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Studiocanal have put together a lovely package for this re-release of the Jean-Pierre Melville classic. It offers a 4k restoration of the film, supervised by DoP Pierre Lhomme, which certainly brings out the bleak blue-dominated palette of the film.

Previous editions of the film have included a commentary track by Professor Ginnette Vincendeau. This time out, that has disappeared into the shadows but there are two substantial background extras instead.

Army Of Shadows...The Hidden Side Of The Story first appeared on the 2013 release of the film and it's an excellent guide to the ins and outs of Melville's attitude and the way he worked with the actors on the set. Interviewees include the producer Jacques Dorfman and the DoP along with Olivier Bohler, who directed documentary Code Name: Melville and who proves an informative guide to Melville's motivations. Actors Alain Mottet, Alain Libolt, and Claude Mann also provide some excellent.

Mk2 Films, the Paris-based outfit behind Justine Triet’s Oscar-nominated “Anatomy of a Fall,” is set to restore Robert Bresson’s “Four Nights of a Dreamer,” a romantic drama which competed at the Berlinale in 1971 and disappeared from screens in 1985.

MK2 Films, the division of a major arthouse cinema chain in France, will digitize “Four Nights of a Dreamer” in 4K and will bring it to global theatres in 2024.

“Four Nights of a Dreamer” is the 10th film directed by Bresson and the only one which wasn’t restored. His other credits include “Mouchette,” “Au Hasard Balthazar” and “Pickpocket.”

Inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “White Nights,” “Four Nights of a Dreamer” revolves around a meeting on the Pont Neuf between a dreamy young man and a distraught young woman who will confide in each other over four nights. It stars Guillaume des Forêts, Isabelle Weingarten, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer. The film...

Jean-Pierre Melville’s most accomplished, most personal movie gets a new reissue. Ignored in 1969 and released in the United States only 37 years later, this somber, ultra-realistic look at the French resistance has never been equalled. Forget thrilling adventure tales with daring escapes, patriotic oaths and beautiful spies; Melville presents resistance activities in the Occupied territory as a fearful grind leading in one direction only. Criterion’s extras include an interview piece with historical operatives, who still argue points of strategy.

Army of Shadows

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 385

1969 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 145 min. / L’Armée des ombres / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 7, 2020 / 39.95

Starring: Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simone Signoret, Claude Mann, Paul Crauchet, Christian Barbier, Serge Reggiani, André Dewavrin.

Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme, Walter Wottitz

Film Editor: Françoise Bonnot

Original Music: Eric De Marsan

Written by Jean-Pierre Melville from the novel by Joseph Kessel

Produced by Jacques Dorfmann

Directed...

Celebrated French cinematographer Pierre Lhomme has passed away aged 89.

The veteran DoP was well known for a string of French classics including Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army Of Shadows (1969), Jean Eustache’s The Mother And The Whore (1973), Bruno Nuytten’s Camille Claudelle (1988) and Gerard Depardieu pic Cyrano De Bergerac (1990).

Lhomme’s career as a cinematographer spanned five decades, beginning in 1953. He was nominated for seven Cesar Awards, winning two for Cyrano De Bergerac and Camille Claudelle. The former also saw him garner a BAFTA win and a technical grand prize at Cannes.

Lhomme also worked with directors Chris Marker, Robert Bresson, Patrice Chéreauon and on several Merchant-Ivory features, including the James Ivory-directed Quartet, Maurice, Jefferson In Paris and Le Divorce, which was his last credit in 2003.

According to the Lumiere Institute in France, Lhomme died yesterday.

Grande tristesse. Pierre Lhomme s’est éteint hier à 89 ans. Il était le cinema français. Formé à Louis Lumière, engagé dans les combats de son temps et de son métier, il a été aussi aux côtés du @festlumiere dès 2009. @afcinema_com pic.twitter.com/5lULCMmIzi

— Institut Lumière (@InstitutLumiere) July 5, 2019...

Pierre Lhomme, the French cinematographer behind such films as Army of Shadows, The Mother and the Whore, Camille Claudel and Cyrano de Bergerac, has died. He was 89.

Lhomme died July 4 in Arles, France, the French Society of Cinematographers told The Hollywood Reporter.

Lhomme received a César award in 1989 for his work on Camille Claudel, which was directed by former cameraman Bruno Nuytten. He received a second César in 1991 for Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which also won a technical prize at Cannes.

Among his 60-odd credits are films by Chris Marker (Le Joli Mai, which Lhomme co-directed, and A bientôt,...

Pierre Lhomme, the French cinematographer behind films like Army of Shadows, The Mother and the Whore, Camille Claudel and Cyrano de Bergerac, has died.

His death was first reported in a tweet from the Institut Lumière in Lyon. He was 89.

Lhomme received a César award in 1989 for his work on Camille Claudel, which was directed by former cameraman Bruno Nuytten. He received a second César in 1991 for Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which also won a technical prize at Cannes.

Among his 60-odd credits are films by Chris Marker (Le Joli Mai, which Lhomme co-directed, and A bientôt, j’...

Above: French poster for A Grin Without a Cat.Starting today, the Metrograph in New York will be launching an extensive series celebrating the 40th anniversary of one of the most dedicated, unsung heroes of U.S. film distribution: Icarus Films. Founded in 1978 by filmmaker Ilan Ziv and sold two years later (in exchange for a video camera) to Jonathan Miller who has run the company ever since, Icarus has become one of the leading repositories for aesthetically challenging, politically engaged documentary cinema. The two-week long series contains 56 films by some of the most important names in documentary film: Chantal Akerman, Jean Rouch, Peter Watkins, Chris Marker, Marcel Ophuls and Wang Bing, to name just a few.Finding posters for a lot of these films was not easy. Many of the titles were never really theatrical material (they range in length from 44 minutes to 345) and so a theatrical poster would...

Above: French poster for Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, France, 1961). Design by Raymond Gid.There is an essential and vital film series opening today at Film Forum in New York: a survey of 1960s Cinema Verité productions which brings vividly to life a decade of instability and protest as well as a new era of introspection. While this survey of posters doesn’t give a complete look at the series—“more than 50 modern classics which not only changed the recording of social history, but revolutionized filmmaking itself”—since many of the films are not feature-length (some of the shows pair an hour long film with a 30 minute short) and thus were not theatrically released. But those that I’ve gathered do convey the urgency of the movement as well as its seat-of-the-pants guerrilla style of film marketing as much as film making.I’ve not included the...

Colin MacCabe in a Chris Marker Cats Go Barack T-shirt Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger co-director Colin MacCabe and photographer Adam Bartos will be joined by Ben Lerner and Experimenter director Michael Almereyda for an In Chris Marker's Studio panel discussion following the screenings of Marker's Cat Listening To Music (Chat Écoutant La Musique), Ouvroir, Second Life featuring Guillaume-en-Égypte and excerpts from Agnès Varda's Agnès De Ci De Là Varda at Metrograph in New York.

Michael Almereyda's Escapes subject Hampton Fancher at BAMcinemaFest Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Almereyda's two latest films, Marjorie Prime (starring Lois Smith, Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Tim Robbins) and his Hampton Fancher documentary Escapes will be released this summer in the Us.

Marker's Sans Soleil, Tokyo Days and his Le Joli Mai with Pierre Lhomme will be shown as part of the series celebrating another cat man.

Take a look at the roots of American campaign image consciousness, and the then-new techniques of cinéma vérité to bring a new 'reality' for film documentaries. Four groundbreaking films cover the Kennedy-Humphrey presidential primary, and put us in the Oval Office for a showdown against Alabama governor George Wallace. The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates Blu-ray Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, Faces of November The Criterion Collection 808 1960 -1964 / B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 53, 52, 53, 12 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 26, 2016 / 39.95 Starring John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Drew, Hubert H. Humphrey, McGeorge Bundy, John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Goodwin, Albert Gore Sr., Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Pierre Salinger, Haile Selassie, John Steinbeck, George Wallace, Vivian Malone, Burke Marshall, Nicholas Katzenbach, John Dore, Jack Greenberg; Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy Jr., Caroline Kennedy, Peter Lawford. Cinematography Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker,...

Issue 6 of Lola carries on rolling out with three new pieces, including an appreciation of Larry Clark's The Smell of Us. Also in today's roundup: Comparing and contrasting Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant and Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, reviewing a book by Werner Herzog and another on Groucho Marx, sorting through the early work of Charles Chaplin, interviewing John Akomfrah and Stephen Cone, a study of Yasujirô Ozu's methods, plus Laurie Anderson in Brighton, Spike Jonze at Vice, Pierre Lhomme in New York—and more. » - David Hudson...

Issue 6 of Lola carries on rolling out with three new pieces, including an appreciation of Larry Clark's The Smell of Us. Also in today's roundup: Comparing and contrasting Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant and Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, reviewing a book by Werner Herzog and another on Groucho Marx, sorting through the early work of Charles Chaplin, interviewing John Akomfrah and Stephen Cone, a study of Yasujirô Ozu's methods, plus Laurie Anderson in Brighton, Spike Jonze at Vice, Pierre Lhomme in New York—and more. » - David Hudson...

Available for the first time in the Us on Blu-ray and DVD is Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful directorial debut, 1949’s Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea). Based on a famous underground novel published secretly in 1942 by author Jean Bruller, written under the pseudonym Vercours, the exceptional debut precedes the brooding themes that would grace Melville’s later noir and gangster films, as well as the continuation of period pieces concerning Nazi occupied France. Understated and elegant, it’s an incredibly haunting first title from the self-made auteur, an actual member of the French resistance (he adopted his surname for his love of author Herman Melville and it remained his pseudonym after the war).

Opening with a statement that the film has ‘no pretensions’ as concerns the relationship with France and Germany (whose people were complicit with the Nazi’s rise to power), we hear the omniscient narration of an elder Frenchman,...

A review of "The Devil, Probably" by Mireille Latil-Le-Dantec. Originally published in Issue 77, July-August 1977, of Cinématographe. Translation by Ted Fendt. Thanks to Marie-Pierre Duhamel.

"I challenge you all now, all you atheists. With what will you save the world, and where have you found a normal line of progress for it, you men of science, of co-operation, of labour-wage, and all the rest of it?

With credit? What's credit? Where will credit take you? [...] Without recognizing any moral basis except the satisfaction of individual egoism and material necessity! [...] It's a law, that's true; but it's no more normal than the law of destruction, or even self-destruction. [...] Yes, sir, the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in humanity! The devil has equal dominion over humanity till the limit of time which we know not. You laugh? You don't believe in the devil? Disbelief in the devil is a French idea,...

 

If you missed the critically acclaimed drama Museum Hours last week, the Austin Film Society is bringing you one more chance to catch it on the big screen. You can check it out on Sunday afternoon at the Marchesa. That's also where you'll find a brand-new digital restoration of Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme's 1963 documentary Le Joli Mai on Tuesday evening and the Essential Cinema screening of Ozu's Floating Weeds in 35mm on Thursday night.

The Drafthouse's new "Tough Ladies In Cinema" series delivers To Kill A Mockingbird this weekend. You can spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons with Scout and Atticus Finch at the Alamo Lakeline and Slaughter Lane locations. Slaugher also has an "Afternoon Tea" screening of Elizabeth on Saturday and a Bonnie and Clyde beer dinner on Sunday (also part of the Tough Ladies lineup).

The Alamo Ritz has a special Mondo Veterans Day presentation of Oliver Stone...

In May 1962, a cease-fire was declared with colonial Algeria, marking the first time in 23 years that France was not at war. Filmmaker Chris Marker and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme took to the streets of Paris that month with a handheld camera (a new model also used by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin to film the contemporaneous ground-level doc Chronicle of a Summer) to interview a cross-section of the city's population about the state of their lives at that moment. The freshly restored time capsule Le Joli Mai (which will screen at Film Forum in Dcp) documents on-the-street talks with a wide variety of Paris residents. A mason cheerfully accepts the eternal need to work to earn money for himself and his family; a poor wife and mother thrills at finally receiving a new, gover...

Apart from the three sneak screening titles that will stir up the buzz in the coming days, Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy’s 40th edition of the Telluride Film Festival excels in bringing a concentration of solid docus from the likes of Errol Morris and Werner Herzog who this year cuts the ribbon on a theatre going by his name and introduces Death Row, a pinch of Berlin Film Fest items (Gloria, Slow Food Story, Fifi Howls from Happiness) Palme d’Or winner (this year Abdellatif Kechiche will be celebrated), upcoming Sony Pictures Classics items (Tim’s Vermeer, The Lunchbox), Venice to Telluride to Tiff titles (Bethlehem, Tracks and Under the Skin), the latest Jason Reitman film (Labor Day) and the barely known docu-home-movie whodunit (by helmers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine) The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden which features narration from the likes of Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger and Connie Nielsen.

Over the years, the Toronto International Film Festival’s Cinematheque programme has given film fans an opportunity to watch old classics from world cinema on the big screen one more time. The 2013 incarnation of the Tiff Cinematheque programme sees seven critical favourites from yesteryear brought to life on the big screen. The films are:

- An Autumn Afternoon, the 1962 Japanese film by Yasujiro Ozu

- Gun Crazy, the 1950 American film by Joseph H. Lewis

- Hiroshima Mon Amour, the 1959 French/Japanese film by Alain Resnais

- Le Joli Mai, the 1963 French film by Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme

- Manila in the Claws of Light, the 1975 Filipino film by Lino Brocka

- Rome, Open City, the 1945 Italian film by Roberto Rossellini

- Shivers, the 1975 Canadian film by David Cronenberg

Details of the movies screening at the programme can be found here. The Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to the 15th.

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, one of many Special Presentations at this year's Tiff.

The Toronto International Film Festival has begun to announce its lineup for its 2013 edition, beginning with Gala and Special Presentations. To browse the festival's programming on their web site, visit here.

Gala Presentations

American Dreams in China (Peter Chan, China)

The Art of the Steal (Jonothan Sobol, Canada)

August: Osage County (John Wells, USA)

Cold Eyes (Cho Ui-seok & Kim Byung-seo, Korea)

The Fifth Estate (Bill Condon, USA)

The Grand Seduction (Don McKellar, Canada)

Kill Your Darlings (John Krokidas, USA)

Life of Crime (Daniel Schechter, USA)

The Love Punch (Joel Hopkins, France)

The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra, India/France/Germany)

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (Justin Chadwick, South Africa)

Parkland (Peter Landesman, USA)

The Railway Man (Jonathan Teplitzky, Australia/UK)

The Right Kind of Wrong (Jeremiah Chechik, Canada)

Rush (Ron Howard, UK/Germany)

Shuddh Desi Romance (Maneesh Sharma, India...

The 2013 Toronto Film Festival selection grew quite a bit today as the organizers announced the Midnight Madness, Documentary, Vanguard, City to City and Cinematheque selections for this year's festival. Among the title announced there aren't exactly a ton of names that pop off the paper immediately. The Midnight Madness selection will open with Lucky McKee's All Cheerleaders Die in which a young girl who practices the dark arts turns on her best friend after she joins the cheer squad. However, I assume most attention will be on Eli Roth's The Green Inferno, a film in which a group of humanitarians go to the Amazon to help a native tribe only to have the tribe kidnap them and later learn their cannibalistic heritage is very much intact. The Documentary selection includes plenty of familiar faces such as Marcel Ophuls, Claude Lanzmann and Errol Morris and Frank Pavich will be bringing Jodorowsky's Dune,...

New work from Errol Morris and Frederick Wiseman will screen in the Toronto International Film Festival’s Tiff Docs strand, while City To City spotlights Athens and Alex Aja’s Horns is among the Vanguard offerings.

Festival staff remind readers that the following listing is not complete or final and is subject to change.

Premieres key

Wp = World PremiereIP = International PremiereNAP = North American PremiereCP = Canadian PremiereTIFF Docs

A Story Of Children And Film

Mark Cousins (UK) Nap

Ain’t Misbehavin’

Marcel Ophüls (France) Nap

At Berkeley

Frederick Wiseman (Us) Nap

Beyond The Edge

Leanne Pooley (New Zealand) Wp

Burt’s Buzz

Jody Shapiro (Canada) Wp

The Dark Matter Of Love

Sarah McCarthy (UK) Nap

The Dog

Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren (Us) Wp

Faith Connections

Pan Nalin (France/India) Wp

Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story

Barry Avrich (Canada) Wp

Finding Vivian Maier

John Maloof and Charlie Siskel (Us) Wp

Hi-Ho Mistahey!

Alanis Obomsawin (Canada...

New work from Errol Morris and Frederick Wiseman will screen in the Toronto International Film Festival’s Tiff Docs strand, while City To City spotlights Athens and Alex Aja’s Horns is among the Vanguard offerings.

Festival staff remind readers that the following listing is not complete or final and is subject to change.

Premieres key

Wp = World PremiereIP = International PremiereNAP = North American PremiereCP = Canadian PremiereTIFF Docs

A Story Of Children And Film

Mark Cousins (UK) Nap

Ain’t Misbehavin’

Marcel Ophüls (France) Nap

At Berkeley

Frederick Wiseman (Us) Nap

Beyond The Edge

Leanne Pooley (New Zealand) Wp

Burt’s Buzz

Jody Shapiro (Canada) Wp

The Dark Matter Of Love

Sarah McCarthy (UK) Nap

The Dog

Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren (Us) Wp

Faith Connections

Pan Nalin (France/India) Wp

Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story

Barry Avrich (Canada) Wp

Finding Vivian Maier

John Maloof and Charlie Siskel (Us) Wp

Hi-Ho Mistahey!

Alanis Obomsawin (Canada...

Above: Le joli mai (1963).

Around about June every year, for several days, a large documentary festival spreads across a cluster of venues in the centre of Sheffield, engulfing the city's main arthouse, The Showroom, and several local theatres, odeons, libraries, and small pubs. The people of Sheffield were affable, generally. Street vendors set-up outside the screening rooms, so there'd regularly be smoke in the air. There was an outdoor screen on Howard Street—at the foot of a grassy hill and against the muraled wall of a pub we saw Ben Rivers' Two Years at Sea (2012) and Wim Wenders' Pina (2011)—and another in the underbelly of a grand, art deco library, where I bummed tickets to see Martha Shane and Lana Wilson's After Tiller (a producer for the film took pity, since I had not booked in advance).

So perhaps it's hardly surprising that the festival itself...

A still from “Charulata”

Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (The Lonely Wife) is one among the twenty feature films to be presented at Cannes Classics, as part of the Official Selection.

Based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore about a lonely housewife, the film features Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee and Shailen Mukherjee. It won Satyajit Ray a Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin international film festival in 1965.

Cannes Classics was created in 2004 to present old films and masterpieces from cinematographic history that have been carefully restored. It is also a way to pay tribute to the essential work being down by copyrightholders, film libraries, production companies and national archives throughout the world.

This year’s programme of Cannes Classics is made up of twenty feature-length films and three documentaries.

Restored Prints

Borom Sarret (1963, 20’) by Ousmane Sembène

Charulata (Charluta: The Lonely Wife) (1964, 1:57) by Satyajit Ray

Cleopatra (1963, 4:03) by Joseph L. Mankiewicz...

The 2013 Cannes Film Festival lineup continues to grow, today with the announcement of the films playing in the Cannes Classics selection as well as the titles playing on the beach at night as part of the Cinema de la Plage selection. It was already announced Kim Novak would be in attendance to present the restored version of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, but the restorations that will be screening don't end there. In addition to Vertigo a restored print of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra will screen along with restorations of Billy Wilder's Fedora, Yasujir? Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon, Hal Ashby's The Last Detail starring Jack Nicholson and a 3-D conversion of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. Additional notable names include films from Alain Resnais, Marco Ferreri, Chris Marker and Rene Clement. In addition to those titles a special presentation of Jean Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete...

Icarus Films has landed North American distribution rights to a brand new restoration of Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme's 1963 documentary "Le Joli Mai." The landmark film follows ordinary Parisians during the "first springtime of peace" in May 1962 after ceasefire between France and Algeria; made possible by the development of lightweight, sync-sound cameras. The restoration work was supervised by Lhomme (Marker passed away last year) and will be presented in Dcp, made from a new 2K scan. The new scan will play at several major film festivals before debuting theatrically at Film Forum in New York on September 13th, followed by a theatrical roll-out and DVD release in November. The deal was negotiated by Jonathan Miller, president of Icarus Films, with producers La Sofra, and Arte France.

Above: Larry Rivers’ poster for the first New York Film Festival.

With the New York Film Festival celebrating its 50th edition next week I thought I’d look back on the very first festival, 49 years ago, in 1963. Whereas this year’s festival has a main slate of 33 films (as well as abundant sidebars) the inaugural event, programmed by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel, had only 21 features and a selection of shorts. The festival opened—on a Tuesday evening, September 10th, 1963—with a now-classic but then ill-received Buñuel, The Extermining Angel, and closed with a film and a director that have been all but forgotten: Dragées au poivre (Sweet and Sour), a French-Italian comedy with an all-star cast, directed by one Jacques Baratier.

Of the 21 selections—handpicked by Roud and Vogel as the year’s best—only six (masterpieces by Buñuel, Ozu, Olmi, Kobayashi, Polanski and Resnais) are currently available on DVD in the Us,...

French film director and writer Chris Marker died on Monday, aged 91.

Born on July 29, 1921, the “craftsman” joined the French Resistance during the Second World War, then became a journalist. He stepped onto the French cultural scene as a writer, then became a filmmaker. From the 1950s onwards, he travelled the world directing documentaries, including one about the Helsinki Olympics (Olympia 52) and another about African art (Statues Also Die with Alain Resnais). His love of travel gave rise to many projects, including Letter from Siberia and Cuba Si.

In 1962, he made the The Pier, for which he won the Prix Jean Vigo, and in 1963 he and Pierre Lhomme together directed Joli Mai, a documentary featuring Yves Montand’s voice about Paris after the Evian Agreements. In 1967, he contributed to the ensemble film Far from Vietnam with Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, and Joris Ivens. In the wake of May 1968, he focused on militant film collective I.

Chicago – Imagine working on the most ambitious, personal artistic endeavor of your life only to watch the most unusual circumstances of fate tear it away from the public eye. Such was the case with 1969’s excellent “Army of Shadows,” a film that took 37 years to find an audience stateside. Released in U.S. theaters for the first time in 2006, Jean-Pierre Melville’s fascinating tale of the French Resistance has now been given the Criterion Blu-ray upgrade and firmly stands as the excellent piece of work that it should have been recognized as for the last several decades.

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.5/5.0

Like its characters, “Army of Shadows” fell victim to politics, revolution, misunderstanding, and a bit of propaganda. The film was released in France shortly after a quelled uprising in 1968 had turned President De Gaulle into an enemy of the cultural revolution. The immensely-powerful Cahier du Cinema read the film as a...

DVD Playhouse: January 2011

By

Allen Gardner

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (20th Century Fox) Sequel to the seminal 1980s film catches up with a weathered, but still determined Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, who seems to savor every syllable of Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff’s screenplay) just out of jail and back on the comeback trail. In attempting to repair his relationship with his estranged daughter (Carey Mulligan), Gekko forges a reluctant alliance with her fiancé (Shia Labeouf), himself an ambitious young turk who finds himself seduced by Gekko’s silver tongue and promise of riches. Lifeless film is further evidence of director Oliver Stone’s decline. Once America’s most exciting filmmaker, Stone hasn’t delivered a film with any teeth since 1995’s Nixon. Labeouf and Mulligan generate no sparks on-screen, and the story feels forced from the protracted opening to the final, Disney-esque denouement. Only a brief cameo by Charlie Sheen,...

Once I got to the end of my first viewing of Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows I realized a close analogy was to compare it to a weather forecast for a thunderstorm. If you do any research into why Criterion would release this film on Blu-ray after their 2007 DVD edition hit shelves following a complete restoration of the 1969 classic you'll find reviewers shouting from the rooftops about the film's quality. Essentially, even though this film begins as something of a mild rainstorm with hints of thunder on the horizon by the time it's over you are in for one hell of a thunder and lightning show.

Dark clouds loom as Army of Shadows opens with marching German troops in front of the Arc de Triomphe in a scene Melville continued to move back-and-forth from the beginning of the film, to the end and ultimately back to the beginning. The...

Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Looking at a map of Paris, the city's rings resemble those of the giant Sequoia cross-section in Vertigo (1958), the one Kim Novak points to saying, 'Somewhere in here I was born ... and here I died.' It's a touchstone scene for Chris Marker, one he recasts in both La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983), though the Paris metaphor is prompted by his lesser known essay film, Le joli mai ('May the beautiful,' filmed with the venerable cinematographer Pierre Lhomme)." Poetry Meets Politics: The Essay — Chris Marker's Le joli mai: Tomorrow evening at 7 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Related: Acquarello's review from 2006.