Category: DVD review

André Bazin once wrote, “Our melodrama in the last century has lost almost all its dramatic integrity and merely survives as a parody.” If that was true in the 1950s (with Sirk and Ray at the height of their powers), it’s definitely true today, when ironic detachment reigns supreme. Outside of contemporary Korean cinema, the best examples of melodrama still hail from classic Hollywood, and few of them shine more brightly than the work of Frank Borzage, whose scant representation on DVD leaves a gaping hole in the medium: Borzage’s best films are full-blooded, convinced and convincing tributes to passionate …

Years ago, my brother and I were hanging out in the apartment we shared in Phoenix and a feeling of nostalgia arose. Something about the atmosphere of that spring day with its gentle breeze lapping at our blinds reminded us of our childhood in Missouri. “I don’t know why, but it feels like summertime,” my brother mused. Was it the April preheat of the city’s famed temperatures? The lazy afternoon with nothing to do but reminisce? Suddenly it occurred to us: someone across our courtyard was listening to a baseball game, and its faint echos were subconsciously transporting us non-sports …

Although La Marseillaise (1938) or The Elusive Corporal (1962) may be the best films in the astonishingly well-packaged (and priced) 3-disc Jean Renoir Collector’s Edition released earlier this year by Lionsgate, The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1959)–based on the Jekyll and Hyde story–is undoubtedly the most Halloween-friendly. It’s also a pretty fun and fascinating film, both as a dark variant on Renoir’s typical themes and as a technological experiment: the film was shot with multiple cameras and long takes to capture the actors’ energy with few interruptions and prove that feature films could be made cheaply with television methods. (Hitchcock …

Raymond Bernard has been described as a forgotten director, and judging from the references I’ve checked (a handful of film encyclopedias, newspaper archives, and several English books on early French cinema) it certainly appears to be true. A few mention him in passing, conceding that he was a critical and commercial success in France at the time, a maker of polished superproductions. According to the notes in Criterion’s Eclipse release a few months ago of Bernard’s Wooden Crosses (1932) and Les MisÈrables (1934), his obscurity is partly due to the collapse of the French prewar film industry during his creative …

Edition Filmmuseum is a Munich-based, joint project of film archives in Europe (mostly German-speaking) that is publishing a fantastic series of films of “artistic, cultural and historical value” on all-region DVDs; their latest release is Straub and Huillet’s masterful Class Relations, and aside from the film itself, the DVD offers a bounty of significant, archive-quality supplements.

There are two major short films on the two-disc set that offer rare and illuminating glimpses of the filmmakers’ working methods, both of them by filmmakers who acted in Class Relations: Harun Farocki’s 65-minute Work on ‘Class Relations’ by DaniËle Huillet and …

For many of us who have seen it, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) remains this year’s best distributed film. Although it was his thesis project at UCLA and one of the first movies chosen for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1990, it wasn’t until this year that the music rights were cleared by Milestone Films for national distribution, and Burnett’s belated praise has been something to savor. Better still, Milestone is also releasing the director’s cut of Burnett’s second feature (with its own difficult history), My Brother’s Wedding (1983), on DVD next month (along with Sheep…