Category: DVD review

Gearing up after the holiday, I find that a couple of recent DVD releases keep interacting in my thoughts, Zeitgeist’s Ten by Abbas Kiarostami and Facets’ Voyage in Time (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra (who has written several scripts for Antonioni and Angelopoulos). I’m always fascinated by the creative process, and Zeitgeist’s disc comes with Kiarostami’s 10 on Ten (2004), his master class lecture I first saw at TIFF, in which he drives around his favorite location in Tehran, a mountainous road featured in Taste of Cherry, and elucidates his approach to directing. Tarkovsky’s documentary presents his …

84-year-old Eric Rohmer’s latest film, Triple Agent (2004), has recently been released as a handsome DVD in France. It’s partly a continuation of his fortÈ–verbose adults parcing the emotional and ethical twists and turns of their lives–and partly (like his previous The Lady and the Duke) a thoughtful period piece. Rohmer’s oeuvre is famous for its contemporary settings and long (but thoroughly charming) pontifications on love, romance, and philosophy that often seem more concerned for timeless ideals than social problems or specific political moments in time. If anything, his last two films (who knows, perhaps his last two films …

Short film compilations commissioned for a theme have been a staple genre of the festival circuit for years, and although they rarely achieve artistic cohesion, they sometimes have their stand-out works and a few of them even manage to get released on video (for example, ’60s collections like Rogopag or Six in Paris or more recent entries like LumiËre and Company or 11’09″01). I’ve watched the first of the two-part Ten Minutes Older (2002) series entitled The Trumpet (the other is The Cello), recently released on DVD in Korea, and found it to be a typical compilation of …

What must surely be the best film (re)released in theatres this year has become what could also be the best single-title DVD package of the year, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). The Criterion Collection doesn’t disappoint with its three discs of material and 55-page booklet to be released next Tuesday. I reviewed the film last January when it played on Los Angeles screens, so I’ll simply highlight the DVD extras that impressed me the most. In addition to the following four programs, the DVD includes a new 51-minute documentary on the making of the film, a collection of …

When I was a kid, I remember on occasion being told–as I protested some punishment or another–that even if I wasn’t guilty of the exact grievance for which I was being disciplined, that my punishment no doubt made up for all those times that I was guilty and wasn’t punished. I remember school teachers and perhaps my parents using this line of reasoning, one that is particularly good at provoking existential worries in ten-year-olds.

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956), released this week on DVD, adopts this argument as its rasion d’Ítre and unnervingly suggests that its protagonist, Manny Balestrero …

QuÈbecois actor, and film and theatre writer/director Robert Lepage (US audiences may remember him for his role in Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal) has built a reputation over the last ten years as a maker of intelligent and offbeat productions that explore inner human themes amid larger technological or historical contexts. And although he has inspired two book-length studies devoted to his work, his last two films (at least) were never distributed in the US, theatrically or on video. This is a shame because the SF thriller Possible Worlds (2000) and the dreamlike drama The Far Side of the …