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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Repulsion, Big Man Japan, and more.
- What We're Watching (Summer Archives Edition): Summer Palace, Choking Man, Tracey Fragments.
- Explore: Preview of coming attractions.
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Criterion presents us with a shiny new director-approved edition of what TimeOut's Geoff Andrews' deemed "still perhaps [Roman] Polanski's most perfectly realised film, a stunning portrait of the disintegration, mental and emotional, of a shy young Belgian girl ( Catherine Deneuve) living in London." Adds Time: "At second glance, or as often as a moviegoer can bear to peek through his knotted fingers, it is a Gothic horror story, a classic chiller of the Psycho school and approximately twice as persuasive. " Many extras include audio commentary featuring Polanski and Deneuve and a documentary on the film's making. |
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This odd but wickedly deadpan spin on the giant Japanese superhero might appeal to fans of "Heroes" and "Godzilla" in equal measure. "I hurt myself laughing at this amazingly inventive mockumentary," wrote Aaron Hillis in the Voice, "and because it's so good, I refuse to give away much more than an insistent recommendation." The film also offers up some "hysterically funny CGI fight sequences," adds JR Jones in the Chicago Reader, "which pit the chubby superhero against a series of creatures so bizarre they'd keep Hieronymus Bosch awake at night." |
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Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye's fourth feature Summer Palace feels very much like a French New Wave film. Using China's turbulent political years as a backdrop, the movie focuses on a small group of students - focusing on the country girl Yu Hong - attending Bejing University in the late 1980s, and the different (sometimes even conflicting) emotions they experience as the careless enthusiasm of their youth gives way to life's disenchanting realities. Emotions, it should be noted, are conveyed accurately, and most importantly non-pornographically, in the film's many explicit sexual encounters... read review >> |
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No less a light than Steven Soderbergh (once upon a time the flag-bearer for independent American cinema) is on record as calling Choking Man "everything an independent film should be." If that kind of all-encompassing praise sounds difficult to live up to, not to worry. Steve Barron's film is plenty good and certainly worth its 83 minutes of your time. [And now you'll notice Breaking Bad's newly-Emmy-nominated Aaron Paul, too.]... read review >> |
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Even though The Tracey Fragments, an offbeat Canadian film starring Ellen Page, was made before the wildly successful Juno<, it was only after viewers and critics were left dumbfounded by the actress's spot-on, deadpan performance in the latter film that Tracey could get a theatrical (and a subsequent DVD) release in the US. As with Juno, Page's Tracey is an intelligent, out-of-the-mainstream, teenage girl who's... read review >> |
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Coming over the next week: A fantastic new piece commemorating the anniversary of one of the more important -- if not one of the happiest -- moments in cinema history, the Hays Code; and a new contest centered around the theatrical release of the new film by one of Asia's, and the world's, most original filmmakers. Check back on GreenCine Central and GreenCine Daily for all that and more.
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