By John ThomasonKobayashi Four (Facets)Standard list price: $71.99Release date: Nov. 23Facets celebrates its new release of Masahiro Kobayashi’s 2001 film Man Walking on Snow by repackaging three of the director’s previously available releases into a box set titled Kobayashi Four.Watching these four titles from the criminally neglected Japanese auteur reveals … [Read more...]
The View From Home 16: New releases on DVD
By John ThomasonEveryone Else (Cinema Guild)Release date: Oct. 26SLP: $20.49If “mainstream cinema” is shorthand for grounded, explicable, coherent story arcs told with logic and closure, then art cinema – the yin to Hollywood’s yang – is the terrain of the unknown, the inexplicable, the frustratingly open-ended. Its filmmakers are fully aware … [Read more...]
The View From Home 15: New releases on DVD
By John ThomasonThe Magician (Criterion)Standard list price: $29.95Release date: Oct. 12Ask 10 film scholars to name the 10 most important Ingmar Bergman films, and it’s quite likely The Magician wouldn’t make any of their lists. This is both a testament to the director’s career-long consistency in producing masterpieces and perhaps a grave oversight. … [Read more...]
The View From Home 14: New releases on DVD
By John ThomasonMy Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (First Look)Standard list price: $18.99Release date: Sept. 14The Killer Inside Me (MPI)SLP: $13.99Release date: Sept. 28Two movies by major filmmakers exploring the minds of killers debuted on DVD recently, and the results are so divergent they might as well be filed under different categories in the … [Read more...]
The View From Home 13: New releases on DVD
By John ThomasonCinevardaphoto (Cinema Guild)Standard list price: $29.95Release date: Aug. 31For a filmmaker of Agnes Varda’s renown, it’s important to note how few features she has made over her 40-plus-year career. She boasts 47 directorial credits on the Internet Movie Database, yet most cineastes who haven’t spelunked into the deepest depths of the … [Read more...]
The View From Home 12: New releases on DVD
By John ThomasonAppointment With Danger, Dark City and Union Station (Olive Films)Standard list price: $19.99Release date: July 27Apparently, DVD labels distributed the memo well: 2010 is the year for classic film noir. Last month Columbia released its Film Noir Classics Vol. 2 collection (SLP $44.99), an essential five-disc set that … [Read more...]
The View From Home 11: New releases on DVD
By John ThomasonGreenberg (Universal)Release date: July 13Standard list price: $18.49If I were Roger Greenberg – the literate, perpetually disgruntled protagonist in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg – I would definitely be hand-writing a letter to Universal right about now that would go something like this:Dear Universal Home Entertainment, Eager to discover more … [Read more...]
The View From Home 10: New releases on DVD
By John ThomasonTerribly Happy (Oscilloscope Laboratories)Release date: July 13Standard list price: $26.99Following in the footsteps of Roger Vadim (…And God Created Woman), George Sluizier (The Vanishing) and Michael Haneke (Funny Games), Danish filmmaker Henrik Ruben Genz becomes the latest foreign-language director to remake his own movie in English … [Read more...]
The View From Home 9: New releases on DVD
By John ThomasonClose-Up (Criterion)Release date: June 22Standard list price: $36.49This two-disc Criterion reissue of one of the greatest – if not the greatest – films of the 1990s replaces the out-of-print edition from Facets, and hopefully a new crop of young cinephiles will discover it. Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami wrote and directed the film after … [Read more...]
The View From Home 8: New releases on DVD
By John ThomasonFor My Father (Film Movement)Release date: June 1Standard list price: $22.49I normally reserve the space for the largest review in this column to wonderful films that are worthy of your time, but occasionally a film so indefensible – so patently contemptible – will arrive on my doorstep that it prompts the need to vent for more than 150 … [Read more...]