A pair of recent Indicator releases resurrect a couple of all-but forgotten features with major stars. Richard Widmark plays a Western lawman whose time has passed in Death of a Gunfighter (1969), the first movie credited to phantom director Alan Smithee, while George C. Scott is a former New York judge dealing with grief by taking on the identity of Sherlock Holmes; his therapist just happens to be named Dr. Watson (Joanne Woodward).
The passage of time has complicated Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), Joan Micklin Silver’s well-observed comedy-drama about a broken romance; the behaviour of obsessed romantic Charles (John Heard) now seems much darker and more troubling than it may have when the film was first released.
Criterion start 2023 with an excellent three-disk set of Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy, the three aggressively confrontational movies with which he began his career by digging into the lingering traces of Fascism which plagued the continent in the second half of the 20th Century. Impressive new transfers are given context by commentaries and seven hours of documentaries and interviews with and about von Trier, his intentions and creative process.
Rouge (1987), Stanley Kwan’s meditation on romance, the passage of time and the imminent return of Hong Kong to China after almost two centuries of British colonial rule, gets a luminous restoration for Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition, which also includes an interview with Kwan and two documentaries by the director which explore issues of gender in Chinese cinema and his own identity as one of the first openly gay Chinese directors.
Three very different features – Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), John Guillermin’s Town on Trial (1957) and Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960) – illuminate the varied pleasures offered by genre in the hands of seriously committed filmmakers.
Dan Ireland, director of The Whole Wide World (1996), died on April 14, aged 57.
Criterion has released a stand-alone Blu-ray edition of Whit Stillman’s Barcelona (1994), the final part of his triptych about young Americans striving to define themselves as they navigate an uncertain world. A romantic comedy with troubling undertones, it deals with the mixture of naivety and arrogance which creates a problematic relationship between the U.S. and other parts of the world.
Kino Lorber have been offering a wide range of movies in generally fine transfers, from the work of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco to poverty row exploitation classics, ’70s Italian exploitation, foreign and arthouse titles, and recently a number of titles from some of the more obscure byways of the ’70s.