3Sep10
This Labor Day weekend, many art-house cinemas and film museums are hitting the open road just like the rest of us. The all-American yearning for that wide highway of possibilities is writ large this week on screens across the country—and is vast enough to make it all the way to Europe. Our weekly map to Criterion titles that may be playing at a theater near you begins with two days of Bob Rafelson’s gritty Five Easy Pieces, featuring Jack Nicholson as an icon of commitment phobia en route to nowhere, at Columbus, Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts (September 3 and 4). Sixties and seventies American alienation also turns up in Detroit and Seattle (Dazed and Confused is playing at the Landmark theaters the Main Art, September 3–5, and the Metro, September 8, respectively), and Vienna, where Dennis Hopper’s cataclysmic crowd-pleaser Easy Rider (September 3) and Monte Hellman’s restrained race movie Two-Lane Blacktop (September 4), starring an elegantly laconic James Taylor, will screen as part of the Austrian Film Museum’s Auto-Kino series. Read more 
Categories:
Screenings
3Sep10
The annual Telluride Film Festival is now under way, and, as usual, Criterion is there. Like every year, the festival programmers kept the official selections hush-hush in the weeks leading up to the event. But the twenty-four-feature lineup has announced yesterday, and we were particularly excited to see new films from a handful of Criterion favorites, including Olivier Assayas (Carlos), Stephen Frears (Tamara Drewe), Mike Leigh (Another Year), Bertrand Tavernier (The Princess of Montpensier), and Peter Weir (The Way Back), not to mention the Elia Kazan documentary A Letter to Elia, the latest collaboration between Martin Scorsese and one of our favorite writers, Kent Jones. Also, Stig Björkman’s long-anticipated documentaries on Ingmar Bergman, . . . But Film Is My Mistress and Images from the Playground, will be shown in the Backlot sidebar.
Additionally, author Michael Ondaatje has picked a half dozen personal favorite movies to screen, including Larisa Shepitko’s devastating 1977 World War II drama The Ascent, which is available in our eleventh Eclipse set. Other events of note: this year, the festival is scheduled to give Silver Medallions (which honor an artist’s contributions to cinema) to Weir and actress Claudia Cardinale (8½).
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Categories:
News
2Sep10
A message for those who can’t get enough of the writing of tireless, timeless movie maven Peter Bogdanovich: click on over to his just-debuted indieWIRE blog, which bears the apt, no-brainer title Blogdanovich. Though, as he explains, this new online endeavor could come about only after he was “guided into the computer world of the twenty-first century,” and he’s feeling less than sanguine about the state of contemporary movie culture (“At film schools all over the country, most of the students act as though picture history begins somewhere around Raging Bull. The knowledge of, or interest in, films made during the fifty-year Golden Age of Pictures—1912–1962—is generally either nonexistent or extremely spotty”), the Last Picture Show director and trailblazing film programmer and scholar is enthusiastic. His first posting lays out Blogdanovich’s agenda (including reviews and recommendations of classic films, lists of favorite films by year, and comments from the personal card file he kept from 1952 to 1970), and he’s already written entries on four films, A Woman Under the Influence among them. Keep checking back for further musings. The Last Picture Show will be available from Criterion this November in the box set America Lost and Found: The BBS Story.
Categories:
Clippings
2Sep10
This year’s ATP New York—the stateside iteration of the British independent music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties—at the Catskills resort hotel Kutsher’s Country Club, is just a day away. Starting September 3, ATP will begin its annual weekend blowout (this year cocurated by Jim Jarmusch), featuring a wildly impressive roster, including Iggy and the Stooges, Sonic Youth, the Breeders, Mudhoney, Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, Vivian Girls, GZA, Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore, and many others. And Criterion, which has been programming a companion screening series at the festival since it came to the States in 2008, is presenting more films than ever before, including some new-to-our-shelves titles (Head, The Night of the Hunter, The Thin Red Line) and some noirish collection classics (Brute Force, Le doulos—both part of a Jarmusch-programmed full day of crime pictures), plus some selections that we haven’t released on DVD or Blu-ray. Considering venturing to Kutsher’s? Click here for ticket info. Also, check out Steve Dollar’s article in the Wall Street Journal about Criterion’s collaboration with ATP, featuring quotes from our own Lee Kline, who discusses some of the selections and shares an anecdote from the 2008 festival about a run-in with Patti Smith.
Categories:
News,
Clippings,
On Five
1Sep10
Starting today at London’s BFI Southbank, the legendary Italian composer Nino Rota will be honored with a monthlong retrospective of films that feature his magisterial music. Rota is probably best known for his collaborations with Federico Fellini on such films as Amarcord, 8½, and La dolce vita and for his iconic melodies for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, but his sensational scores have also buoyed the work of Franco Rosi, Franco Zefferelli, Edward Dmytryk, and Luchino Visconti. It’s the latter’s The Leopard that this short video piece from the BBC waxes most lyrical over, and it’s worth a look—and a listen.
Categories:
News
1Sep10
Feeling pithy? Give us a hand in creating brief taglines for the ads below for upcoming Criterion releases (and see examples of what we’re looking for in the slide show). Come up with as many or as few lines as you’d like, leave them in the comments, and we’ll choose our favorites. Winners will receive a single- or double-disc DVD/Blu-ray of their choice.
Examples:
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Read more
Categories:
Contests
31Aug10
In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim provides some context for the work of Maurice Pialat, whose first film, L’enfance nue, is out on Criterion DVD: “Recognized in France as one of the major filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century, Pialat (1925–2003) belonged to the same generation as Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and the other leading figures of the French New Wave.” Lim goes on to call the feature debut of this chronicler of the lives of wayward, fragmented people “one of the most moving films about childhood ever made” and “one of the most tough-minded . . . It establishes the searching sensibility that would characterize Pialat’s cinema, bruisingly alive and fully in the moment.”
Slant’s Fernando Croce also deems L’enfance nue to be the brilliant herald of a great career, plus makes a intriguing connection to another Criterion release: “Maurice Pialat’s piercing first feature introduces the Gallic master’s mix of laceration and delicacy . . . The film is remarkable for its vivid, uncondescending snapshots of working-class life and, in its loving observation of Marie-Louise and René Thierry (real-life foster parents more or less playing themselves), the fullest portrait of an elderly couple since McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow.” DVD Town’s Christopher Long is even more unstinting in his praise, exclaiming “This is a fantastic film. L’enfance nue deserves to be considered one of the great debut features of the last half century, a thunderbolt heralding the arrival of a distinctive visionary. Damn it, I can’t resist saying it: L’enfance nue is a masterpiece.”
More praise from DVD Talk.
Categories:
Press Notes
30Aug10
The arts/culture/politics journal n+1 has launched a new online film supplement, N1 FR, which it tantalizingly proposes to “publish semi-regularly, although we’re not sure yet what semi-regularly means in this case.” The wide-ranging and thoughtful inaugural installment contains some great pieces. In one of them, Criterion contributor Chris Fujiwara grapples with the idea of what contemporary cinema is (“Classical narrative filmmaking has become impossible. Contemporary mainstream Hollywood cinema merely confirms this proposition with its endless remakes, sequels, sequels to remakes, and remakes of sequels, its grand-scale repetition-compulsion machine,” and “If the outstanding films are never all visible at the same time until the window of their contemporaneity has closed, it means they are truly contemporary only for a small group of people—critics, programmers, and distributors.”). Fujiwara also gives a shout-out to Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours—as an example of a new kind of collaboration between museums and film—and another to Robert Bresson, as an archetype of the filmmaker who is both timeless and contemporary.
Other Criterion-related highlights from the issue: Christine Smallwood reports on the experience of watching Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by the light of her texting neighbor’s cell phone (as prelude to a marvelous piece on Claire Denis and the happy impossibility of total escape into a movie), and Jeanette Samyn and Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon hold forth on the epistolary nature of the work of Pedro Costa, with a nod to the title of our box set Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa.
Categories:
Clippings
27Aug10
Lucky West Coasters can swoon to Rock Hudson on the big screen this coming week. Two magnificent melodramas from Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, will be splashed across screens at, respectively, Seattle’s Metro Landmark Theatre and San Francisco’s Castro Theater, both on Wednesday, September 1.
They’re just two of a handful of eye-popping color classics available from Criterion that will be playing theatrically over the next seven days. Moviegoers in Paris and London hankering for vivid Technicolor are in luck: the Cinémathèque française in Paris screens the sparkling comedy Heaven Can Wait on August 29 as part of a continuing Ernst Lubitsch series; the BFI Southbank in London will be showing a new digital restoration of Visconti’s lustrous The Leopard (pictured), starting August 27 and running all the way through September 29; then, as part of its Deborah Kerr retrospective, BFI will also present Powell and Pressburger’s dazzling tongue-in-cheek epic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on September 1. Read more
Categories:
Screenings
25Aug10
Long before Stanley Kubrick was Stanley Kubrick!, he was a young photographer for Look magazine, snapping for the publication starting at age seventeen. A collection of two hundred pictures that Kubrick took between 1945 and 1950 will be on view in Venice as part of the exhibition Stanley Kubrick Fotografo. Curated by Rainer Crone, the show, opening at the Instituto Veneto on August 28 and running through November 14, is the first of its kind, spotlighting a previously largely unstudied aspect of Kubrick’s life and career. Click here for more info—and to see a few beautiful black-and-white shots.
Categories:
News
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