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It’s not often that I find myself wholly embracing contemporary thrillers–I’ve seen enough of them to recognize formulas in the trailers alone; their emphasis on gruesome aesthetics and heavy-handed shock tactics, sexy serial killers, or cops who decide that this time, it’s personal.

Happily, I can fully recommend two exemplary thrillers currently getting some play: Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002), just released on DVD, and the first installment of Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogy (2002) series, On the Run (Cavale), which I just saw last night. Both films benefit from an almost old-fashioned love of character and formal …

While breezing through Roger Ebert’s site this morning, I was surprised to see his three-star (good) rating of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s mesmerizing Distant (2003), a film he indirectly panned ¹ last year in his disparaging remarks toward the Cannes Film Festival.

Occasionally at Filmjourney, I’ve critiqued Ebert’s populist dismissals of highly regarded art cinema in light of the fact that he continues to be one of the few mainstream critics who actually attends film festivals and writes about them and offers at least a modicum of sensitivity toward film history and analysis with his Great Films essays or Overlooked …

A few blogs back, I noted the latest issue of Cineaste includes the editors’ Ten Favorite Historical Films and sneaking in at tenth place is Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1961), a film which has recently been released as a 2-disc DVD from the Criterion Collection.

Its subject is a notorious mountain bandit who was recruited to lead the fight for Sicilian independence immediately following World War II. After the island was declared an autonomous region of Italy in 1946, Giuliano waged terrorist acts against communists until 1948 when conservatives took office, after which he engaged in various criminal activities until …

Kino International has released a 50th anniversary print of Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953), which I had the pleasure of watching this week.

If I had to choose one aesthetic movement in film that I find the most personally invigorating, it would likely be neorealism. A short-lived but potent eruption in postwar Italian literature and filmmaking (roughly ’45-’53), it is commonly identified with the aesthetics and particularities of its first critical and popular success, Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (1945): simple plots and location shooting, nonprofessional actors playing working class people whose lives are complicated by social turmoil. While these elements …

Lots of startling news items this morning:

ïMasters of Cinema has been bought by Ron Howard

ïErrata is now content-free

ïDVDBeaver reviews the <a href="new DVD of Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home?

Stay tuned for more developments……

The new issue of Cineaste is out and it’s expanded with a “Film and History Supplement.”

I haven’t had time to read the articles in depth, but a brief skimming looks promising:

ïA 2-page spread on Salt of the Earth (we’re somewhere around its 50th anniversary), which actually mentions the recent Los Angeles screening I blogged about a few months ago. (Incidentally, a settlement has been agreed upon, and it’s nice to see the same old faces at my local grocery stores again.)

ïDecent reviews of some recent personal favs (My Architect, The Return, Bus 174)…