Released a year after Jean-Luc Godard’s death at age 91 in September 2022, writer-director Cyril Leuthy’s 2022 documentary Godard Cinema (Kino, $29.99 Blu-ray, $19.99 DVD) is an informative and engrossing endeavor to unravel the mysteries and contradictions behind the movies’ most disruptive trailblazer. Leuthy interviewed subjects from in and outside of Godard’s circle, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Two cross-cultural Asiatic adventures, new on Blu-ray
A few years before she directed a soon-to-be pop-culture touchstone in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fran Rubel Kuzui helmed her debut feature Tokyo Pop, a charming picaresque that has languished largely in cult obscurity for 35 years. A 4K restoration, supported through the Jane Fonda Women Directors Fund, opened in New York City and Los Angeles this past August, and … [Read more...]
‘Farewell, Mr. Haffmann’: WWII drama sees the enemies within
“We’re not in danger … we’re French.” These are famous last words, perhaps, from one Hannah Haffmann (Anne Coesens), wife of a successful jeweler in Paris, toward the beginning of Farewell, Mr. Haffmann. It’s 1941 Paris, a year after the Third Reich seized France, and Hannah’s husband Joseph (Daniel Auteuil) can literally see the writing on the wall: a “Census” posted outside … [Read more...]
Meme streets: ‘Dream Scenario’ raises funny, troubling points about cancel culture
Paul Matthews, the character played by Nicolas Cage in the new satire Dream Scenario, is many things: a husband, a father, a tenured professor of evolutionary biology, a font of insecurities and jealousies and resentments. But more than anything, in this strange, heady and ever-shifting polemic, he is a human meme. Paul tends to satisfy both the original scientific … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘The Unknown Country’ a sublime entry in the docufiction pantheon
Expect to be taken aback the first time The Unknown Country, a work of ostensible fiction newly released on DVD and Blu-ray ($22, Music Box), abruptly shifts to a documentary. We’ve just watched an actor, Lily Gladstone, stop at a Deadwood diner after a long night of driving. The camera is focused on her, not the loquacious server at the greasy spoon, who in between dispensing … [Read more...]
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’: Scorsese’s innovatory masterpiece
The autumn of Robert De Niro’s extraordinary career has been a period of prolific emptiness — an assembly-line churn of comedies about dirty and eccentric old men whose titles are as interchangeable as their content. Thank goodness, then, for Martin Scorsese and scant other directors, who still realize that De Niro is a vessel for a certain strand of dark magnetism, a shadowy … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Hardcore’ is an ethnographic odyssey into a bygone culture
If you feel like you need a shower after watching Paul Schrader’s 1979 crime drama Hardcore (newly reissued on Blu-ray, Kino Lorber, $17.42), then the movie has done its job. Skeevy even by Schrader standards, Hardcore germinated the same year as Scrader’s celebrated screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and it feels cut from the same sordid cloth — and imbued with the … [Read more...]
2023-24 Season in Film: Rich cinema bounty for 2023, but strike will affect 2024
There’s good news and bad news for the strike-riddled film industry. The good news is that the fall release schedule should not be adversely affected, since the work by screenwriters and actors on films slated to open by the end of this calendar year was all completed before their guilds called them to strike. (They will open, mostly on schedule, but with a lot less … [Read more...]
‘Strange Way of Life’: Almodóvar short is fuller than most epics
It’s easy to grumble that, since the ascension of streaming, everything is content now. Art-house films, blockbusters, documentaries, limited series, multi-season dramas, standup specials, even news broadcasts — they’re all items in a queue, presented for your enjoyment or consigned to oblivion on the caprices of an algorithm. Some of them take longer than others to finish, and … [Read more...]
The View From Home: War and resistance in 1960s Paris
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...]