In its ongoing efforts to excavate the buried corners of contemporary art-house cinema, Cohen Media Group has dug up a pair of little-seen romantic dramedies from France’s Patrice Leconte, at one point among the most acclaimed and distributed directors worldwide. Felix and Lola and Love Street have been collected on a single, and gorgeously transferred, Blu-ray disc ($17.99, … [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...]
‘Norman’: A hollow man gets an empty character study
Norman Oppenheimer, Richard Gere’s title character in writer-director Joseph Cedar’s new movie, is a walking LinkedIn, if LinkedIn had defective code. Norman lives to connect people. Self-servingly curious, he’s a relentless interrogator of everyone he meets — he’s the mosquito that won’t leave you alone — until his marks end up accepting his card, or a bribe, or a dinner … [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...]