4Apr11
If you haven’t seen any films by Mikio Naruse, who made dozens of immensely popular and artistically refined Japanese domestic dramas, the very beginning would be a very good place to start. We’ve collected all the titles that survive from the filmmaker’s presound early years in the new Eclipse set Silent Naruse. Writes DVD File’s Mike Restaino, “Criterion junkies have been hoping for a release like this one for years, and the five films included here . . . are as emotionally stunning as they are melodramatically effective . . . Silent Naruse is one of the best Eclipse sets in years, a collection of impossibly rare works from a cinematic master that is stunning in breadth and accomplishment.”
For the New York Times, Dave Kehr reviews the films by this “great poet of stoicism and quiet despair.” Kehr is enamored of the first two films in the series in particular, the “brash and jaunty” Flunky, Work Hard and the “unvarnished melodrama” No Blood Relation: “In both movies Naruse seems to be moving toward the sense of resigned, suppressed suffering that would shape his masterpieces.” Home Theater Forum’s Matt Hough, on the other hand, is taken with the “lovely film” Apart from You, which he calls “a noble melodrama with an underbelly of sweetness.” For Slant, Andrew Schenker cites Every-Night Dreams as “a devastating film,” praising its set design as “as vivid a creation as the raucous sailor’s haunt in Sternberg’s The Docks of New York,” and calls Street Without End “a richly ambiguous melodrama” and “the director’s most fully realized film of the silent era.” All in all, writes DVD Talk’s Jamie S. Rich, “Silent Naruse is a wonderful time capsule . . . It shows how he honed his craft, going from family comedy to full-blown melodrama, elevating the low-end ‘women’s picture’ to high art.”
Categories:
Press Notes
1Apr11
Every good cinephile should know the Japanese directors Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Hiroshi Teshigahara. But what about the actors without whom their films would be unthinkable? New York’s Film Forum kicks of a series today titled Five Japanese Divas, paying tribute to a handful of iconic actresses—Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyo, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine—who inhabit the center of some of the greatest movies ever made. This week’s offerings include such Criterion titles as Ozu’s Early Summer (April 3 and 4) and Late Spring (April 6), starring Setsuko Hara; Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion (April 4), starring Isuzu Yamada; and Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (April 7), with Machiko Kyo. Check back with Film Forum throughout the month to see more great performances, including Kyo in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, Hara in Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Takamine in Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, and Yamada (in the Lady Macbeth role) in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.
Other U.S. moviegoers on the lookout for strong female protagonists this week are in luck as well. Italian cinema’s ultimate diva, Anna Magnani, comes to the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, for a weeklong stay, with Pasolini’s impassioned Mamma Roma (April 1 and 4–7), and to the Music Box Theatre in Chicago for Sidney Lumet’s fiery Tennessee Williams adaptation The Fugitive Kind (April 2 and 3). Doe-eyed little Ana Torrent, meanwhile, haunts moviegoers at New York’s Walter Reade Theater with a double feature of Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive and Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos (April 1). Arletty commands the screen in Marcel Carné’s epic backstage drama Children of Paradise at the Detroit Film Theatre (April 2). Kiyoko Kishida is the Woman in the Dunes in Teshigahara’s masterful, metaphorical battle of the sexes, playing at the International Film Series in Boulder (April 3). Alida Valli terrifies in Georges Franju’s diabolical shocker Eyes Without a Face, at Cinestudio in Hartford, Connecticut (April 3). And Jules and Jim, in which Jeanne Moreau woos two men through the years and seduced moviegoers forever, casts its spell at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz in Austin (April 5) and the Bryn Mawr Film Institute in Pennsylvania (April 5).Read more 
Categories:
Screenings
30Mar11
This Friday, the New School in New York kicks off what it promises will be an annual tradition—the New School Arts Festival, “a cultural showcase reflecting the artistic and intellectual energy of the entire university”—with a bang: the theme is film noir. As you'll know if you've spent any time nosing around the shadowier corners of the Criterion Collection, bumping into the heist masterminds and femme fatales who lurk there, the topic is right up our alley. And we’re particularly excited about the experts that festival organizers James Miller, Robert Lupone, and Robert Polito (who recently wrote Criterion liner notes for Samuel Fuller’s B-noirs Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss) have rounded up for the weeklong affair, many of whom we’ve also had the pleasure of working with in the past, including James Naremore (who will lecture on The Big Sleep), Geoffrey O’Brien and Luc Sante (participating in a panel discussion about the silent crime film serial Fantômas), Molly Haskell (delivering a paper on the “noir female archetype”), and Guy Maddin (introducing a screening of his Hauntings, tantalizingly described as “short adaptations of movies by great directors for which the prints have been lost, which he based on plot synopses found in ancient Variety magazines”). There’s a lot more hard-boiled entertainment to be had all week; learn all about the festival here.
Categories:
News,
Screenings
29Mar11
As the only film of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera brought to the screen with the participation of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, Victor Schertzinger’s 1939 Technicolor The Mikado is a unique specimen; however one rates it, there is nothing with which it can be compared. Rupert D’Oyly Carte, son of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s partner Richard D’Oyly Carte, had over several decades thrown himself with great energy into keeping the Savoy operas alive as a popular performance tradition. He had resisted granting film rights to producers likely to take Hollywood-style liberties with that tradition but was persuaded by Geoffrey Toye, the opera company’s former musical director, to take a chance on the medium, with Toye producing under the aegis of the newly formed Gilbert and Sullivan Productions. There was a certain inevitability in the chosen vehicle’s being The Mikado, the team’s greatest triumph and the delight of a thousand amateur theatrical troupes and parlor sing-alongs.
The result was an Anglo-American hybrid, with the Hollywood veteran Schertzinger directing and the popular crooner Kenny Baker (a radio sidekick of Jack Benny’s) as Nanki-Poo, but filmed at Pinewood Studios, outside London, with an otherwise British cast. The D’Oyly Carte chorus played a crucial role, but surprisingly, only a few of the leads were taken by regular members of the company, notably Sydney Granville, as Pooh-Bah, and the extraordinary Martyn Green—a rising star since the retirement of Sir Henry Lytton—as Ko-Ko. For some reason, Darrell Fancourt, who with his cavernous basso and extravagant peals of laughter had made the role of the Mikado his own since joining the company in 1920 (he played the part onstage some three thousand times), was passed over in favor of John Barclay, an acceptable but not overwhelming alternative.Read more
Categories:
Film Essays
29Mar11
Attention, all debutantes, disco lovers, and urban haute bourgeoisie: the first film in well over a decade from Whit Stillman—whose comedies of manners Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco are available from the Criterion Collection, and who discusses his top ten Criterion titles here—has been picked up for distribution and may see release this year, it was announced today. Sony Pictures Classics has acquired Stillman’s Violet Wister’s Damsels in Distress, starring Greta Gerwig and Adam Brody. This news should please the legions of devoted fans of the erudite auteur, who have been clamoring for Stillman's return for years. Sony’s press release describes the project as “a comedy that follows a trio of beautiful girls who set out to revolutionize life at a grungy East Coast university.
Categories:
News
29Mar11
“Winner of the Oscar for best documentary and countless other honors, The Times of Harvey Milk is a game-changing doc, one that not only captures an atmosphere and history of a time and place but does so with impressively astute filmmaking style,” writes Mike Restaino in a DVD File review of Criterion’s release of Robert Epstein and Richard Schmiechen’s film. “You might think you know what this Harvey Milk documentary is going to throw to you, but even having seen the film more than once, the doc is so rich and multifaceted that one gets different things out of it with every viewing . . . And what a way to view the film.”
DVD Talk’s Jason Bailey is equally roused: “The Times of Harvey Milk is a visceral, emotional film: it taps the viewer right into its events . . . The power of this film lies in those moments, in the bravado with which the filmmakers bring them to life, and make us a part of them.” For J. D. Lafrance of WhatDVD.net, “The Times of Harvey Milk is a powerful film and a sobering reminder of how much still has to be done to give equality to gays and lesbians.” Winston Gieseke, for the Advocate, also remarks on the film’s lasting importance: “It’s easy to draw parallels between the 1978 assassinations of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone and January’s shootings in Tucson, making the new Criterion edition of the acclaimed doc as relevant as ever.”
PLUS: Epstein sits down with Movieline’s Alonso Duralde for a discussion about the film and his barrier-breaking career.
Categories:
Press Notes
28Mar11
We never pass up an opportunity to send you over to Blogdanovich, and we have the perfect excuse to do so today: in Peter Bogdanovich’s latest entry, the filmmaker-writer-raconteur reminisces about his experiences as an extra in John Cassavetes’ backstage drama Opening Night, plus offers his take on the film, which he calls “Cassavetes’ anti–All About Eve.” He adds, “What dominates is the mystery of personality, and the often unfathomably complex motivations of artists,” and he saves special acclaim, naturally, for Gena Rowlands: “Magnificent in an extremely challenging role . . . If any other picture maker and actress have together repeatedly achieved such emotional depths, I don’t know about them.” Cassavetes’ devastating meditation on the nature of creation is available exclusively in the Criterion box set John Cassavetes: Five Films.
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Clippings
Recent Comments
“What I love about this is that Criterion pokes fun of its own supplements.”
—John on Going Beneath the Surface with Kent Jones, about 20 hours ago
“I believe the CC new years email (drawing) hinted that Kuroneko would be released on BD and DVD in 2011. The BD should be well worth the wait.”
—LJ on Introducing Kuroneko, about 22 hours ago
“This would actually make a great release, but I was suspicious because it said 'commentary by Pedro Costa', but I would still take it. Hysterical!”
—David Hollingsworth on Going Beneath the Surface with Kent Jones, about 24 hours ago
“Best April Fool's EVER! Next time American Idol Box Set along with Gigli. I do hope Song of South gets a release.”
—Howard on Going Beneath the Surface with Kent Jones, 1 day ago
“"noirish cinematography by Peter Stein (Ernest Goes to Jail)" and "1987 radio dramatization, featuring Eric Bogosian", hilarious!”
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