Press Notes

In the January/February 2008 issue of Film Comment, Jake Perlin hails Walker as "an inspired selection from the Universal vaults. Alex Cox and Rudy Wurlitzer's great, go-for-broke, though deadly serious comedy sent many careening toward the exits. But 20 years on, it seems just about perfect."

Fred Kaplan writes on Akira Kurosawa's underseen I Live in Fear (part of the new Eclipse Postwar Kurosawa box set) in Slate, praising how "Kurosawa shows a world in which the most dreadful dangers are shrugged off as routine...it's remarkable that this film was made, in the only country where atom bombs were dropped on cities, and so soon after the fact."

Agnès Varda is showing up everywhere these days. The latest issue of V Magazine finds her interviewed by the Museum of Modern Art's senior film curator Laurence Kardish, and in The Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim also interviews the so-called "mother of the French New Wave" (in her words, "an early bird of that spring"). Lim praises her "quietly seismic debut," La Pointe Courte, as does Nicolas Rapold in The New York Sun, who calls it the box set's "big rediscovery...an astonishing work that flaunted the New Wave one-two of maverick reinvention and budget-rate independence."

In "The Genius of Berlin," a New York Review of Books comparison between Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz and its source novel by Alfred Döblin, Ian Buruma remarks that "we would never have been able to appreciate the full beauty of Fassbinder's film if it had not been remastered for the new DVD collection...the original screening on television certainly didn't do it justice, and it is only now that the colors look the way Fassbinder intended."

Dave Kehr reviews 4 by Agnès Varda in The New York Times, calling it a "superbly produced box set" that highlights the work of an "extraordinarily gifted, restlessly inventive filmmaker." Kehr singles out Varda's debut, La Pointe Courte, as the discovery of the set, composed of "spectacularly reproduced" images that each "seem to constitute an individual moment of grace... These are not self-effacing visuals designed to be subsumed by a narrative, but rather images meant to stand alone, generating stories of their own."

Our new Postwar Kurosawa Eclipse set "should substantially rectify a few general misconceptions" regarding Kurosawa's career, according to David Fear in Time Out New York: namely, that Kurosawa was primarily a director of samurai movies, and also that Rashomon marked his "fully formed" emergence as a filmmaker. Instead, Fear praises "the genius of this particular grouping" of resonant, genre-spanning films that address the "then-current state of the nation" in 1940s and 50s Japan.

We're thrilled that such a wide variety of Criterion titles have been featured on so many publications' year-end "best of" lists. Time's Richard Corliss placed Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist at #2, calling the box set "a fitting tribute to a grand and tragic figure." Also highly ranked are Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks and Berlin Alexanderplatz, which "comes to DVD in a restoration of startling clarity and power." In "The Best Non-Theatrical Debuts of '07," Michael Atkinson at IFC News made note of Hiroshi Teshigahara's Pitfall and Raymond Bernard's Wooden Crosses (Eclipse), calling Pitfall "the most impressive film debut of 1962" and Wooden Crosses "arguably the greatest of the early talkie WWI antiwar sagas...peerlessly cynical about military life and its purpose."

Available for the first time on home video, our newly restored edition of Ace in the Hole has been garnering accolades as one of the top DVDs of 2007. "Billy Wilder's ferocious 1951 examination of media-driven frenzy...never loses its timeliness," raves Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker. DVDTalk, ranking it as their top release of the year, writes that Billy Wilder's vitriolic cult classic has been a "holy grail for film fans for decades," and SF Weekly recently deemed Ace in the Hole "the year's most important release: history lesson as cautionary tale."

In The New York Times, Dave Kehr spotlights two January releases: The Naked Prey and Postwar Kurosawa (Eclipse), which brings together five "intriguing films from the least familiar but most prolific period of Akira Kurosawa's long and varied career." Kehr praises Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey for avoiding "the sentimental pictorialism that overwhelms so many movies shot on the African continent...The Naked Prey is a singular achievement that makes you wish Mr. Wilde had caught the directing bug much earlier."

Calling "Criterion's characteristically deluxe double-disc release" "an invaluable public service to cinephiles everywhere," The Onion A.V. Club named the long-unavailable Ace in the Hole one of their Best DVDs of 2007. Also making the list was Two-Lane Blacktop; the A.V. Club reserved special praise for our reprint of Rudy Wurlitzer's screenplay, which "burnishes the legend" of Monte Hellman's 1971 classic.