A surprisingly hearty list of new DVD titles out today, including a new set of Mystery Science Theater classics (well, the movies aren't classics, but their commentary makes these episodes classic), comedy from Louis C.K., a new volume of Noein, a harrowing environmental doc and a harrowing Mark Wahlberg actioner - wait, that one isn't harrowing, it's ludicrous, and fun. Plus the Chris Marker two-fer mentioned elsewhere. See all of 'em by clicking below.

Continue Reading New on DVD: June 26, 2007

Black Snake Moan: Craig Brewer's follow-up to Hustle & Flow finds him again in musical mode, but this time for a rather lurid melodrama, which is either exploitative and ludicrous, or "as humorous and raunchy as a good blues refrain" (Austin Chronicle), depending on your point of view - or all of the above.

"As a filmmaker, Brewer doesn't just yank your chain: He forges a bond with his characters and his audience that produces ecstasy and healing," writes critic Michael Sragow.

Continue Reading Black Snake Moan

By Jonathan Marlow

Originally published May 2, 2005

Besides the general buzz in the air, there are a few more concrete ways you can tell when a certain genre or national cinema has become, to put it curtly, hot. For one, the press begins to say so, but more formally, respected magazines and journals start devoting special issues or sections to a particular wave, none perhaps more decisively than Film Comment. Throughout the magazine's history, editors have canonized certain moments in film history with issues such as the one in the 70s examining the sudden surge of sexually explicit imagery on the screen, or more recently, issues devoted to Hong Kong (1998) and Bollywood (2002; and both of those projects were overseen by David Chute, by the way) and, most recently, Korean cinema (November / December 2004).

Which brings us to the second sign: Controversy. It can range from arguments over which films and which directors really represent the cream of the new crop all the way to outright backlash. Yes, Hong Kong action flicks are exciting and colorful, the naysayers argued a few years ago, but ultimately, they're all the same. Bollywood? Exciting and colorful, but... all the same. With Korean cinema, the naysaying is more scattered and varied because no one could argue that, say, Park Chan-wook and Lee Chang-dong or Bong Jun-ho and Hong Sang-soo are making the same sort of films.

Rather than a full-fledged backlash, an across-the-board sorting is going on: Which filmmakers truly represent the best of current Korean cinema? When Park won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last year for Oldboy, many cheered; some did not. Most prominently, Manohla Dargis, who's raved enthusiastically about Hong's Power of the Kangwon Province, for example, aimed in the pages of the New York Times to pull Park down a few notches. But at least Dargis was civil and serious about her argument; Rex Reed, writing in the New York Observer, was not. His borderline racist remarks about Koreans' taste in films and food stirred a flurry of protest in blogs, online forums and the Village Voice and, just last week, offered a backhanded apology.

But that swirl of controversy was kicked up by a single film. The case of Kim Ki-duk is far more serious thanks to the widely regarded British critic and programmer Tony Rayns, who attacked Kim's entire oeuvre in the very issue of Film Comment that would cement reputations of various Korean filmmakers in the west for possibly years to come. Those who admire Kim's work reacted immediately and furiously, beginning with Singapore-based writer and artist Ben Slater and spilling over into one of the most lively debates to hits the boards at Koreanfilm.org in quite a while.

The debate didn't end there, though. Chuck Stephens, who edited that special section in Film Comment, rallied to Rayns's defense - and hence, to the offense against Kim as well - in Cinema Scope earlier this year, intensifying the clash between those who, like the programmers of the major festivals in Berlin, Venice, and this year, Cannes, find a fresh, vigorous and vital creativity in Kim's films and those who, well, don't.

Ultimately, of course, it's audiences, not critics, who forge canons and pecking orders. But in Kim's case, audiences haven't had much of a chance to decide, with only two very different films - The Isle and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring - immediately available to go by. [Update: That's about to change. Samaritan Girl, Bad Guy and 3-Iron -- and now The Bow -- are all now out on DVD in this country. --ed.]

3-Iron screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and it was there, with the help of translator Ju Hui Judy Jan, that Jonathan Marlow spoke with the director about, among other things, how the "Kim Ki-duk style" plays in the US. - David Hudson

Chris Marker's short film La Jetee, the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, is paired up with Marker's haunting Sans Soleil, and that is major cause for celebration. Both films are meditations on time and memory, with Soleil ostensibily about the correspondence between a cameraman and a woman who narrates. "No two people will come away from [it] with the same impression," writes Eric Henderson in Slant, "nor will a solitary viewer's multiple viewings yield the same experience." Adds the BBC: "Too rich, complex, and elusive to be digested on a single viewing."

More from Steve Erickson on Nerve: "After watching Sans Soliel, you realize that the paths Marker blazed for documentarians remain largely unfollowed."

Continue Reading La Jetee/Sans Soleil: Chris Marker via Criterion

If...: New from Criterion, this unforgettable drama about a revolution within a British public school, long unavailable on DVD. "So good and strong," wrote Vincent Canby in 1969, "that even those things in the movie that strike me as being first-class mistakes are of more interest than entire movies made by smoothly consistent, lesser directors... Lindsay Anderson, a fine documentary moviemaker, develops his fiction movie with all the care of someone recording the amazing habits of a newly discovered tribe of aborigines."

Continue Reading If...

"It likely goes without saying that Bridge to Terabithia is not the sort of movie you'd generally find discussed on this site. Clearly, no self-respecting cineaste would squander their time on a movie supposedly made for families, right? Why, then, are we running an interview with the co-screenwriter/co-producer of this film? Because David Paterson is (to borrow a memorable piece of dialogue from Freaks) 'one of us'." Jonathan Marlow recently spoke with David Paterson about the film adaptation of his mother's novel, Bridge to Terabithia.

Terabithia is now out on DVD.

Continue Reading David Paterson: The Journey to Terabithia

A decent selection of titles release in this first week of summer - comedies, anime, period dramas, Criterion cult classics, and more. Enjoy!

Click on for titles both out today and coming soon.

Continue Reading New on DVD: June 19, 2007

By Robert Horton

Put them together, and the terms "East Germany" and "cinema" conjure up bleak associations: a gray Berlin, barbed wire, and the soul-frying bitterness of a Hollywood Cold War picture along the lines of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or a post-reunification lookback such as The Lives of Others.

But for "East German cinema" itself? There's a fair amount of barbed wire and bitterness in the films of the German Democratic Republic, but there's much more: the subject is ripe for re-discovery, a process helped along in the US by a 2005 Museum of Modern Art series and a steady stream of DVD releases from First Run Features. In preparing a lecture on Cold War cinema for the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, I had the chance to delve into the world of GDR film and found it arresting in many ways - an island unto itself, yet connected to the greater flow of movie history in unexpected flashes. Here's a bit of background, followed by a collection of films from this strange era.

It was an accident of history, probably, that Berlin's key filmmaking centers - including the location of the legendary Ufa studios, the Metropolis playground itself - were occupied by Russian forces in the latter days of World War II. Not an accident is the fact that the Soviets set up a filmmaking apparatus much more quickly than the West did; a collective of filmmakers, Filmaktiv, formed in October 1945, documentary films were in production as early as January 1946, and the state-operated film studio, DEFA (for Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) established itself shortly thereafter. The history of East German film is fundamentally the history of DEFA, which hit the ground running with Germany's first postwar feature, Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are Among Us, 1946).

Better late than never with the updated list of new releases and titles coming soon. This week's batch featured some surprisingly dark stuff, considering we're approaching summertime, but a few good 'uns in that group. Click on for more.

Continue Reading New on DVD: June 12, 2007

Days of Glory is a powerful film about an aspect of WWII previously neglected, Algerians who served heroically for France in WWII. "A kind of a North African Saving Private Ryan," wrote the LA Times' Kenneth Turan, " a taut, involving film that delivers all the things we look for in war movies and does so with intelligence and integrity." GreenCine reviewer Craig Phillips thinks the Private Ryan comparison misses the film's more powerful subtext about racism. "Here it's more moving because the subtext is these men were not given any acknowledgment for their heroism, and the ending while equally emotional, is that much more bitter." Read the rest of his four-star review on Guru.

See also: GreenCine Daily's recap of reviews >>

D.K. Holm on the film (from Portland International Film Fest write-up). 

Continue Reading Days of Glory: Unsung heroes