Reviewer: Philip M Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): *** 1/2

There’s a key piece of editing about halfway into The Organizer, Mario Monicelli’s 1963 film about a worker’s strike in late 1800s Turin. A factory worker has travelled to the outskirts of town to bring funds to a family living below poverty conditions. The funds are to show solidarity because the family’s breadwinner has been jailed due to issues stemming from the strike. While making the rounds of the family’s dirt-floored shanty, the factory worker opens a wooden flap, revealing a grinning, barefoot toddler squatting on the ground. The film then cuts to a group of society women preening in their sparkling white gowns during a social function.

Continue Reading The Organizer (Criterion)

Reviewer: Philip M Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): *** 1/2

In The Sky Turns, filmmaker Mercedes Álvarez returns to her birthplace: the small Castilian village of Aldealseñor. Nearly four decades earlier, Álvarez became the last child to be born in Aldealseñor and, upon her return, she discovers a place out of time in both senses of the phrase – the way of life the village has clung to since prehistory remains an anachronism and the village inhabitants are finally yielding to the death knell of modernity.

Continue Reading The Sky Turns

This weeks packs an emotionally complex wallop, with character studies of a coming-of-age closeted lesbian, a returning Iraq vet who must re-assume her roles as wife and mother, and even a young Goethe in love. More, plus lots of other genres - inside!

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: April 24, 2012.

We've got some directing heavyweights on the slate this week, featuring a Roger Corman compliation, the newest from BFA star Steve McQueen, and a ground-breaking immigration film from indie filmmaker Robert M. Young. Dive in, inside!

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: April 17, 2012.

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

Thanks to the happy success of Martin Scorsese's Hugo, the French silent era filmmaker Georges Méliès is now far better known to the general public. Flicker Alley, which distributed a massive box set of surviving Méliès films, has now released a special new two-disc "steelbook" set. It features a brand-new, restored version of Méliès' most famous film, the 14-minute A Trip to the Moon, with the original hand-tinted color back in place, and a new score by Air.

Continue Reading A Trip to the Moon (Restored Limited Edition)

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

Paul Goodman didn't change my life. Unfortunately. But I wish he had. Born 30 years before me (in 1911), he published his famous work, Growing Up Absurd, around the time I was attending a Christian Science school (Principia College), a place at which a fellow like Goodman -- proudly bisexual and "out" (before the use of that word had even come into being!) -- would not have found favor. Once I abandoned that foolish religion and began to grow up (absurd or not), I did learn something of Goodman and read an occasional essay of his.

Continue Reading Paul Goodman Changed My Life

Reviewer: Jeffrey M Anderson
Ratings (out of five): ****

In 1974, Luchino Visconti was nearly seventy and had worked as a filmmaker for thirty years. He was in ill health and his most glorious films were behind him. When it came time to make Conversation Piece, which would become his second-to-last film, he needed something fairly simple to shoot, like something that took place in one building.

Having hit upon an idea, he called up some of his favorite actors, including Burt Lancaster, who had starred in Visconti's opulent masterpiece The Leopard (1963). The presence of Lancaster in a much smaller-scale Visconti production can only draw unfavorable comparisons. And, no, Conversation Piece is not nearly as impressive, ambitious, or powerful as The Leopard. But that doesn't make it a bad film.

Continue Reading The Conversation Piece (Gruppo di famiglia in un interno)

We've got more than a few "Iron Ladys" featured on this week's new releases: Madames, politicians, models, and more. Let them peer into your soul - after the jump. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: April 10, 2012.

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

Constance Marks' documentary Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey tells the story of a shy black kid, growing up poor in Baltimore. Kevin Clash has a dream, but it has nothing to do with sports or hip-hop music. Rather, he wants to be a puppeteer on "Sesame Street."

This is a great twist for a movie, but Being Elmo does not dwell on it. In fact, it hardly brings up Clash's skin color at all, and it only brings up his former poverty in terms of the obstacles he overcame. For example, in order to meet puppet designer Kermit Love, he had to wait for a school trip to New York; his family couldn't afford train fare otherwise. (What the movie does not explain is why there was a camera present and footage of this first meeting.)

Continue Reading Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): **** 1/2

From its opening onward, Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of Murder simmers like a slow-cooked stew. After Saul Bass’s sultry opening credits, the film opens as Paul Biegler (Jimmy Stewart) returns home from a fishing trip. Biegler methodically, wordlessly cleans his fish, places them in the icebox, and tidies up his office/living space. It’s a wonderfully inauspicious beginning; no flashy opening hook or clumsy exposition. While the film is by no means slow, this nice moment of domestic activity establishes Preminger’s pace – as its title implies, the film is a dissection of little, seemingly insignificant, moments and tossed-off words that add up to momentous events.

Continue Reading Anatomy of a Murder (Criterion)