Criterion have released an excellent two-disk edition of Claude Berri’s adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s epic tragedy of idealism brought down by greed and petty rivalries in early 20th Century rural Provence. New 4K restorations of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (both 1986) are visually ravishing, while the drama is embodied in superb performances from Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart and an excellent supporting cast.
Recent Arrow disks offer an alien invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Invasion [2007]), stylish horror (Rampo Noir [2005]), a classic western (Don Siegel’s The Shootist [1976]) and a note-perfect homage to ’70s low-budget exploitation (Francis Galluppi’s The Last Stop in Yuma County [2023]).
Two key films from the era of peak paranoia, the late-’60s and early ’70s, are given exemplary disk releases – Theordore J. Flicker’s darkly comic The President’s Analst (1967) on Blu-ray from Imprint and Francis Ford Coppola’s nightmarish The Conversation (1974) on 4K in a dual-format edition from StudioCanal.
My recent streaming seems to lean heavily into horror, with a few animated movies to lighten the tone.
Criterion’s new dual-format 4K UHD/Blu-ray release of The Wages of Fear (1953) presents an opportunity to revisit Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic and examine just why it troubled its U.S. distributor and some critics with its political and sexual implications.
Until fairly recently I’ve avoided streaming – I like nothing better than handling physical media, taking small shiny disks out of their case and putting them back on the shelf as part of my collection after watching their contents. But various factors have been pushing me towards rethinking my collector mentality and in the past few months I’ve found myself mixing and increasing amount of streaming into my viewing. This has included a number of (limited) series as well as quite a few older and newer movies. And I’ve become aware that I haven’t been writing about these shows because – that collector mentality again – I have kind of ghettoized them: somehow I haven’t taken a streamed movie as seriously as the ones I own. So perhaps it’s time to consider them here…
With the end of my Vinegar Syndrome subscription, I’ll be getting a lot fewer disks from them this year, but there are still a few leftovers from last year to consider – I won’t miss things like Phillip Noyce’s Sliver (1993), but without the subscription I might never have seen Fred Burnley’s romantic-horror oddity Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1972). Only a brand-new 4K restoration of Michael Mann’s flawed second feature, The Keep (1943), gives me a twinge of regret. Still, although I’ll have to be much more judicious about ordering without the subscription, hopefully there’ll be other interesting releases like this in the future.
In December 1981 I got to meet David Lynch and spend time with him in his office at Universal Studios as he recounted the remarkable story of making his first feature, Eraserhead (1977). But he talked about much more – his early life, his passion for art, and how painting and sculpture evolved into an interest in filmmaking. Although I’ve previously published the transcripts of those sessions in my book about Eraserhead, I thought it would be a fitting tribute to David to post the actual recordings here; when spoken in his distinctive voice, his words convey so much more than they do on the page.
Performance (1970), co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, is one of the key films to emerge from Britain towards the end of the 1960s, a turbulent decade during which the post-war order was challenged by a generation seeking to redefine society; the film’s radical style – with disorienting editing and a rejection of conventional linear narrative – both reflected and embodied the chaos in a story which deconstructed class, sexuality and individual identity in a welter of violence clashing with art and music. More than fifty years later, the film seems fresher and more pertinent than ever.
Three recent releases from England explore the survival into the modern world of ancient mystical forces, illustrating different aspects of folk horror. In Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre (2023) a pagan entity brings tragedy to a family; in Robert Wynne-Simmons’ The Outcasts (1982), villagers in 19th Century Ireland believe a farm girl is a witch: and in Peter Sasdy’s The Stone Tape (1972), scripted by Nigel Kneale, a research team believe they’ve found the mechanism behind hauntings.