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BED AND BOARD - (THE ADVENTURES OF ANTOINE DOINEL) - #187
It's in the third Antoine Doinel film, 1970's Bed and Board, that Francois Truffaut's series of films becomes a series proper. Now there is a set style and tone, the happenings vacillating between...
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LA PROMESSE (Blu-Ray) - #620
Whenever self-important reviewers such as myself complain about the preponderance of blockbusters and their dominance over ticket sales at multiplexes, it's because there are films like La promesse...
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MAIDSTONE AND OTHER FILMS BY NORMAN MAILER - ECLIPSE SERIES 35
"I carry a broken heart in every knuckle."Norman Mailer has always been a larger-than-life literary figure, one whose gargantuan personality regularly precedes and often supersedes the quality and...
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LOVE ON THE RUN - (THE ADVENTURES OF ANTOINE DOINEL) - #188
Love on the Run could have just as easily been called "Coming Home to Roost," but the film's title is not merely meant to be descriptive of this, the final entry in Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel...
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SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 8/12
My reviews of non-Criterion movies from August.IN THEATRES... * 2 Days in New York, the new one from Julie Delpy. Really, if I were Chris Rock, I'd have tapped out after 12 hours.* The Bourne Legacy,...
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QUADROPHENIA (Blu-Ray) - #624
"Oh, yeah? What's normal then?"My first Who concert was seeing the Quadrophenia revival in the mid-1990s. It was a pretty amazing experience. How often do you get to see one of your all-time favorite...
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KENJI MIZOGUCHI'S FALLEN WOMEN: OSAKA ELEGY/SISTERS OF THE GION - ECLIPSE...
Just how much is $300 worth to you? It's a question that Ayako Murai, played by Isuzu Yamada, must ask herself in the 1936 movie Osaka Elegy. Directed by master dramatist Kenji Mizoguchi, using a...
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BLAST FROM MY OWN PAST: LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD - #478
I am surprised this never made it over here from my Confessions of a Pop Fan blog, where I reviewed the film during its revival run. I think maybe when the Criterion was announced I intended to do a...
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LES VISITEURS DU SOIR (Blu-Ray) - #626
Love may conquer all, but it can't do it without putting in a good fight first.Or so we may glean from Marcel Carné's 1942 romantic fantasy Les visiteurs du soir (The Devil's Envoys). In this medieval...
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KENJI MIZOGUCHI'S FALLEN WOMEN: WOMEN OF THE NIGHT - ECLIPSE SERIES 13
Okay, so maybe Kenji Mizoguchi's 1948 drama Women of the Night wasn't the best choice for a Saturday evening's entertainment. Particularly since I hadn't even started drinking. Correcting that now.The...
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EATING RAOUL (Blu-Ray) - #625
I remember the print ads for Eating Raoul from when I was a kid. Even in black-and-white in the newspaper, the big lips seemed somehow dirty to me. I really don't know where or how it would have landed...
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SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 9/12
My reviews of non-Criterion movies from September.IN THEATRES...* Bachelorette, Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher lead a great cast into some crass territory the night before the wedding.* Compliance,...
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KENJI MIZOGUCHI'S FALLEN WOMEN: STREET OF SHAME - ECLIPSE SERIES 13
The final movie in Eclipse's Kenji Mizoguchi's Lost Women also turned out to be the last film the director made. 1956's Street of Shame not only shows how far Mizoguchi has come as a cinematic...
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IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Blu-Ray) - #147
If I could go back in time and rejoin myself in a position just prior to having seen In the Mood for Love, I would do it in a heartbeat. Oh, to relive that first taste of love! To fall under the spell...
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THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD (Blu-Ray) - #628
It starts with a simple act.A father and a son are on their delivery route, selling bread out of the back of their rickety, horse-drawn cart. To get off a back road and onto the main one, they climb...
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ROSEMARY'S BABY - #630
"This is no dream...this is really happening!"I wonder how many documentary programs have used Mia Farrow's panicked cry to illustrate the dark side of swinging '60s psychedelia? I know I have seen it...
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SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 10/12
My reviews of non-Criterion movies through October.IN THEATRES...* Argo, Ben Affleck takes a true story about a fake movie and turns it into genuine cinema.* Bill W., a documentary about the man behind...
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THREE WICKED MELODRAMAS FROM GAINSBOROUGH PICTURES - ECLIPSE SERIES 36
Gainsborough Pictures, I'll admit, is not a company I had heard of, despite the fact that they produced Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes [review] (and, indeed, were instrumental in encouraging the master...
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PRIVATE LIVES OF ALEXANDER KORDA: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII - ECLIPSE...
"Six wives, and the best of them's the worst."It's an older, weary, yet unflappable Henry VIII who drops that chestnut on us at the conclusion of The Private Life of Henry VIII. Charles Laughton plays...
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WEEKEND (Blu-Ray) - #635
"This isn't a novel, it's a film. A film is life."Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard's incendiary 1967 farewell to motion pictures as he knew (and redefined) them, gives new meaning to the term "road rage." Most...
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