20Nov09
The Academy Award–winning Howards End, starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins, is back in the spotlight, thanks to Criterion’s new Blu-ray disc. “Pure artistry defines this 1992 film from director James Ivory,” writes Amanda Mae Meyncke in a review for Film.com, “which is as beautiful and timely seventeen years later as the day it was released.” And according to the home-video experts, Howards End has never looked better; it has a restored visual richness to match its emotional lucidity. DVD Talk commends the “immensely vivid presentation” of this “sumptuous, meaningful drama,” while DVD Verdict praises this “involving and rewarding literary adaptation that deserves to be in your collection.”
16Nov09
Interview magazine’s Darrell Hartman is just one of many critics heralding the release of Wings of Desire in Criterion Blu-ray and DVD special editions: “Rilke-inspired interior monologues; Henri Alekan’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography; a glorious score, rich with cellos and angsty choral music—Wim Wenders mixed these ingredients together for Wings of Desire, his 1987 art-house classic about heavenly creatures keeping grim watch over late-communist-era Berlin.” For Paste, Tim Regan-Porter sings the film’s praises, calling it “a masterful work that’s part tone poem, part philosophical treatise, and part love story—not a dramatic tale of love writ large but an exploration of the tiny things that can make life worth loving.”
Time Out New York’s Joshua Rothkopf reminds us, in a four-star review, of the film’s importance to a generation of soon-to-be cinephiles: “Wim Wenders’s 1987 angels-over-Berlin fantasy was a gateway drug to the pleasures of art cinema, a gorgeous reverie.” Of course, Slant’s Bill Weber says, Criterion’s release of this “cultishly adored fantasy” is not just for the already converted: “Even for non-fanatics, this packaging of perhaps the most beloved European film of a generation is heaven-sent.”
5Nov09
Critics are rallying around the Criterion special edition DVD of Costa-Gavras’s benchmark political thriller Z. As Film.com’s Amanda Mae Meyncke cries, “This 1970 Academy Award best foreign film winner is a simultaneous declaration against tyranny and call to arms.” The Dallas Morning News’ Chris Vognar exclaims, “Costa-Gavras’s frenetic masterpiece is no less startling today than it was forty years ago . . . After you watch Criterion’s new edition of Z, delivered in one of the distributor’s customary pristine digital transfers, you might be tempted to stay put, return to the menu, and soak it all in a second time.” And DVD Talk’s Jamie S. Rich writes that this is “a remarkable re-creation of a volatile political tragedy” and “an important, influential picture.”
Leonard Lopate interviewed Costa-Gavras on public radio about Z earlier this year. We told you about it at the time, and you can listen to it again here.
23Oct09
“Mira Nair’s joyous movie about a wedding in Delhi . . . is both her most popular film and her best. It’s her Rules of the Game, an ensemble masterpiece,” writes Michael Wilmington in a review of our new special edition of Monsoon Wedding that is downright jubilant itself. Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News is similarly intoxicated by the 2001 film: “[Its] colors, motion, music, and spirited cross-cultural ensemble convey an infectious sense of unabashed joy and romance.” But Amanda Mae Meyncke, at Film.com, trumps them both with her praise. “Simply put,” she writes, “Monsoon Wedding is one of the finest films I have ever seen.”
14Oct09
If there’s any way to classify Dušan Makavejev’s unclassifiable films, it’s as products of the cinematically revolutionary sixties. And that’s the tack critics took this week in their reviews of our new Eclipse set of the Serbian director’s first three films, Dušan Makavejev—
Free Radical. “Some of the period’s most scathing and elaborate subversions came from, of all places, Communist Yugoslavia, where the best-known cinematic iconoclast was, and remains, Dušan Makavejev, the master of the kinky political comedy,” writes Dennis Lim
in the Los Angeles Times, adding, “In some ways, with his indelible fantasies of sexual freedom and political liberation, Makavejev remains the definitive 1960s filmmaker.”
In the New York Times, Dave Kehr also attests to the works’ persistent vision: “These films may arrive as ghostly dispatches from a vanished country, but thanks to Mr. Makavejev’s bounding wit they seem as full of unruly life as ever.” And IFC.com’s Michael Atkinson finds that “Makavejev’s first three features are dizzy with free love and romantic gravity, reflected in his spontaneous potpourri style of shooting and editing . . . No filmmaker ever had so much high sport with the prevarications of Iron Curtain communism.”
8Oct09
[Updated]
Critics have been deploying appropriately expansive terms in discussing Masaki Kobayashi’s gigantic slab of filmmaking The Human Condition on the occasion of its Criterion DVD release: “magnificent” (Time), “epic” (Time Out Chicago), even “suitably exhausting” (Film Comment). Perhaps the most vivid superlatives, however, have come from Grady Hendrix. In his terrifically enthusiastic review for Slate, Hendrix writes, “Kobayashi’s humanist triumph is finally getting the Western exposure it deserves . . . The Human Condition is as grand in scale and scope as that other antiwar classic, Gone with the Wind.” So if you’re trying to decide whether to devote nine and a half hours to Kobayashi’s devastating, existential war film, take it from Hendrix: “Kobayashi’s epic is not art-house homework. Tense escape sequences rival anything in Hitchcock’s early filmography, and a scene of hundreds of half-dead Chinese prisoners attacking a food cart looks like an outtake from Night of the Living Dead. The trilogy is a gothic noir, shot like a survival horror epic.”
8OCT09: “Kobayashi’s anti-war saga is a deeply affecting emotional experience,” writes Glenn Erickson at TCM.com, “a career highpoint for director Masaki Kobayashi.”
29Sep09
David Mamet’s Homicide is many things: an introspective character study, an examination of racial and religious identity, a conspiracy thriller—and also, as critics have been noting, a damn good cop drama. “Homicide is the rare big-screen policier that can stand up to The Shield, The Wire, Hill Street Blues, and Homicide: Life on the Street,” raves Noel Murray of the Onion’s AV Club in his review of the film, now available as a Criterion special edition DVD. “The plot is fiendishly clever—full of misdirection and unexpected turns, culminating in a devastating ending—and the dialogue contains some of Mamet’s choicest one-liners . . . It’s one of the greatest ‘pull up a bar stool and let me tell you the damnedest thing’ cop anecdotes of all time.” Amanda Mae Meyncke of Film.com also recommends this “complicated foray into a dark world populated by hard-nosed cops and cryptic occurrences” for its noirish narrative: “This film is a must-see for any Mamet enthusiast but stands on its own as an excellent detective story with remarkably high stakes.”
3Sep09
In his Huffington Post review of our new release of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Mike Miley notes that “Akerman was twenty-five years old when she made this film—the same age at which Orson Welles began Citizen Kane.” It’s a perhaps surprising but entirely appropriate comparison for this groundbreaking film, which Miley calls, “in short, perfect, the kind of total work artists dream of making just once” and “one of the greatest films of all time.”
Miley has gotten a lot of corroboration for his assessment. “One of the real masterworks of modern cinema,” says Paper’s Dennis Dermody. “The look, the sound and feel of the 1975 film is on the surface very simple, but it’s emotionally complex and incredibly powerful. A true work of genius.” And in the Los Angeles Times, Sam Adams calls it a “masterpiece . . . Jeanne Dielman belongs to the rare class of films capable of transforming the world around you.”
Also worth a read: in his review of the release, the New York Times’s Dave Kehr unexpectedly compares the gender-coded worlds of Akerman and John Cassavetes.
27Aug09
Known for creating some of American independent cinema’s chattiest characters, writer-director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan) is apparently feeling rather talkative himself this week. Stillman has popped up all over New York in interviews marking Criterion’s new special edition DVD release of his charmingly caustic romantic roundelay The Last Days of Disco.
First up, there’s a profile and interview by Nick Pinkerton at the Village Voice, where, we learn in the full transcript (online only), Stillman got his first job, when he was still in college.” Then the director dispels some misconceptions about the film with IFC.com’s Stephen Saito (“It’s not so much about disco”), discusses his brief flirtation with Hollywood with Time Out’s Joshua Rothkopf (“I think I made the mistake of trying to make films within the industry and going along. You have to work outside it”), and lets Gothamist in on his favorite spots in New York City (“The Battery, Governor’s Island, and the steps of the Metropolitan when no one’s there, i.e., around 5:00 a.m.”).
Stillman was on the airwaves too, and you can download that WNYC interview with Leonard Lopate here. And the director will be in attendance at local screenings of the film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade, tonight, and Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns Film Center, on September 1.
6Aug09
“Repulsion is finally out on DVD!” exclaims Paper’s Dennis Dermody about the long-awaited release of Roman Polanski’s “terror masterpiece”—in both standard-definition and Blu-ray editions—which he goes on to dub “one of the finest of psychological shockers.”
Chris Nashawaty, at Entertainment Weekly, writes, “Polanski’s first English-language film is still a creepy little horror masterpiece. And thanks to the Criterion Collection’s new digital face-lift, it’s never looked better or more crisp.” And Dave Kehr, in the New York Times, says, “Repulsion remains a commanding film, its festering detail enhanced by an excellent new transfer.”
More comes courtesy of IFC.com’s Michael Atkinson (“Quintessentially cinematic . . . an impeccable Petit Guignol spectacle in deep black and white”) and Sam Adams, at the Los Angeles Times (“Consistently engrossing . . . Repulsion quivers with liberated energy and forces both cathartic and annihilating”). And the “claustrophobic shocker” is the critics’ pick over at Salon.com.
