Press Notes

In The Onion A.V. Club, Scott Tobias praises The Ice Storm's disc's "surprisingly casual and jokey commentary track by longtime collaborators Lee and writer-producer James Schamus," plus "thoughtful reflections by the actors, Moody, and key crewmembers" and "four strong deleted scenes." As for the film itself: it "thrives in the particulars, with uniformly strong performances, enveloping period detail, and a coda suffused with anguish and an ironic glint of salvation."

Chris Nashawaty gives Mafioso an "A" rating in the March 28 issue of Entertainment Weekly: "extras on this pristine black-and-white gem include a 1996 interview with director Alberto Lattuada, an early Fellini collaborator. Mafioso is every bit as timeless as the Maestro's better-known classics."

In Time Out New York, Bilge Ebiri writes on The Last Emperor: "Bertolucci's panoramic masterwork presents the reverse of what ennobling historical films usually try to teach us: Pu Yi has no power; from his unwitting elevation to the throne to his unexpected abdication to his pathetic attempts to regain his past glory, this is a man acted upon by history, not the other way around. The result is a bewildering masterpiece--a glorious film about an inglorious man."

In the March 21 issue of Entertainment Weekly, Chris Nashawaty reviews The Ice Storm, Ang Lee's portrait of 1970s suburban malaise. Nashawaty praises Lee's "fun, gossipy commentary" and the disc's extras: "In new interviews, the cast still seems surprised by how much bite the movie has beneath its groovy formica and polyester trappings. ''It's one of those films that lingers with you and sits with you and is uncomfortable,'' says Elijah Wood. After seeing Lee's self-help suburban hedonists try and fail to make sense of a world that's changing too fast, you have to agree."

Dave Kehr reviews Pierrot le fou in The New York Times. Kehr writes: "Seen today, particularly in the crystal-clear, brightly saturated print offered [in] a lushly appointed double-disc edition" that showcases Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina "at their most glowingly movie-star beautiful...Pierrot le fou remains a great movie, masterly on a number of levels."

Scott Tobias writes on The Last Emperor in The Onion A.V. Club: "The new four-disc Criterion edition makes an imposing and mostly convincing argument for the film as a truly great epic, one which attempts to capture the political turmoil that gripped 20th-century China without getting too reductive or bogged down in minutiae. Through the story of Pu Yi, the footnote of an emperor who ended the Ching Dynasty, Bertolucci tells the larger story of an era where individuals were caught in the swells of history."

In The New York Sun, Gary Giddins writes on Mafioso, Alberto Lattuada's mordant dark comedy: "Mafioso is built like a snare...[with] a perfectly judged performance by Alberto Sordi, [Lattuada's film] goes beyond catchphrases and soap opera to capture the chilling reality" of the Sicilian Mafia.

Three February releases are profiled in the Philadelphia City Paper: Pierrot le fou, presented in an "eye-popping transfer," is "vibrantly alive in every moment, a tragic intellectual slapstick comedy." "Criterion is gambling that 20 years is room enough for reappraisal" of Alex Cox's manic, long-maligned Walker, which screened recently as part of the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center. And reviewing The Smiling Lieutenant, part of the Eclipse set Lubitsch Musicals, Sam Adams writes that "the movie's wicked charms are irresistible, presaging the daring, even shocking forthrightness of Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise."