3Jul09
“If you want a break from all the summer bombast, My Dinner with André is out . . . in a fabulous new two-disc package,” suggests NPR’s Glenn McDonald in a review of the new Criterion special edition of Louis Malle’s 1981 high-minded gabfest. “Here’s a movie that more or less does the impossible: it consists entirely of two friends having a quiet conversation over dinner, and it’s riveting.”
Joining in the dialogue about this “fascinating, deceptively simple movie” is the National Post of Canada’s Chris Knight: “The film flies in the face of the show-don’t-tell rule of moviemaking, but so expertly that, even though you have just spent two hours watching two guys eat dinner, your mind’s eye will take away ideas, images, even sounds that exist only as spoken words.” Jen Chaney, in the Washington Post, writes that My Dinner with André is “cinema’s quintessential conversation.” And perhaps most persuasive is the Dallas Morning News’s Chris Vognar: “Listen to what André Gregory and Wallace Shawn actually say over their epic dinner, and you might just get your mind blown.”
You can also listen to critic Amy Taubin discussing the film on Blogtalkradio’s Back to Midnight program, broadcast Tuesday night and available now in a podcast. In the interview, Taubin (who wrote an essay for the release) analyzes the much-acclaimed (and parodied!) work from a film-critical and personal perspective: she was an actor in the sixties and early seventies and knew actor-writer Shawn and theater director Gregory, and the experimental-theater-world they discuss, well. She also shares her evolving feelings about the film. Today, she says, even more than at the time, “I’m incredibly moved by that idea of a passionate quest to find a transcendental experience, a meaning in life.”
3Jul09
It’s often said that there’s never been a movie quite like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. But in paying tribute to this French New Wave landmark on the occasion of its release in Criterion DVD and Blu-ray editions, some critics have noted that its unique style has been so influential on other films that it now might seem . . . strangely familiar.
This “graceful, haunting movie puzzle . . . , photographed in widescreen black and white by the great Sacha Vierny,” has “a visual texture that has exerted an influence over everything from Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to Ridley Scott’s commercials,” writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. And in his Los Angeles Times review, Dennis Lim adds to the list of descendants of this “sumptuous . . . unrivaled conversation starter”: “You can detect its imprint in the death-haunted reverie of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, the mazelike structures of Peter Greenaway’s puzzle-box films, the sinister corridors of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.” (The L’s Cullen Gallagher also picks up on that Kubrick connection.)
IFC’s Michael Atkinson, however, sticks with the source, writing that “Resnais’ saturnine masterpiece remains exactly the film experience it was originally intended to be: a dream inside a puzzle inside a story that never actually takes place. Is there a better, more eloquent way to define movies?” And Time puts it most simply, on its “Short List of Things to Do”: “It’s still ravishing, confounding, and fun.”
Related: At Paste, Sean Gandert takes a closer look at Resnais’ documentary shorts legacy, specifically two works featured on Criterion’s Last Year at Marienbad editions: Toute la mémoire du monde and Le chant du styrène.
And heads up: Critic John Powers will be on NPR’s Fresh Air today to discuss Last Year at Marienbad (in New York the show airs on WNYC at 3 p.m.). Check back here for the podcast if you miss it!
27May09
Critics writing about our new Eclipse Series 16, Alexander Korda’s Private Lives, seem to have felt compelled to pick their favorites—and, interestingly, they run the gamut. Turner Classic Movies’ Glenn Erickson calls the collection “a quartet of fine films by the famed producer-director,” but comes down for the 1936 Rembrandt, “the most mature and melancholy . . . , a tender and insightful contemplation of the artist’s relationship to society.” Michael Sragow, writing in the New Yorker, is also a fan of Charles Laughton’s portrayal of the Dutch painter, as well as the actor’s legendary performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII, a pair of films that “prove that the producer-director Korda and the idiosyncratic star Charles Laughton were, in their prime, as formidable a filmmaking team as John Ford and John Wayne or Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro . . . Laughton’s movies, with their meatiness, anchor this set and elevate it to rare artistic heights.”
Meanwhile, DVD Verdict’s Clark Douglas singles out The Rise of Catherine the Great, which Paul Czinner directed and Korda produced: “Czinner made a fine substitute, actually offering a considerably more ‘cinematic’ experience than Korda.” And Dave Kehr, in the New York Times, blazes his own trail: “The major discovery of the Eclipse set is The Private Life of Don Juan . . . As deeply felt as it is merciless, this Don Juan could almost be a lost film by Ernst Lubitsch.”
10May09
“The Hit is what we would now describe as Tarantinoesque,” writes Sonny Bunch in the Washington Times about the Stephen Frears thriller, starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth, and released last week in a Criterion special edition DVD. “The paid killers are alternately funny and menacing, the topics of conversation are rooted in existentialism, and the movie zips along at a quick pace.” In a five-star review for Time Out New York, Hank Sartin also makes the Tarantino connection, citing the film’s theme of “thugs waxing philosophical,” and concluding that it “was both ahead of its time and a throwback.” The Boston Globe’s Tom Russo calls out the acting in particular, noting “how satisfying it is watching Stamp play mind games, and watching Hurt play detached, disgusted, and deadly without wasting a word.”
4May09
Perhaps the most shocking thing about Nagisa Oshima’s infamous, hard-core In the Realm of the Senses and savage ghost story Empire of Passion is just how elegant they are, a couple of critics have noted in their reviews of our special edition DVDs. The former, writes Dennis Demody in Paper, was “a scandal at the time, but it is also an artistic triumph”; and he calls the latter film an “eerily beautiful tale that plays like The Postman Always Rings Twice meets The Ring.” Similarly, in the New York Times, Dave Kehr was struck by how the notorious In the Realm of the Senses plays as “a handsomely designed period piece,” by the way “this profoundly anarchic film is as tightly controlled and precisely calibrated as a tea ceremony.” But Dennis Lim, in the Los Angeles Times, reminds us that this “landmark . . . retains its power to provoke.”
30Apr09
Following the lead of Andrew Sarris’s rave review last week, critics continue to praise Revanche, the brooding crime drama of guilt and retribution opening in theaters today, from Janus Films. “Revanche gets its hooks into you early and leaves them there,” promises Scott Foundas in the Village Voice, an assessment echoed by Noel Murray in the Onion’s AV Club: “Revanche is downright hypnotic . . . [It] conveys the feeling of looming danger, and the cold comfort of blame.” In Time Out New York, Joshua Rothkopf, in his four-star review, even makes a surprising comparison: “While poised at the crossroads of shame and purgation, Revanche works on the level of a higher-minded Death Wish.” (Earlier in the year, Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir called it a “gorgeous, brooding, unpredictable neonoir.”)
Much more than a thriller, though, Revanche is also garnering notices for its human drama. In indieWIRE, Leo Goldsmith claims it’s “nothing short of revelatory, a nondogmatic and warmly humanist morality tale, a weirdly funny character study, and a revenge tale that’s oddly, breathtakingly soft.” And the New York Press’s Armond White is perhaps the most impressed: “A possibly great filmmaker has arrived . . . Through intelligent formalism, Spielmann crafts a penetrating perception of the world and human experience.”
Update (4 MAY 09): “This Oscar-nominated film deserves comparison with grade-A Hitchcock,” writes John Hartl in the Seattle Times. And in the Boston Globe, Wesley Morris offers: “Amid the stillness in Götz Spielmann’s Revanche, there is surprise . . . There’s a moral beauty in the movie’s consideration of violence and vengeance.”
28Apr09
“The wonders never cease in this superb anthology,” exclaims the New York Times’s Dave Kehr in his review of the new Criterion three-disc set Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé. And other critics have been getting along with the new DVD release just as swimmingly.
Many viewers may not have heard of trailblazing underwater documentarian and avant-gardist Jean Painlevé, but, says Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times, his historical importance is undeniable: “Long before the high-definition panoramas of Planet Earth, before even the landmark wildlife documentaries of Richard Attenborough and Jacques Cousteau, a Frenchman named Jean Painlevé was making films that captured the natural world as it had never been seen before.” Lim also notes the inclusion of Yo La Tengo’s eight-film score, “lush, dreamy compositions that add to the amniotic vibe.” And in Artforum, Steve Erickson celebrates the introduction of this pigeonhole-defying filmmaker to a wider American audience.
Update (6 MAY 09): San Francisco Bay Guardian: “an invaluable survey of the director's most extraordinary aquacades.”
1Apr09
More cheers for the rediscovery of Hiroshi Shimizu, in Eclipse Series 15, come from IFC.com’s Michael Atkinson (“Criterion does it again, rescuing a major filmmaker from the quicksand of neglect, happenstance, and/or canonical prejudice, and shoving them into the spotlight”), the L Magazine’s blog (“not only an exciting, long-overdue release but also a historically redefining moment”), and UCLA’s Asia Pacific Arts (“Thanks to this new Eclipse box set, people can now ‘find’ [again] Shimizu—and that’s poetic, period”).
1Apr09
The phrase “the show must go on” gets a dark twist in François Truffaut’s 1980 Oscar-nominated The Last Metro, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu as theater folk who keep working despite the Nazi occupation. “Standing in opposition to that threat,” writes Keith Phipps in the Onion’s A.V. Club, “Truffaut places artistry, compassion, and commitment. Humanity was always his weapon of choice.” And there’s more praise from the San Francisco Chronicle (“Truffaut’s last great film”), Slant (“warmly performed and deftly shot”), and the Washington Times (“a very moving testament to human integrity and survival”).
The Last Metro is now available in DVD and Blu-ray editions.
Update (7APR09): The praise must go on, too, as evidenced by this week’s review in the Austin Chronicle: “Lush and romantic with occasional stylistic nods to the director's origins in the nouvelle vague, The Last Metro was Truffaut’s last masterpiece.”
1Mar09
The words “David Lean” and “laughter” aren’t often used in the same sentence, but our recent reminder of the British drama and epic maker’s good humor, in the form of the DVD release of Hobson’s Choice, may help change that. In the New York Times, Dave Kehr calls this 1954 comedy, about an 1880s Mancunian boot shop proprietor’s battle of wills with his eldest daughter, “a delightful period comedy . . . The spectacle of the staunch, strong-willed Maggie battering her father’s pride while she elevates the subservient Willie into a confident businessman is irresistible, as is the profusion of detail Lean crams into every frame.” Vying for space in that frame is the larger-than-life Charles Laughton, who, Tom Russo writes in the Boston Globe, “is in fine, comically cantankerous form.” The Boston Herald’s James Verniere also lavishes praise on the actor: “Using his bulk and marvelously expressive face to great comic advantage, the great Laughton transforms . . . Hobson into a Victorian-era Lear.”
Still, its unusual display of comedy notwithstanding, the film fits right in with Lean’s more dramatic works, asserts Donna Bowman in the Onion: “Hobson’s Choice embodies the very best of the intimate Lean, while anticipating the startling clarity of vision he would later bring to the North African desert and the Russian steppes.” Similarly, in Slant Jeremiah Kipp argues that Lean’s talents transcended genre: “David Lean simply knew where to put the camera—to tell stories through images that convey a sense of mood, place, character, and conflict . . . Hobson’s Choice is a superb addition to the Lean canon, and a charming and surprising selection by Criterion.”
