The Criterion Collection

Fans of our release of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles last year can get a healthy second dose of Chantal Akerman with our new Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies, which features five groundbreaking works that came out in the years just before and just after that domestic-space masterpiece, including News from Home, Je tu il elle, and Les rendez-vous d’Anna. It’s an “inarguably vital Eclipse box set,” trumpets GreenCine’s Aaron Hillis as a prelude to his new podcast interview with Akerman. The brilliant Belgian filmmaker also turns up in an interview for Moving Image Source with Melissa Anderson, who writes, “Thanks to Chantal Akerman in the Seventies, viewers can finally see the other vital, rarely screened films that the director made during that groundbreaking decade of her career.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim praises the films in the box set as “sensual and severe in equal measure, notable both for their formal rigor and their emotional intensity,” before proclaiming Akerman’s News from Home “one of the all-time great New York movies.” And we’ll leave the last word to Gay City News’ Steve Erickson, who says, simply, “No one else made films like hers.”

More from the Onion’s A.V. Club.

4FEB10: Praise from the New York Times’ Dave Kehr.