Tag: Criterion Collection

Screening Room: Fellini’s ‘La Strada’

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In Federico Fellini’s breakthrough classic La Strada, a girl from a poverty-stricken family is sold to a traveling circus performer who does not realize just what a miserable life he has consigned both of them to.

My review of the new Criterion Blu-ray DVD is at PopMatters:

La Strada became a quiet sensation upon its American release in 1956. Critic Christina Newland, in an essay that accompanies the recent Criterion Blu-ray, refers to its “paradigm-shifting effect” for the widespread of its influence. It quickly earned a prominent place in the arthouse canon that placed a small cadre of foreign directors—Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut—as standing for everything sharp, insightful, and humanistic that bloated, materialistic, and subliterate Hollywood apparently did not. In that respect, La Strada certainly fits the bill…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Ratcatcher’

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The debut movie from Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) is a bracing combination of unflinching poverty and expressionist imagery.

My review of the new Criterion Blu-ray edition of 1999’s Ratcatcher is at PopMatters:

Living in tumbledown council housing blocks, many of the families pine for the day their number comes up on the list of people being moved across town to brand-new houses with yards. But even though this is a dream that seems destined to fall apart, Ramsay is more engaged by the nit and grit of these people’s lives – the actual sensation of cramped apartments with flickering TVs (a surreal mix of Tom Jones and news reports on rat infestation) and lurking rent collectors – than any desire to rub viewers’ noses in the pornographic poverty of it all…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Parallax View’

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The Criterion Collection Blu-ray release of 1974’s The Parallax View is a fantastic way to experience this paranoid classic that still induces shivers today.

My review is at PopMatters:

The screenplay reads like the kind of thing that might play at the drive-in to a half-attentive Friday night crowd. But in execution, the film more closely resembles one of the year’s other cinematic landmarks, Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), whose indictment of American corporate-political criminality was similarly ruthless but still somewhat toothless by comparison…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Kiss Me Deadly’

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My article on Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) was published at Eyes Wide Open:

For sheer brazen strange, it’s hard to top Robert Aldrich’s 1955 noir adaptation of the skull-busting Mickey Spillane novel. It’s a mystery that never gets solved and a thriller that creeps more than excites. The closest that it gets to an explanation is a cynical, tired reference by the hero’s gal Friday to “nameless ones who kill people for the great whatsit.” All this confusion very likely derives from Aldrich clearly holding Spillane’s book in some contempt (as he did most things). But then it’s hard to say that a greater fidelity to the source material would have cleared matters up much…

Here’s the trailer for the Criterion release:

Screening Room: ‘A Touch of Zen’

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In 1971, former martial-arts director King Hu embarked on an epic reimagination of what the genre would look like. The three-hour A Touch of Zen was magical, weird, and breathtaking, often in the same scene. It was mostly ignored in its butchered release, except for some brief acclaim after finally getting a proper showing at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.

touchofzen-dvdSince then, the film—which deeply influenced Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—has been mostly confined to obscurity. Thankfully, Janus Films gave it a proper release earlier this year, and now there’s also a beautiful new Criterion DVD edition.

My review is at PopMatters:

The film’s second third comes as a relief after the deliberate mannerisms and fussy perfectionism of the first third. Here, A Touch of Zen pivots from quiet pastoral with supernatural elements to more John Sturges Western. As villainous forces marshal against Yang and the two fugitive generals who came to her aid, Ku uses his study of classic works of strategy to plan their defense. The set-piece battle in which the small army of guards are lured into the supposedly haunted fort for a spectacular night-time ambush is a marvel of geometric precision and subterfuge…

Here’s the trailer:

New on DVD: ‘Pina’

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pina-dvdThe 2011 dance documentary from Wim Wenders, Pina, was a refreshing new usage of the 3D format for nonfiction film. (Werner Herzog tried to use it to much less effect in Cave of Forgotten Dreams). The film is available today from Criterion Collection in DVD and Blu-ray. My full review is at AMC Movie Guide:

Joy isn’t a feeling that one associates with Wim Wenders all that much. Wonder or ennui, maybe irony, but not joy. But nevertheless that’s the first thing that springs to mind with his electric new 3D dance documentary, his first feature to get a real Stateside release since 2005’s moody, downbeat Don’t Come Knocking. There are other feelings and moods wrapped up here, tragedy and loss, but with all the sunlight (has the man ever shot a brighter film?) and sweeping movement, the joy prevails. This is filmmaking as glorious music…

You can see the trailer here:

 

New on DVD: ‘Heaven’s Gate’

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heavensgate-dvdIn the history of legendary cinematic disasters, there are flops and then there is Heaven’s Gate:

In his interview on the Criterion Collection release of the 1980 Michael Cimino film Heaven’s Gate, a craggy-looking Kris Kristofferson makes a strong appeal for the roundly maligned Western as being a potent work of political cinema. Kristofferson sticks up for Cimino’s indictment of Manifest Destiny and robber baron greed at the end of the 19th century. Of course, he did star in the thing. But still, this is the iconoclast’s take, and an unpopular coming after more than two decades of popular film history telling us that not only was Heaven’s Gate one of the greatest disasters in film history (it took in less than ten percent of the $40 million budget at the box office) but that it single-handedly ended the free-wheeling era of American filmmaking…

The Criterion Collection now offers Heaven’s Gate on DVD and Blu-ray, with plenty of the usual extras. My full review of the DVD edition is at PopMatters.

You can see the trailer for the original film release here:

 

DVD Tuesday: ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’

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It would be too reductive to say that Wes Anderson’s films are about people who don’t fit in. Yes, his characters are on the oddball end of the spectrum. But in Anderson’s better films (like The Royal Tenenbaums), he doesn’t fall prey to the common bugaboo of those artists who celebrate the unique. Namely, he doesn’t even bother creating an outside world to judge them for their curious behavior. There is no island of misfit toys for his characters to retreat to, because the whole that is visible doesn’t seem much different. Everybody doesn’t fit in, together…

The Royal Tenenbaums is available now in a beautiful new Blu-ray transfer from Criterion. Read my full review at PopMatters.