Category: DVD review

One of the most lauded documentaries from last year was a film I only managed to catch up with this week, when it was released as a stunningly produced two-DVD set. The Corporation analyzes what it convincingly calls the primary influence on contemporary life: “Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places,” the narrator says, “the corporation is todayís dominant institution.”

The film is over two-hours long, but the DVD contains over seven or eight hours of supplemental material, including two audio commentaries, a host of clips from screening discussions and media appearances around …

Jean Renoir (1894-1979), the son of the famous impressionist painter, is commonly referred to as a major filmmaker in history, but his films, strangely enough, rarely figure prominently in retrospectives or the era of Internet film discussions. Part of that may be attributed to the fact that his directorial style is gentle and restrained. He is no volatile Eisenstein or iconoclastic Godard or perplexing Bresson. In one of the better entries of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes: Renoir “liked simple incidents and their fusion with popular theatre and never chose to go beyond elementary narrative forms. …

Bringing Up Baby

Viewers new to American comedies of the ’30s are often surprised by the period’s sophistication and wit, two words not usually reserved for Hollywood comedies nowadays. Screwball comedy, in particular, was a genre that offered an opportunity for Depression troubled audiences to enjoy stories promoting a complete reshuffling of the social order, where classes and sexes intermingled with equal agency, random events ensured happy endings, and chaos reigned supreme. The genre was given its start in 1934 when three films were released–It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, and The Thin Man–and petered out …

“There is no shortage of ugliness in the world. If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more.”

Thus begins the narration in Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962), a landmark short film (roughly 20 minutes) by one of Iran’s most venerated modern poets, a woman killed at the age of 32 in a car accident whose writing still permeates Iranian culture. (Her poem “The Wind Will Carry Us” is prominently featured in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1999 film of the same name.) In the 2001 book Close-Up: Iranian Cinema, Hamid Dabashi cites The House is Black…

Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been slowly sampling one of the most entertaining–and important–DVD releases of the year, the National Film Preservation Foundation‘s More Treasures From the American Film Archives box set of (mostly) silent films from 1894 to 1931. (A previous collection was released in 2000.) It’s 50 films totaling over nine hours of material spread out over three discs, and each film contains a very informative, multi-screen essay, a new score, and typically an audio commentary by one of the 17 participating critics, historians, and preservationists.

While a number of silent features …

Last week, It’s All True (1993), a documentary about Orson Welles’ “failed” 1942 documentary of the same name, was released on DVD. On the heels of filming his second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons, 26-year-old Welles was asked by the State Department to film a Technicolor documentary in South America in the hopes of strengthening international relations and deflecting potential Nazi influence in the Southern Hemisphere. (“It was never meant to be a commercial venture,” Welles’ co-producer Richard Wilson states, “more a cultural exchange.”) Welles’ studio, RKO, promised to send him editing equipment so he could finish Ambersons in Rio …