It gives me a small pleasure to recall that the French New Wave, one of the most important artistic movements in world cinema, began in a critical journal years before any of its alums would film their first features. Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol launched their careers as critics for Cahiers du Cinema, a film magazine launched in 1951. … [Read more...]
The View From Home: An American indie auteur’s raw and controversial 16mm debut
For most audiences, writer-director Ira Sachs first landed on their radars with the 2005 independent drama Forty Shades of Blue. The film introduced the patient style, realistic approach to dialogue and nuanced treatment of adult relationships — gay and straight alike — that would resurface throughout a mostly unimpeachable filmography. Keep the Lights On, Love is Strange, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A revelatory box set explores an unsung Japanese auteur
The Criterion Collection, as any cinephile knows, casts a wide net, and us critics lucky enough to land on the distributor’s media radar are never short of options for review material. Last month saw the release of a dramatic staple of classic Hollywood (Gilda), an effervescent Ernst Lubitsch comedy (Trouble in Paradise), an acerbic religious satire much ahead of its time (The … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Classic import, innovative doc offer alternative approaches to crime cinema
Lino Ventura cuts a menacing figure in Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques (Criterion, $31.96 Blu-ray, $23.96 DVD). Maintaining a detached exterior even when his measures grow increasingly desperate, his character, a gangster-on-the-lam named Abel Davos, keeps a stoic demeanor punctuated by fits of volcanic temper. Sentenced to death in his native France, he first appears as an … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Two women-directed films, 40 years apart, revel in the possibilities of belief
In the Talking Heads classic “Heaven,” David Byrne asserts, in the declarative tense of someone who’s been there, that “Heaven is a place / a place where nothing / nothing ever happens.” Depending on the receiver, this information is either a relief or a comedown — a paradise of blessed stillness or an eternity of boredom. In Byrne’s metaphor, heaven is a bar whose live band … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Japanese anti-actioner ‘Cloud’ a corrosive satire on the capitalist dream
As someone who dabbles in reselling myself — albeit of on-the-level vinyl records, not suspiciously cheap “designer” goods — the scenario outlined in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film Cloud (Criterion Premieres, $23.96 Blu-ray, $19.96 DVD) is the stuff of nightmares. Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who initially works in a garment factory by day, entered the world of online … [Read more...]
The View From Home: In a pig’s eye: Sublime ‘Babe’ and its more manic sequel are far more than kids’ stuff
Babe is not, as James Cromwell points out in a new interview for the film’s new Blu-ray release ($19.96, Kino Lorber, in a double feature with Babe: Pig in the City), a children’s film. It is, rather, an “adult fairy tale,” a distinction that helps to explain its generation-spanning endurance in the popular culture, in the cinephile’s library, and in the annals of vegan … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Criterion, Scorsese pair up for another globetrotting collection
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...]
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...]