The Second World War, and especially the role of ordinary French civilians in resisting Nazi occupation, would repeatedly inspire René Clément, a journeyman director whose travels often took him onto the front lines of anti-fascist action. World War II or its immediate aftermath would inform his best early works (Battle of the Rails, Forbidden Games, The Walls of Malapaga) as … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Revel in the enduring 3-D schlock of ‘Robot Monster’
3-D movies, the most stubborn fad in cinema, turned 100 last year. Twenty twenty-two marked the centenary of the unremembered 1922 film The Power of Love, released with dual-strip projection and those familiar anaglyph glasses to a presumably gobsmacked audience of Los Angelenos. The technology has, of course, continued to evolve amid peaks and valleys in its popularity. … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A radiant twosome: Coming of age in occupied France, making movies for the sightless
Sometimes, the theme for a View From Home column derives not from a think piece or deep connection on my part but simply from the arbitrary vicissitudes of a distributor’s release schedule. So it was that in my mailbox, within days of each other, I received two foreign-language DVDs from Film Movement that begged to be reviewed together. A Radiant Girl ($20.44) and Radiance … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A challenging experimental twofer from Marguerite Duras
Was there a better year for slow cinema and Delphine Seyrig than 1975? That was, most famously, the year Jeanne Dielman, reviewed last month here on ArtsPaper, burrowed into theaters and helped change the way movies could be made. Astonishingly, though, it’s not even the most radical Seyrig vehicle to be released that year. That honor goes to India Song, the novelist Marguerite … [Read more...]
The View From Home: The minimalist perfection of ‘Jeanne Dielman’
“A lonely widow turns to prostitution to make ends meet.” This one-sentence synopsis offered by HBO Max for its presentation of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is as literally accurate as it as tonally, emotionally, thoroughly misleading. It suggests that Chantal Akerman’s 1977 masterpiece could be a humanist melodrama, the sort of hardscrabble women’s … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Rivette’s subtle, rewarding ‘Gang of Four’
What would a Hitchcock thriller look like if it were stripped of all of its suspense — its capital-E entertainment? As a director of mainstream, if fussily curated, studio pictures, the maestro himself arguably never attempted such a gnomic exercise, the male gaze-y avenues of Vertigo notwithstanding. I believe such a thought experiment would resemble Jacques Rivette’s … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Catching up with Criterion: Lean, Kwan and Franklin
It’s been years since I’ve perused Blu-rays from the gold standard of art-house cinema, the Criterion Collection. With diverse and exciting titles continuing apace from this vital distributor, it seemed high time to revisit its ever-expanding catalog. These three new summer releases, all loaded with generous bonus features, offer a welcome return. Venice has never received a … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Offseason’ an atmospheric chiller with an all-too-familiar setting
Writer-director Mickey Keating’s confident and chilling horror feature Offseason ($28.96 Blu-ray, $27.97 DVD, and streaming on Shudder) is set in a community called Lone Palm Beach. Lone Palm Beach is an isolated island off the coast of the Eastern United States, accessible by bridge, that jolts to life only during high tourist season. Its few year-round residents — all of them … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A bracing, anti-nativist love story; a ‘90s art-house classic of urban longing
Call it love in the time of nativism. Darkly comic and fretfully relevant, Bulgarian writer-director Ivaylo Hristov’s Fear (Film Movement, $24.95 DVD) exists on a pitch-black nexus between satire and documentary. It’s set in a seaside village along the Turkish border, where the locals are bracing for a brutal winter. Signs of life are scant, as fog blankets skeletal trees, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Dementia’ a brilliant, experimental plunge into psychosis
It’s safe to say there’s never been a film, before or since, quite like John Parker’s 1953 psychodrama Dementia (now on Blu-ray from Cohen Film Collection, $19.99). An uncanny marriage of avant-garde cinema, horror and noir, it was somehow both ahead of its time and, boldly, behind it: Parker shot it as a silent film, without intertitles, in an era when such an approach was … [Read more...]