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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Exiled, The Wire, and much more.
- What We're Watching: Lady Chatterley, Drunken Angel, and Guantanamo.
- Service Highlights: Gift certificates!
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"Buoyed by humor in all the right places, the script is dryly funny," notes Craig Phillips on GreenCine
Guru of this "Spaghetti Eastern" that owes a bit to Sam Peckinpah as well. "As other critics have already mentioned, Exiled serves as a fine introduction to (Johnnie) To's work; if it's not his best film, it's certainly one of his most accessible and enjoyable (and, good Lord, the man's more than 45 films!)." A "fantasy of a crime epic, to be sure," adds Sean Axmaker, "but it's a glorious fantasy in which the unspoken bonds of brotherhood bathe every shootout and sacrifice in the light of myth." |
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The Wire Season 4 Rent 
A critic for Newsday declared the acclaimed HBO series The
Wire "the greatest dramatic series ever produced for television" and they're not alone. Wrote the SF Chronicle's Tim Goodman: "The breadth and ambition are unrivaled and taken cumulatively over the course of a season -- any season -- it's an astonishing display of writing, acting and storytelling that must be considered alongside the best literature and filmmaking in the modern era." And The
Wire Season 4 is arguably the finest yet (at least until season 5), expanding its focus to include Baltimore's public school system (and education in general). |
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Winner of five French Cesar awards, this incredibly sensuous adaptation of DH Lawrence's novel is "a masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace," wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader. Adds Ella Taylor of the LA Weekly: "The supreme achievement of this lovely film -- all three rhythmic, leisurely hours of it -- is that what borders on faintly fascistic body worship in the novel instead feels as perfectly natural to us as it does to the lovers. Lawrence would kvell." Read more reviews here >> |
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Early works in artists' careers can be fascinating, giving viewers a window with which to view later greatness, and that certainly is the case with the new Criterion Collection release of Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948). The crisp digital transfer will give fans of the venerated Japanese director the opportunity to see (the first viewing for some – this is the official region 1 debut on the DVD format; GreenCine previously offered an import) what the master called his first "real" film – that is, the first time he had complete creative control on a project. Perhaps more notably, it was his first collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, beginning one of the.. . Read full review >> |
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The Road to Guantanamo presents us with the firsthand accounts of three former detainees from Tipton, England. Asif, Shafiq and Ruhel, along with their cousin, are arrested in war-torn Afghanistan after haphazardly deciding to become fighters. Using reenacted scenes and interviews with the three young men, filmmakers Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom present the viewer with a savage and suspenseful tale of mistaken identity. The film is still timely, too - the three men are tortured (in brutal re-enactments) by American and British intelligence trying to get a false confession out of them. Read Full Review >>
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Hoping for Peace
in the Middle East
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