min

Color

2.35:1

Just when you thought it was safe to return to the tripod, he’s baa-ack. “Cassavetes earned a belated place in film history,” writes Darrell Hartman in his Artforum piece marking the Criterion breakout releases of A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Once he earned that place, though, he never budged. Hartman muses on the famously independent American actor-filmmaker’s “stubborn disregard for the traditional rules of planning and shooting a movie,” as well as on his difficult relationships with his audiences, critics, and producers. And that abrasiveness, Hartman argues, is played out in the dynamics between the characters in Cassavetes’ famously raw films. In comparing the seemingly wildly different protagonists in Woman and Bookie, the writer finds both Mabel and Cosmo to be victims of the same external forces, “constantly molding themselves for a world of impatient spectators . . . Few nonperiod American movies have made social pressures and influences feel so ever present.”

Meanwhile, in the New Yorker this week, Richard Brody uses the occasion of the DVD releases to focus on Chinese Bookie, which he claims was an artistic breakthrough for Cassavetes that “set the stage for his daringly personal later works.” He sees the film’s story of a small-time criminal as perhaps autobiographical: “Cassavetes avoids psychological motivation in favor of a Beckett-like opacity and absurd humor, and turns the story into a portrait of an artist . . . Cosmo is no ordinary pander but an auteur of sorts.” And, of course, Cassavetes is no ordinary auteur.

A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie are also still available in the Criterion eight-disc box set John Cassavetes: Five Films.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

John Cassavetes

1976

135 min

Color

1.85:1

A Woman Under the Influence

John Cassavetes

1974

155 min

Color

1.85:1

This week, the New York Times compiled its special annual holiday movie preview, and judging by Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek’s enthusiasm for a slew of upcoming DVD releases for November and December, it seems critics are looking forward to what’s going to be on the small screen as much as on the large. Taylor’s first choice is Criterion’s upcoming edition of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, which he calls a “comedy of romantic befuddlement . . . Chungking Express is one of those rare classics that isn’t just admired but cherished.” Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, on the other hand, is a film that hasn’t been fully embraced for many years. Taylor explains the controversy surrounding this film, preventing its theatrical release in 1982 and keeping it long misunderstood (and unseen), before concluding: “White Dog is among his [Fuller’s] most potent films, and also his most elegant, thanks to the photography of Bruce Surtees and Ennio Morricone’s score . . . It should never have taken this long for Americans to see White Dog.”

Meanwhile, Zacharek touts Criterion’s release of Douglas Sirk’s wild melodrama Magnificent Obsession. Much has been written about Sirk’s gorgeous compositions and social commentary in such films as All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, and Zacharek extends that praise to this earlier film: “Sirk’s placement of nature in relation to humans—with everything painted in lush colors, brighter than those of real life—amounts to a kind of visual optimism, a reassurance that not even the biggest problems are as dire as they might seem. These are larger-than-life issues rendered on a human scale.”

Chungking Express

Wong Kar-wai

1994

102 min

Color

1.66:1

Magnificent Obsession

Douglas Sirk

1954

108 min

Color

2.00:1

White Dog

Samuel Fuller

1982

90 min

Color

1.78:1

“Greek director Costa-Gavras is like Oliver Stone with subtlety,” declares Chris Nashawaty in his Entertainment Weekly review of Missing. More than two decades have passed since Costa-Gavras’s political thriller won awards around the world (including the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Academy Award for its screenplay), but our recent two-disc DVD release of the film is wowing a new generation of critics. Of the filmmaker’s intense dramatization of the real-life search for vanished American writer Charles Horman in Chile during the American-aided coup that put dictator Augusto Pinochet in power, Leba Hertz writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Costa-Gavras makes the story move like a thriller . . . The acting is great across the board, and the story is still relevant decades later.” 

One of the film’s key lasting ingredients is the performance of Jack Lemmon, as Charles’s crumbling, desperate father. “Lemmon was perhaps the quintessential everyman of American cinema, a reliably down-to-earth performer who was equally good at playing the put-upon hero in Billy Wilder comedies and embodying an average, relatable guy in dramas like The China Syndrome and Glengarry Glen Ross . . . So it’s especially heartbreaking to watch Lemmon’s performance in Missing,” writes Scott Tobias in the Onion.

Missing

Costa-Gavras

1982

122 min

Color

1.85:1