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.
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.
Criterion’s new release presents a stunning restoration of Jean Eustache’s intimate epic The Mother and the Whore (1973), a bleak epitaph for the failed promise of social change which climaxed and crashed with the May 1968 uprising in Paris: a few years later, the film’s characters are adrift and trying to rebuild a sense of themselves in a society which has rejected them and their dreams.
Part seven of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers Western European films charged with doses of Romanticism and existential despair.
Time again to catalogue what I’ve been watching over the past couple of months, but haven’t yet mentioned. First, a mix of throwaway low-brow entertainment and more interesting genre movies from Severin – Italian horror spanning from the ’60s to the ’90s, some low-budget exploitation, and a box set of minor movies featuring Peter Cushing.
Four decades into a career which began with the New Wave, Claude Chabrol delivered a masterpiece with La cérémonie (1995), a psychological mystery adapted from a Ruth Rendell novel. Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert play a pair of working class women whose bitterness and resentment drive them on a collision course with the bourgeois Lelievre family. Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition provides some illuminating supplements on the director and his two stars.
Something for everyone this week – killer clowns, sea monsters, Gothic horrors, a high-speed ambulance and haunted buildings, werewolves, Nazi cannibals and anatomical abnormalities, murder and madness.
A recent trip to one of the last places in Winnipeg where you can actually buy movies on disk, armed with a bag full of DVDs and Blu-rays to trade, netted an interesting assortment of items, new and used, including some from the UK and Australia; it brought back the pleasures of in-store shopping and immediately being able to go home and watch what I’d just bought.
Three recent releases spanning nine decades offer radically different viewing experiences, from James Whale’s pre-Code courtroom drama The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933), rife with bourgeois misogyny, to Patrice Leconte’s Man on the Train (2002), steeped in existential weariness, to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Something in the Dirt (2022), in which the residents of a nondescript Los Angeles apartment discover a portal to cosmic horror.
Criterion has released a two-disk set of Marguerite Duras’ mid-’70s features India Song (1975) and Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977), highlighting the novelist’s idiosyncratic approach to cinema, particularly striking in the separation of image from sound in the earlier film, though the languid pacing and slow, exploratory camerawork gives both a hypnotic effect in their exploration of bourgeois marriage, infidelity and ennui.