Cloverfield [BLU-RAY]

Disguised under deliberately goofy, yet deliciously edible-sounding, aliases such as Cheese and Slusho, Matt Reeves' Cloverfield was produced and rushed into theaters under an equally appetizing shroud of secrecy. From last year's incredibly elusive Super Bowl ad to the film's viral marketing campaign, Cloverfield had everybody scratching their heads and drooling in anticipation. Aside from the as-yet untitled title and the Blair Witch-ian visual style, the film's biggest appeal was the enigmatic creature who was last (un)seen hurling the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty onto the crowded streets of New York City. All we knew about the mysterious beast was that it was big and angry. Now that the highy-anticipated project has come and gone, one question has fortunately been answered: Cloverfield was a major success.

You...Read More

The Draughtsman's Contract

The Draughtsman's Contract is Peter Greenaway's best film, the only one by this idiosyncratic filmmaker to warrant repeated viewings. After years of editing BBC documentaries and making experimental shorts, Greenaway made his first feature, the mock documentary The Falls, in 1980. Released in 1982, The Draughtsman's Contract is his first true narrative feature and remains the most accessible of his films.

On an English estate in 1694, Neville (Anthony Higgins) is hired to execute twelve drawings of the buildings and grounds of Herbert (Dave Hill). Neville accepts the assignment reluctantly, suggesting to Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) that he will do it while her husband is away, only if she agrees to have sex with him each day. Neville offers this proviso as a joke only to be surprised when she...Read More

2 Days in Paris

Although Julie Delpy swears that 2 Days in Paris is not autobiographical, the personality that comes across in the 24-minute interview with her on the DVD of her debut film shows that she and her protagonist are very similar. More importantly, 2 Days in Paris proves that Delpy has considerable talent as a filmmaker.

Marion (Delpy), a French photographer living in New York, returns home to Paris after a vacation in Venice with her American boyfriend, Jack (Adam Goldberg). Half of 2 Days in Paris focuses on Marion's relations with her parents (Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy), sister (Alexia Landeau), and the ex-lovers she keeps running into. The rest presents Jack's bemused reaction to these strange French people and to Marion's often hyperactive behavior in her native land.

The Furies

Anthony Mann's career was unusual because it developed in stages. He began with low-budget B movies in 1942, moved on to films noir such as Raw Deal, and then to westerns (often with noir elements) in the fifties. One of his three fifties westerns, The Furies represents a particularly interesting and odd blend of genres: western, noir, gothic romance, and melodrama.

In the 1870s, T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) lords over an immense New Mexico ranch. Rather than leave his legacy to his weak-willed son (John Bromfield), he considers his feisty daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck) his natural heir. Problems arise when Vance is drawn to gambler Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey). This man's land was stolen by T. C., who tries to run off Mexican squatters including Vance's childhood friend...Read More

Classe tous risques

Claude Sautet is best known for subtle interpretations of French bourgeois life in such films as Un coeur en hiver and Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud. Yet the director began his career with genre films. Classe Tous Risques, released in 1960, is considered the best of his early work and it's a fascinating companion to similar crime movies made around the same time by Jean-Pierre Melville.

Classe Tous Risques (roughly translated as "at any risk") opens with an lengthy and exciting action sequence. Gangster Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) decides to end his long exile in Milan and sneak back into France with his wife (Simone France) and two young sons (Robert Desnoux and Thierry Lavoye) despite a death sentence hanging over his head in his native country. After dropping...Read More

Pierrot le fou

"Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion." Samuel Fuller's famous epigram during his cameo in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou is a concise summary of the film itself. Not only does it have love, hate, etc., but it is a battleground on two fronts: Godard's attempt to break away from genres and his need to exorcise Anna Karina, his frequent star and the wife who was divorcing him at the time. Even without background about the turbulent Godard marriage, Pierrot le fou is fascinating. With this knowledge -- approached from many angles in the excellent as always Criterion extras -- the film has an emotional subtext that would not otherwise be evident.

Loosely based on Obsession (by the crime writer Lionel White),...Read More

Mafioso

Nino Badalamenti is a supervisor in a car manufacturing plant who hasn't taken a vacation in over two years. On his way out the door to visit his beloved childhood hometown of Sicily -- with his blonde wife and daughters -- Nino is handed a package by his boss and asked to deliver it to a powerful and influential Sicilian gangster named Don Vincenzo. Once in Sicily, Nino has a hoot seeing friends and family, but his wife has trouble fitting in and is unfairly dismissed as a snob by Nino's family. Even more worrisome, Nino finds himself entangled in an intricate web of secret mafioso dealings and is eventually sent on an unexpectedly... elaborate errand.

Okay, I know that plot synopsis leaves a lot to be desired, but Mafioso is so unique in its balance of moods and story elements,...Read More

There Will Be Blood
2-Disc Collector's Edition

As rich, daring, detailed, emotional, complex, and original as any film released in 2007, There Will Be Blood is that rare film that actually earns the label "instant classic." Unlike its gloriously cinematic (but inferior) awards season rival, No Country For Old Men -- which is marred by one-too-many goofy supporting characters, several structural mishaps, and an overall sensibility that feels slight by comparison -- There Will Be Blood is a film that proudly depicts real, flawed, contradictory, and mysterious people living in the real world with none of the Coens' winking detachment or genre shortcuts. While most filmmakers are content to play around with the same old tricks, Paul Thomas Anderson is quietly inventing a new cinematic language.

But enough about the movie. The real issue at hand is this 2-disc DVD released on...Read More

Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals

Fans of classical Hollywood comedy appropriately revere Ernst Lubitsch as one of the greatest and most influential comic directors of all time. Billy Wilder had a sign in his office that asked "what would Lubitsch do?" and, while Lubitsch's influence isn't always evident in today's comedies, few of the great Hollywood comedies of recent decades would have been possible without the Lubitsch-influenced work of Wilder. Familiar with Lubitsch's numerous comedy classics (Ninotchka, Trouble in Paradise, and The Shop Around the Corner, to name just three), some might wonder why they'd need to bother with his musicals. This wonderful release from The Criterion Collection's Eclipse Series makes it abundantly clear. Not only do these films feature charmingly buoyant musical numbers, but they are largely indistinguishable from the aforementioned classics. Imagine any of Lubitsch's best comedies, but with lively musical sequences...Read More

4 by Agnes Varda

One major weakness of the auteur theory is its tendency to engender career-wide support (or dismissal) of a director based on a few celebrated works, rather than encourage a more thorough consideration that takes into account their most eccentric, personal, and disreputable efforts. This has an averaging effect, leaving canonical films overpraised and much greater achievements undervalued or even forgotten. If aspiring Godard fans are taught to reduce his filmography to Breathless, Masculin feminin, and Contempt (great films, one and all), they could very well miss the even more innovative and radical work found in Les Carabiniers, Pierrot le fou, Weekend, and Tout va bien. Auteurism blurs films together and prevents individual films from receiving the scrutiny that their unique efforts deserve.

This problem is especially applicable to the work of Agnes...Read More

Two-Lane Blacktop

Eight or nine years ago, Monte Hellman's reputation was a bit of a mess. He hadn't made a film in ages and his most recent effort was the third entry in the increasingly forgettable Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise. It was around this time that Anchor Bay issued Two-Lane Blacktop on DVD for the first time, instantly reviving Hellman's rep and opening the floodgates for a series of wonderful Monte Hellman special editions, including The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind, Cockfighter, and Iguana. The latter two were also Anchor Bay releases. Hell, they even released the Shaw Brothers/Hammer Films co-production Shatter with a commentary by Hellman, even though his work on that film was uncredited.

By putting previously unavailable Hellman films back in circulation -- in their original aspect ratios...Read More

Help!

Once upon a time, boys and girls, there were these mopheads from Liverpool. They made these songs that made everybody happy. Then these men in suits said, "There's even more gold in them there boys." And a movie was begat real fast cause everybody knew they were flashes-in-the-pan. An American expatriate, Richard Lester, was chosen to make it because he had made It's Trad, Dad! and knew all about quickly fading musical fads. And behold, A Hard Day's Night was a masterpiece and everybody was very, very happy. And the suits said, "Dick, do it again" and Help! was born. It also made people happy... but not as happy.

Somewhere in the mysterious East, Clang (Leo McKern) is about to sacrifice a virgin when he discovers the would-be victim has sent the required...Read More

Shoot the Moon

Marriages disintegrate every day and, while there have been many movies about this subject, most are trite or hysterical or both. Despite some melodramatic touches, Shoot the Moon -- the 1982 film written by Bo Goldman, directed by Alan Parker, and famously praised by Pauline Kael -- is neither. George Dunlap (Albert Finney) is an award-winning writer living in northern Marin County, California with his wife, Faith (Diane Keaton), and their four daughters (Dana Hill, Viveka Davis, Tracey Gold, and Tina Yothers). The movie begins with the Dunlap marriage obviously strained and, following an argument, George leaves to live with his mistress, Sandy (Karen Allen).

The rest of Shoot the Moon consists of George trying to maintain a relationship with his youngest daughters while Faith and Sherry, the eldest, mope about. Faith hires contractor Frank Henderson (Peter Weller) to build a...Read More

Becoming John Ford

Nick Redman's Becoming John Ford is intended as a supplement to the massive 24-film Ford at Fox set. Aimed at those who already believe in Ford's greatness, it has some deficiencies -- primarily random comments that seem divorced from any context -- but Becoming John Ford is generally a pleasant way to spend 93 minutes. The commentators are Joseph McBride (author of Searching for John Ford), Rudy Behlmer (editor of Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck), James D'Arc (curator of the movie archives at Brigham Young University), UCLA professor Janet Bergstrom, French documentarian Jean-Christophe Jeauffre, screenwriters Lem Dobbs and Tom Mankiewicz, and Peter Fonda. Except for Jeauffre, who babbles about discovering America through Ford's movies, all have something of interest to say about Ford, Fox, Zanuck, or Henry Fonda, star of four of Ford's Fox films, presenting a balanced view of Ford...Read More

Blades of Glory [HD DVD]

As you may already know, Paramount (and Dreamworks) no longer caters to the Blu-ray crowd. Instead of supporting both high-def formats, the studio has decided to release their catalogue exclusively on HD DVD. Whether or not this was a rational business decision (probably not) or bribery (probably), the much-anticipated high-definition release of Blades of Glory was, at the eleventh hour, cancelled for Blu-ray. At the time, this may have seemed like a minor triumph for HD DVD supporters, but now that Warner has jumped ship, it's little more than a punchline.

In spite of the last minute recall of the Blades of Glory Blu-ray -- which resulted in a near apocalypse -- several copies did actually make it onto shelves and they were sold on eBay...Read More

Music For the Movies: The Hollywood Sound, Bernard Hermann, Georges Delerue, and Toru Takemitsu

These four 1990s documentaries attempt to give the layman some understanding of how film scores work. One does so magnificently, while the others have problems, though each has something for anyone interested in the history of movie music. Such a person should watch the four in the following order.

Joshua Waletsky's The Hollywood Sound -- the longest at 85 minutes; the others run 58 minutes -- examines scores from the 1930s and 1940s by Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Dimitri Tiomkin, and David Raksin (where's Miklos Rosza?). Musicians who worked with them, other composers, and a music scholar comment, as does John Mauceri, the film's host and the conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at the time. Roughly a third of the documentary involves Mauceri...Read More

Pretty Things

The main reason to see Pretty Things is Marion Cotillard. If you've seen her in La Vie en rose, you know she's a terrific, possibly great actress. Pretty Things offers the chance to see her tackle a similar role six years earlier and she's almost equally riveting. Written and directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, Pretty Things is the story of identical twins (both played by Cotillard) with opposite personalities. Lucie is carefree and outgoing, the favorite of her father (Olivier Granier), while Marie is withdrawn and considered ugly by la pere. Naturally, Lucie becomes a coke-sniffing nympho, running off to Paris to do anything she can to survive, including performing in a porno film.

Lucie develops a platonic relationship with a songwriter named Nicolas (Stomy Bugsy) and is offered a recording contract even though she can't sing. So Marie, who can, is summoned from...Read More

Macbeth (2006)

With the notable exception of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Shakespeare's Macbeth has had a rather spotty film history. Welles' 1948 version is compromised by budgetary restrictions. In Roman Polanski's 1971 adaptation, the violence is handled wel l-- big surprise, huh? -- and then there's Francesca Annis' nifty nude stroll down a corridor. Which brings us to Geoffrey Wright's 2006 endeavor, which relocates the setting to contemporary Australia and changes the characters to gangsters. As might be expected from the director of Romper Stomper, Wright's take is heavy on the old ultraviolence.

Re-imagining Shakespeare's characters as criminals is nothing new. Men of Respect, a mess but a guilty pleasure, salvages a bit of the Bard's language while emphasizing the gore. Wright and co-writer Victoria Hill, who also plays Lady Macbeth, preserve the language and do an excellent job of refining the...Read More

Chinatown and The Two Jakes

We all know where we stand on Chinatown and The Two Jakes. For many of us, Chinatown is one of the landmark American films -- and arguably the summit of director Roman Polanski's distinguished career -- while The Two Jakes is its flawed, but occasionally worthwhile successor (sadly, the latter film's commercial failure prevented Robert Towne and Jack Nicholson from making their planned third installment in the series). But I'm not here to write about the films, I'm here to write about the new DVDs. On the surface, this appears to be a pointless double-dip, designed to cash-in on a new pair of matching DVD covers. And yes, to some extent, that's precisely what this is. However, short list of supplements notwithstanding, these discs offer a bounty of fascinating new material.

My original concern was that...Read More

Hostel: Director's Cut and Hostel: Part II [BLU-RAY]

Many of you probably own or have experienced the more than satisfactory uncut DVD incarnation of Hostel that was released in April '06. There is likely no need at all to upgrade to the director's cut (I guess there's a difference between director's cut and uncut) unless of course you're planning on picking it up on Blu-ray. The sum of a better transfer, slightly crisper audio, an optional (but arguably inferior) alternate ending, and a handful of new extras -- including 19 minutes of very decent deleted/extended scenes, a Takashi Miike interview, four brief featurettes, and a not-brief-enough clip of Eythor Gudjonsson (who plays Oli) eating a cooked sheep's head, eyeball included -- make this release totally worthwhile for any self-respecting fan. And if you haven't seen Hostel yet, give it...Read More