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...]
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...]
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...]
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...]
The View From Home: Consciousness is for the birds
The subtitle of Judy Irving’s tender and soulful 2003 documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Kino, Blu-ray, $23.96) could be In Defense of Anthropomorphism. And it’s a pretty darn effective one. Mark Bittner, the doc’s subject, doesn’t see himself as an eccentric for the hobby that became his passion: feeding and caring for the countless feral parrots — nonnative … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Eephus’ tallies more than the loss of a baseball game
The men who arrive at a soon-to-be-demolished baseball field for a final recreational matchup in Carson Lund’s directorial debut Eephus (Music Box, $34.95 Blu-ray, $29.95 DVD) are not soon for the majors, or even the minor leagues. These characters creak and smoke and curse. Many are boomers, or close to it. “I think we could all use some medical work,” one player says, in a … [Read more...]
The View From Home: An elusive masterpiece from a world-cinema auteur
Master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s films were many things, but “plotty” wasn’t one of them. His 1999 gem The Wind Will Carry Us, released in a ravishing new 4K restoration from the Criterion Collection ($31.96 Blu-ray), is a perfect example of his experiential approach to moviemaking, one that’s liberated from the structural shackles of narrative. Instead, it’s a movie as … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Schrader’s latest explores a callous documentarian’s jumbled reckoning
Richard Gere’s Leonard Fife, the unreliable narrator at the core of Paul Schrader’s latest film Oh, Canada (Kino, $23.96 Blu-ray, $15.96 DVD), is seldom without a woman in his life. Yet he shares plenty in common with the brooding loners of the director’s recent de facto trilogy of First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener: the tendency toward self-flagellation, the … [Read more...]
The View From Home: WWII spycraft, stealth feminism in Kino’s latest film noir box set
Kino Lorber recently retrieved three titles from the distributor’s seemingly bottomless well of obscure noirs from the genre’s golden age for yet another impactful box set. The Dark Side of Cinema XXI ($33.22 Blu-ray) features three titles that largely dance around the traditional expectations of noir, mixing its shadowy atmosphere with timely espionage drama and hothouse … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Solondz’s disturbing ‘Happiness,’ and a wry wolfman movie
As director Todd Solondz himself concedes in a bonus interview for Criterion’s long-awaited release of 1998’s Happiness ($34.99 4K, $27.99 Blu-ray, $13.91 DVD), the film “never would have been financed today.” This perspective seems to be the consensus, owing to shifting social mores, to increased institutional adversity to risk, and I suppose to wokeism. Down to brass tacks, a … [Read more...]