| |
The Gleaners and I
BD
- There's a suggestive discrepancy between the French and
English titles of this wonderful essay film completed by Agnes Varda last year. It's a distinction that tells us something
about the French sense of community and the Anglo-American sense
of individuality -- concepts that are virtually built into the
two languages. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse can be roughly
translated as "the gleaners and the female gleaner," with the
plural noun masculine only in the sense that all French nouns
are either masculine or feminine. The Gleaners and I sets up an
implicit opposition between "people who glean" and the
filmmaker, whereas Les glaneurs et la glaneuse links them,
asserting that she's one of them. The Agnès Varda Collection
Blu-ray Release Date: December 11th, 2017
Legend of the Lost
BD - Produced and directed by Henry Hathaway,
The Legend of the Lost boasted the one-time-only teaming of John
Wayne and Sophia Loren. Location-filmed in the Sahara desert,
the story concerns the efforts of Wayne, Loren and Rosanno
Brazzi to locate a missing treasure in the ruins of ancient
Timgrad. Once found, the treasure is stolen by Brazzi, who
leaves his partners in the middle of nowhere to die like rats.
Fortunately, Wayne and Loren survive the ordeal, though Brazzi
is not so lucky. Of the three stars, Brazzi delivers the most
interesting performance, while Wayne and Loren seem ill-at-ease
throughout. The best aspect of this sometimes ponderous effort
is the color cinematography of the great Jack Cardiff.
Blu-ray Release Date: December 12th, 2017
Cleo From 5 to 7
BD - Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in
the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne
Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a
biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo
from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama,
featuring a score by Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)
and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. The Agnès
Varda Collection Blu-ray Release Date: December 11th, 2017
Vagabond
BD - Sandrine Bonnaire won a César award for her
portrayal of Mona, a defiant young drifter who is found frozen
in a ditch. Using a largely non-professional cast, famed New
Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda recollects Mona’s story through the
flashbacks of those who encountered her, producing the
splintered portrait of an enigmatic woman. Told in sparsely
poetic images set against the frozen landscape of mid-winter
Nîmes, this is Varda’s masterpiece. The Agnès Varda
Collection Blu-ray Release Date: December 11th, 2017
The Complete Monterey Pop Festival
BD - On a beautiful June
weekend in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, the
Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a
decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll.
Monterey featured career-making performances by Jimi Hendrix,
Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding, but they were just a few of the
performers in a wildly diverse lineup that also included Simon
and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, the Byrds, Hugh
Masekela, and the extraordinary Ravi Shankar. With his
characteristic vérité style—and a camera crew that included the
likes of Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock—D. A. Pennebaker
captured it all, immortalizing moments that have become legend:
Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, Jimi Hendrix burning his,
Mama Cass watching Janis Joplin’s performance in awe. The
Criterion Collection is proud to present the most comprehensive
document of the Monterey Pop Festival ever produced, featuring
the films Monterey Pop, Jimi Plays Monterey, and Shake! Otis at
Monterey, along with every available complete performance filmed
by Pennebaker and his crew and additional rare outtakes.
Blu-ray Release date: December 12th, 2017
Columbo Season One
BD - He's the disheveled detective, dismissed
by his suspects as an erratic pest, but little do they know this
keen investigator is lulling them into a false sense of
security. His rumpled trench coat, bumbling speech, chomped
cigar and battered Peugeot 403 convertible all help paint the
portrait of a cop out of his depth, but we know it's just a
matter of time before the evidence is revealed to ensure
criminal conviction. Voted as one of the top TV detectives of
all time, COLUMBO turned the mystery genre on its head by
revealing the perpetrators of crime at the very start of each
episode. It's no whodunnit! The suspense is in discovering how
Columbo will eventually trick the criminal into letting their
guard down and revealing key evidence.
Blu-ray Release Date:
March 10th, 2017
The Breakfast Club
BD - What happens when you put five strangers
in Saturday detention? Badass posturing, gleeful misbehavior,
and a potent dose of angst. With this exuberant film,
writer-director John Hughes established himself as the bard of
American youth, vividly and empathetically capturing how
teenagers hang out, act up, and goof off. The Breakfast Club
brings together an assortment of adolescent archetypes the
uptight prom queen (Molly Ringwald), the stoic jock (Emilio
Estevez), the foul-mouthed rebel (Judd Nelson), the virginal
bookworm (Anthony Michael Hall), and the kooky recluse (Ally
Sheedy) and watches them shed their personae and emerge into
unlikely friendships. Criterion Blu-ray Release date: January
2nd, 2018
Animal Factory
BD - Edward Furlong plays Ron Decker, a
21-year-old kid from a comfortable background, who receives an
excessively harsh sentence for minor drug trafficking and finds
himself in prison – the ‘Animal Factory’ of the title. Realising
his good looks could be something of a liability, he soon
ingratiates himself with prison fixer Earl Copen (Willem Dafoe)
and finds himself taken under his wing as Copen becomes his
mentor and protector.
Blu-ray Release date: November 28th,
2017
Mill of the Stone Women
BD - Set design is key to creating the
film's unsettling atmosphere. The interior of the titular mill
features an overwhelming, expressionistic feel that relies on
odd structural designs and slants. Stairways stand at crooked
angles, and doors hang off center creating a nightmarish
landscape. In the middle of this gloom-filled structure sits the
carousel, a motorized diorama which depicts the fates of women
accused as criminals in gory detail. This sophisticated piece of
machinery operates through the use of a series of gears which
cause its morbid wax caricatures to be propelled forward in a
terrifying series of lurching motions. It's a ghastly set piece
that will be remembered by the viewer long after the film's
finale.
Blu-ray Release date: August 31st, 2016
Pulp
BD - Caine plays Mickey King, a successful pulp novelist
responsible for such titles as My Gun Is Long and The Organ
Grinder, who is invited to ghost-write the autobiography of a
mystery celebrity. His client turns out to be a former actor,
played by Mickey Rooney, well-known for his gangster roles and
real-life gangster connections but death is around the corner,
and King finds his commission to be a lot more complicated than
he first imagined.
Blu-ray Release Date: December 18th-19th,
2017
Letter From an Unknown Woman
BD - Of all the cinema's fables of
doomed love, none is more piercing than this. Fontaine nurses an
undeclared childhood crush on her next-door neighbour, a concert
pianist (Jourdan); much later, he adds her to his long list of
conquests, makes her pregnant - and forgets all about her.
Ophüls' endlessly elaborate camera movements, forever circling
the characters or co-opting them into larger designs, expose the
impasse with hallucinatory clarity: we see how these people see
each other and why they are hopelessly, inextricably stuck.
Olive Signature Blu-ray Release Date: December 5th, 2017
Leatherface - US horror directed by Alexandre Bustillo and
Julien Maury. Unable to convict Verna Sawyer (Lili Taylor) and
her family for the brutal killing of his daughter, Texas Ranger
Hal Hartman (Stephen Dorff) has the Sawyer children taken away
and admitted to a mental institution. Ten years later, a now
teenage Jed Sawyer (Sam Coleman) escapes the institution along
with fellow patients Jackson (Sam Strike), Ike (James Bloor) and
Clarice (Jessica Madsen). As the group embark on a murderous
rampage across Texas, Hartman once again sets out in pursuit and
will seemingly do anything to get his revenge. DVD Release
Date: January 8th, 2018
False Confessions - Luc Bondy's final feature film as director
draws talent from both stage and screen to bring Pierre de
Marivaux's 1737 play into 21st century Paris. Isabelle Huppert
commands the screen as Araminte, the wealthy widow who
unwittingly hires the smitten Dorante (Louis Garrel) as her
accountant. Secrets and lies accumulate as Dorante and his
accomplice, Araminte's manservant Dubois (Yves Jacques),
manipulate not only the good-hearted Araminte, but also her
friend and confidante, Marton (Manon Combes). Dorante, by turns
pitiable and proficient, but always deferential to his social
better, walks a fine line in his quest to arouse an equal desire
in the object of his affections. Bulle Ogier delivers a
memorable turn as Araminte's mother, who suspects the young
man's intentions, but wants to push her daughter into the arms
of an aged, hard-up Count (Jean-Pierre Malo). Filmed in part
on-site at the Théâtre de l'Odéon and shot during the daytime,
while the same cast performed the play there at night the film
blurs the distinction between stage and screen, offering a new
turn on this classic take on the psychology of love. DVD
Release Date: November 28th, 2017
Eight Films By Jean Rouch - One of the early pioneers of
ethnographic filmmaking to treat the field as something beyond
the documentation of processes and descriptions of
objectively-observed behavior, anthropologist Jean Rouch
(1917-2004) left a body of work about African cultures
encompassing everything from traditional cultural practices to
the adaptation and resistance of practitioners when confronted
with mechanization and industrialization, even entering into
collaborative relationships with his subjects of study and
producing controversial works questioning the intersection
between the people in front of the camera as storytellers and
the influence of his own control as film editor. DVD Release
Date: November 14th, 2017 |
