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Nominally a thriller, Diabolique (newly re-released on DVD in a digitally restored print via Criterion) is a pitch-dark comedy about taking responsibility and assigning blame. Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1943 The Raven (Le Corbeau), a not-so-thinly veiled parable against French collaboration with the Nazis, nearly destroyed his career, but his post-war work started immediately jabbing again at the post-war French republic. Vadim Rizov revisits this gripping masterpiece. Read more >>
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Pale Flower, Vanishing on 7th Street, and more.
- What We're Watching: Araya, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, Shoeshine.
- Explore: Jonathan Demme's Something Wild.
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Masahiro Shinoda's 1964 Yakuza noir is part of the Japanese equivalent [see sidebar] to the French New Wave. "A sumptuous sonnet to unrequited amour fou, Pale Flower remains Shinoda’s most enduring creation," writes Chuck Stephens on Criterion. "Brooding and nigh unreadable, with its morally murky fusion of modernism and mayhem—fast cars and fatal attractions, Sartrean silences and operatic apogees—the film is a perennial favorite among genre aficionados and art-house cine-sophistos alike." |
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Perennially underrated and interesting indie genre director Brad Anderson is back with this creepy exercise. "Anderson smartly frontloads the movie, drawing you in with long shots of deserted cityscapes, the quiet punctured by periodic bird calls and dog barks," writes Manhola Dargis. It's "a fairly solid B-movie matinee with a nicely calibrated mix of intellectual dread and visceral shock," adds James Rocchi. More from Scott Weinberg on FEARNet. |
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The rediscovered 1959 documentary about a desert archipelago in northeastern Venezuela, whose salt reserves have made it a hot spot for pirates, conquistadors and traders since the 16th century, draws much of its tone from this voice-over. Cabruja didn't write the script, with its hypnotic rhythms and poetic loops of language, but he definitely gives it a grave, grandiose magnetism that sounds practically self-parodic today. Yet it's also one thing that makes the film truly gripping to watch. Directed by Margot Benacerraf, the French-Venezuelan production depicts a day-in-the-life of a community of peasants whose livelihood comes from that salt, dredged... Read more >> |
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This documentary made its U.S. premiere at the 2009 New York Film Festival, made some festival and arthouse rounds in 2010, and finally had a San Francisco opening in 2011. It began, ostensibly, when film archivist Serge Bromberg found himself stuck in an elevator with Henri-Georges Clouzot's widow, and she told him about the late director's ordeal shooting L'Enfer (Inferno, or Hell) in the mid-1960s. The new documentary unveils a great deal of amazing-looking footage for the first time, as well as interviewing some of the surviving players.... Read more >> |
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The very first official Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Vittorio De Sica's neo-realist classic was also notable for long being unavailable on DVD but that's now been remedied, thanks to Entertainment One. "It's a blistering portrayal of a critical period of time, created in the midst of it, and yet tapping into something fundamentally human, and thus still effective even decades later," writes DVDTalk's Jamie S. Rich. "The technique is as important as the story itself, but De Sica is so good, the famous aesthetics all but disappear in the telling." |
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When it was first released 25 years ago, Something Wild seemed very much a part of the zeitgeist. As "morning in America" drifted into the senile platitudes of Ronald Reagan's second term, and Top Gun and Back to the Future cleaned up at the box office, some filmmakers were reconsidering the national identity, in particular, the apple-pie verities of small towns in what might now be called Red States - aka, the Heartland. Steve Dollar has more on Jonathan Demme cult favorite, now on DVD from Criterion. More >> |
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