Like you, I’m stuck at home for what has begun to feel like an eternal, if comfort-filled, purgatory. But movies have been my escape from the dreadful and the humdrum. My recent adventures with the Criterion Channel app continued with six more eclectic features — five gems and one dud. La Vie de Boheme: When I reviewed Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre, in 2011, I must have skimped … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A treasure trove on TCM
As someone who is millennial-adjacent, I’ve watched as friends and colleagues younger than I — and some older folks too — cut the proverbial cord on the musty cable monopolies that satisfied so much of my entertainment diet over the decades. Roku boxes and Fire sticks are the new satellite dishes and Xfinity consoles. It may boast more channels and on-demand opportunities than … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Finding classics on Netflix
In essence, the movie-criticism paradigm hasn’t changed much since the earliest days of the studio system: We critics publish our reviews the week a movie opens theatrically. What happens to us scribblers when the theaters shutter, and the model that has sustained this dwindling profession is disrupted? With the coronavirus prompting the swift closure of cinemas nationwide, … [Read more...]
The View From Home 82: Mizoguchi and Reed, Refn on fame, Fassbinder the cop, and Eastwood goes South
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum: Completed more than a decade before the string of masterpieces for which he’s most known, Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Criterion, $27.99 Blu-ray, $22.99 DVD) is a startlingly modern meditation on the give and take between art and life. Forecasting by at least two years the technical innovations of Orson Welles, this … [Read more...]
The View From Home 81: British New Wave, Hanks abroad, a towering dystopia, and Preminger
A Taste of Honey: One unwed mother begets another in Tony Richardson’s British New Wave classic, but A Taste of Honey (Criterion, $27.99 Blu-ray, $29.95 DVD) is more than a social-problem film. It is, at various times, a pungent comedy, a touching romance, a shattering indictment of postwar malaise and, above, all, a meditation on motherhood’s failings. If London was just … [Read more...]
The View From Home 80: Sokurov at the Louvre, Pialat’s Van Gogh, Resnais, Makavajev, Verhoeven and forbidden love
Francofonia: Defying categorization, Alexander Sokurov’s hypnotically watchable Francofonia (Music Box, $24.19 Blu-ray, $20.69 DVD) is an essay and a collage, a historical fiction that is also documentary about its own creation, a place where past and present can collide during a single circular pan. Its subject is the Louvre, particularly the museum’s uncertain future during … [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...]
The View From Home 78: Hawks classic, Fuller gumshoe, The Residents, Reynolds and what’s in a name
Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Only Angels Have Wings: Howard Hawks’ 1939 masterpiece (Criterion, $26.19 Blu-ray, $19.69 DVD) is set in an exoticized South American airfield, where Cary Grant’s emotionally crippled American expat runs a commercial aviation business. He’s accustomed to sending pilots off into treacherous conditions and, often, … [Read more...]