As a longtime devotee of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I expected to encounter a familiar brand of B-movie schlock with the new triple-feature DVD Drive-In Retro Classics (Corinth, $22.99). The cover art depicts a man gleefully shooting death rays from his eyes, and the titles — The Brain From Planet Arous, The Hideous Sun Demon — seem ripe for riffing. The biggest surprise … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Restored ‘La Dolce Vita’ laughs all the way to the apocalypse
There may be no better example of a film’s prologue forecasting its themes than the exhilarating aperitif that opens La Dolce Vita. A helicopter, its heavy cargo suspended from wires, delivers a statue of Christ to its final destination in St. Peter’s Square. Trailed by a second copter of tabloid reporters and photographers, the spectacle traverses an ancient Roman aqueduct, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A shattering colonialist neo-Western, and ennui on the French Riviera
The most innovative foreign-language films often are not the ones jostling for the five coveted slots on the Academy Award ballot. They’re the films with miniscule if any distribution, that drop on DVD or a streaming service with little fanfare. Memory House (Film Movement, $24.95 DVD, $3.99 digital rental), the stunning debut from Brazilian writer-director João Paulo … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Stanley Kwan’s beautiful, disruptive biopic “Center Stage”
As intimate as it is lavish, Stanley Kwan’s landmark 1991 biopic Center Stage has finally received the illustrious Blu-ray release it deserves, thanks to the tireless efforts of Film Movement and its specialty Classics imprint ($29.99). Like the screen icon it depicts, this transfer positively glows, shimmering with memory, criticism and the very foundations of cinema … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘The Vast of Night’ is a perfectly timed sound bath of adventure
The impact of the film industry on the coronavirus pandemic has been depressingly documented, from the indefinite postponement of movie shoots to the delayed release of studio pictures to the continued closures — some will be permanent — of cinemas. Audio-based art forms, on the other hand, are thriving. Offering the illusion of intimacy but the safety of distance, radio and … [Read more...]
The View From Home: More gems from Criterion
Like you, I’m stuck at home for what has begun to feel like an eternal, if comfort-filled, purgatory. But movies have been my escape from the dreadful and the humdrum. My recent adventures with the Criterion Channel app continued with six more eclectic features — five gems and one dud. La Vie de Boheme: When I reviewed Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre, in 2011, I must have skimped … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A treasure trove on TCM
As someone who is millennial-adjacent, I’ve watched as friends and colleagues younger than I — and some older folks too — cut the proverbial cord on the musty cable monopolies that satisfied so much of my entertainment diet over the decades. Roku boxes and Fire sticks are the new satellite dishes and Xfinity consoles. It may boast more channels and on-demand opportunities than … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Finding classics on Netflix
In essence, the movie-criticism paradigm hasn’t changed much since the earliest days of the studio system: We critics publish our reviews the week a movie opens theatrically. What happens to us scribblers when the theaters shutter, and the model that has sustained this dwindling profession is disrupted? With the coronavirus prompting the swift closure of cinemas nationwide, … [Read more...]
The View From Home 82: Mizoguchi and Reed, Refn on fame, Fassbinder the cop, and Eastwood goes South
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum: Completed more than a decade before the string of masterpieces for which he’s most known, Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Criterion, $27.99 Blu-ray, $22.99 DVD) is a startlingly modern meditation on the give and take between art and life. Forecasting by at least two years the technical innovations of Orson Welles, this … [Read more...]
The View From Home 81: British New Wave, Hanks abroad, a towering dystopia, and Preminger
A Taste of Honey: One unwed mother begets another in Tony Richardson’s British New Wave classic, but A Taste of Honey (Criterion, $27.99 Blu-ray, $29.95 DVD) is more than a social-problem film. It is, at various times, a pungent comedy, a touching romance, a shattering indictment of postwar malaise and, above, all, a meditation on motherhood’s failings. If London was just … [Read more...]