Reviewer: Jeffrey M Anderson
Rating (out of five): **** 1/2

Kino's new box set, the Great Italian Directors Collection, is far from comprehensive. There's no Rossellini, for one thing, nor any kind of nod to the great, second-tier genre directors like Mario Bava or Sergio Leone. But it is a nice showcase for three of Kino's new releases, and a very cool set nonetheless.

Continue Reading Great Italian Directors Collection (Story of a Love Affair / Boccaccio '70 / Casanova '70)

Today's new releases are filled with romance, scandal, and intruge. We're adding many more titles next week - until then, check out what's inside!

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: November 1, 2011.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of five): ****, Likely ***** if footage wasn’t lost

For a film that had been one of the most sought-after missing-in-action DVDs, Orson Welles' “other masterpiece” -- when it finally arrived -- did so with surprisingly little fanfare. It's certainly at least partially due to the DVD arriving as part of an exclusive special edition set with the more widely available 70th Anniversary Blu-Ray version of Citizen Kane, and not individually or on Blu-ray. Still, its release is cause for celebration, especially for Welles completists and cineastes in general.

Continue Reading The Magnificent Ambersons

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of five): ****

You may remember the series of short films that opened in limited release back in 2008 under the name of the longest short in the bunch: L’origine de la tendresse (previous coverage). This fine program of live action films was brought to theatrical fruition via a little company called The World According to Shorts and a fellow named Jonathan Howell. Established in 2000, its initial venture (The World According to Shorts) was released via New Yorker Films. That storied film distributor, after taking a hiatus for a year or two, is back in business again and is distributing The World’s… latest assemblage of animated shorts titled Nine Nation Animation. As expected, it’s a good one.

Continue Reading Nine Nation Animation

GreenCine gets ready for Halloween with a shriek show of great releases this week. We've got some retro horror favorites, lethal ladies, superheroes, and more crazy characters, inside! 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: October 25, 2011.

One word to sum up this week's new releases: intense. We've got killer clowns, bank robbers, religious fanatics, prisoners, and soldiers featured on this week's roster of new releases. But there's some fun to be had too - peek inside for more!

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: October 18, 2011.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of five): *** 

It was quite a surprise to learn that, between Park Chan-wook's extraordinarily lithe, punchy Lady Vengeance (2005) -- the final entry in his equally extraordinary "vengeance" trilogy -- and the bizarre, acid vampire movie Thirst (2009), Park made this very broad, very odd comedy.

It looks as if I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK never saw an American theatrical release, or if it did, it was so small and localized that no critics knew of its existence. It apparently did middling box office in its native Korea as well. It's somewhat similar to Sion Sono's Love Exposure, from Japan, which was released in San Francisco this past summer. It features singularly love-struck characters with peculiar fates. It focuses on three or four specific, off-kilter jokes and runs with these jokes over and over until they connect and make some kind of sense.

Continue Reading I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of five): *** 1/2

Ill Met By Moonlight (a.k.a. Night Ambush) is about the only Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger collaboration I'd never seen. Why this is important: they are among my favorite filmmakers of all time. At their creative peak, the fruitful collaboration in the 1940s and '50s -- Powell was generally the director/co-writer and Pressburger co-writer/producer, and they dubbed their team “The Archers” -- gave us such lovely gems as The Red Shoes, (my personal favorite) I Know Where I'm Going, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus and A Matter of Life and Death.

Continue Reading Ill Met By Moonlight

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Rating (out of five): *****

About halfway through Carlos -- Olivier Assayas’s five-and-a-half hour masterpiece -- the title character (Edgar Ramirez) tells a journalist that “the only struggle that matters is the oppressed versus the imperialist.” Were it up to Carlos, this struggle would be the focal point of a film based on his life. By the time he delivers these words, however, they are a fatuous hot wind. The focus of the film is not the struggle of the oppressed, it’s Carlos’s actual obsession: himself.

Continue Reading Carlos (Criterion)

Terrence Malick's epic is just one of many can't-miss titles available for rent today. We've got 2 hit comedies from the summer, historical epics, and much much more, inside. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: October 11, 2011.