Critics Honor White Dog Release
The National Society of Film Critics announced its 2008 awards this week, and Criterion won a special honor for the DVD release of White Dog. The esteemed organization, founded in 1966 and made up of the country’s leading film critics, recognized the company with a film heritage award for making Sam Fuller’s famously suppressed antiracist sensation available to a wide American audience for the first time (it had a limited run at New York’s Film Forum in 1991). Other heritage awards went to Kent Mackenzie’s long-unseen 1961 independent film about Native Americans in Los Angeles, The Exiles, which was restored and saw its first theatrical release, from Milestone, in 2008; Flicker Alley, for its silent-film DVD collections; and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, for its DVD set Murnau, Borzage, and Fox. The society gave its top new-release film award to Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, and its director prize to Mike Leigh, for his latest, Happy-Go-Lucky.