The Criterion Collection continues to provide a vital service in partnering with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, launched in 2007 to preserve and restore important but neglected films from mostly economically marginalized countries. The distributor just released its fifth box set of titles from the World Cinema Project ($79.96 Blu-ray), and while these collections … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Israel Palestine on Swedish TV’ a vital argument for journalistic access
Watching Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 (Icarus Films, $29.98 DVD), a hulking film composed entirely of archival footage and spanning nearly three and a half hours, a paraphrased lyric from Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” surfaced often in my mind: “How did we get here?” Ultimately, after absorbing this exhausting and multifaceted account of the world’s most … [Read more...]
‘Is This Thing On?’ plows old rom-com ground, but charms just the same
To this introverted writer, there are few prospects scarier than appearing on a stage and trying to make people laugh. Alex Novak, Will Arnett’s newly separated father of two in Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, whose day job, we are told simply, is “finance,” might have shared such trepidation at one time. But when he shuffles onto the stage of a comedy club’s open-mic … [Read more...]
The View from Home: Gabin, Dietrich smolder in 1940s gem
As far as I’ve been able to research, the French film industry never fell under the yoke of a censorship regime as sweeping as the Hays Code, which effectively neutered American cinema from 1934 to 1968. Yet Martin Roumagnac, a 1946 crime thriller newly restored and released by Icarus Films ($26.49 Blu-ray), bears the hallmarks of a Hays-era Hollywood noir, its lasciviousness … [Read more...]
‘Auction’ looks beautiful, but plot is less than artful
In the opening scene of Auction, a French drama set in the lofty world of the fine art market, auctioneer André Masson (Alex Lutz) visits the home of a potential seller of a desired artwork. This client — bitter, vindictive to her own family and imperturbably racist — is nobody’s ideal partner, but business is business. And she’s credited with one of the film’s more memorable … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Riefenstahl’ a revelatory prosecution of the Nazis’ favorite filmmaker
Was Leni Riefenstahl, director of the Third Reich-commissioned documentary Triumph of the Will, a card-carrying Nazi? Or just an artist who seized a fulfilling opportunity? German director Andres Veiel, with lucid patience and a questing curiosity, probes the controversial filmmaker in Riefenstahl (Kino Lorber, $23.96 Blu-ray), a documentary borne out of the bequeathing, in … [Read more...]
‘Die My Love’: Lawrence riveting in harrowing post-partum tale
The setting of Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s dread-inducing new film Die My Love is a country house in Montana. It’s not a huge place, but it’s a sizable upgrade for a young, artistic couple from New York City to create, to make love, to refashion in their image. It’s the perfect, isolated space for him to make music, and for her to write the next Great American Novel. Maybe … [Read more...]
‘Blue Moon’: Hawke triumphs in tale of the last days of lyricist Hart
Lorenz Hart is singing in the rain. Seconds later, he’s collapsed in an alley, no longer with a song in his heart, abandoned with the rest of the Broadway trash. He’ll perish from pneumonia hours later in a nearby hospital, at age 48. That’s how Richard Linklater opens his new film Blue Moon, spoilers be damned, and it neatly summarizes, in one pitiless tracking sequence, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A trio of films that do better leaving noir in the shadows
Kino Lorber’s ongoing drip-drip release of Universal’s seemingly endless archive of Golden Age film noirs continued with its most recent box set, The Dark Side of Cinema XXVI ($24.99 Blu-ray), the latest entry in this library of classic crime cinema. But as its three titles reveal, one person’s noir is another’s romance, and is another’s gilded literary adaptation, films that … [Read more...]
‘Relay’: A compelling thriller grounded in regular tech
Tom, Riz Ahmed’s single-named protagonist in the moody thriller Relay, is adept at disappearing in crowds. He seldom speaks and is a master of disguise, whether masquerading around cities and airports as a Muslim cleric, a beat cop, a construction worker. His default is that of a phantom in a hoodie — an urban ninja eluding the prying cameras of even the most determined … [Read more...]