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...]
The View From Home 80: Sokurov at the Louvre, Pialat’s Van Gogh, Resnais, Makavajev, Verhoeven and forbidden love
Francofonia: Defying categorization, Alexander Sokurov’s hypnotically watchable Francofonia (Music Box, $24.19 Blu-ray, $20.69 DVD) is an essay and a collage, a historical fiction that is also documentary about its own creation, a place where past and present can collide during a single circular pan. Its subject is the Louvre, particularly the museum’s uncertain future during … [Read more...]
The View From Home 79: Akerman’s swan song, Wenders’ wayward comeback, a John Ford masterpiece and more
A scene from No Home Movie (2015). (Icarus Films) No Home Movie: The tragic coda that followed the completion of Chantal Akerman’s inadvertent swan songNo Home Movie (Icarus, $19.01 DVD) is forever inextricable from the picture itself. The documentary charts the director’s conversations with her 86-year-old mother Natalia during the last months of the latter’s life; Akerman … [Read more...]
The View From Home 78: Hawks classic, Fuller gumshoe, The Residents, Reynolds and what’s in a name
Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Only Angels Have Wings: Howard Hawks’ 1939 masterpiece (Criterion, $26.19 Blu-ray, $19.69 DVD) is set in an exoticized South American airfield, where Cary Grant’s emotionally crippled American expat runs a commercial aviation business. He’s accustomed to sending pilots off into treacherous conditions and, often, … [Read more...]