NEW RELEASES - September 6

Crash (2005).

To the surprise of more than a few, one of the most talked about films of this year so far - besides the one with the penguins, of course - has been Crash, written and directed by Paul Haggis, the screenwriter behind last year's winner of the Oscar for Best Picture, Million Dollar Baby. Months after its release in theaters, the Los Angeles Times noted that it was still fodder for watercooler talk. Of course, the film is set in Los Angeles, but what Haggis is up to here - and he certainly doesn't bother being subtle about it - is tossing together "ciphers in an allegorical scheme," as A.O. Scott put it in the New York Times. In other words, this is post-9/11 America, as Haggis sees it.

It's split critics in unpredictable ways, too. Scott, ultimately, doesn't buy it. But the LA Weekly's Ella Taylor has decided it's "not just one of the best Hollywood movies about race, but, along with Collateral, one of the finest portrayals of contemporary Los Angeles life period."

Save the Green Planet. (2003).

"A rollercoaster ride of emotions eliciting absurd disbelief at one moment to deep pathos the next," writes markhl in his excellent list, The "New" Korean Cinema. "Shin Ha Kyun shows that his wonderful acting in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was not a fluke with this delicate role. Unexpectedly unforgettable."

"Snazzy, playful, somewhat gory, often hilarious," adds J. Hoberman in the Village Voice. "What's most remarkable about this lurid, wildly busy spectacle is how serious it can be - that is, how poignant and poetic."

3-Iron (2004).

Once again, markhl: "Simpler is quite often better. And this latest offering from Kim Ki Duk is a refreshing piece which doesn't rely on provacative subject matter nor excessive violence to entertain. A simple message... beautifully delivered."

And don't miss Jonathan Marlow's interview with the director.

The Holy Girl (2004).

"This is a movie that does not give away its own ending, but that rather arrives at a final vantage point, which reveals the startling and intricate shape of everything that had come before," wrote A.O. Scott in the New York Times. "At the last possible moment, [Lucrecia] Martel's sympathetic inquiry into the varieties of human imperfection coalesces into something perfect. The Holy Girl is a film that defies categorization, but I'm tempted to call it a miracle."

Fear and Trembling (2003).

Sylvie Testud plays a young Belgian woman who takes a low-level job at a Japanese company in Alain Corneau's adaptation of Amélie Nothomb's autobiographical novel.

"A mindboggling view into the heart of Japan, Fear and Trembling includes some of the incongruous hilarity of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and the monstrous (if ceremonially correct) barbarity of Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, but it's also new and different," writes Janos Gereben at CultureVulture.net. "It will make you laugh, cringe, learn, and refuse to accept what appears obvious to those on the screen."

Young Gods (2003).

This playfully sexy flick from Finland won the FIPRESCI Prize, that is, the one awarded by critics, at the Göteborg Film Festival last year.

Paris is Burning (1991).

"They call themselves the Children," writes PopcornQ. "As black and hispanic gay men, the Children inhabit two worlds - an everyday world of discrimination and poverty, and the world of 'Realness,' where through costume and competition, dance and inspired performance, they imitate and transcend the powerful fantasy media that excludes them."

Introducing an interview with director Jennie Livingston at indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez wrote, "When I first saw Paris Is Burning in Los Angeles in 1991 it blew me away.... [I] have always admired Jennie Livingston for creating such an incredible look inside a world that my friends and I found eye-opening. Listening to Cheryl Lynn's 'Got To Be Real' today still takes me back to the first time I saw the film."

Lipstick and Dynamite: The First Ladies of Wrestling (2004).

The title pretty much says it all. The colorful anecdotes from The Fabulous Moolah, The Great Mae Young, Ida May Martinez and Gladys "Kill 'Em" Gillem Long have won over audiences at festivals for months now. Now you can have them into your home. You won't be sorry; you can get to know them first at their collective blog.

TCM Archives: Garbo Silents (1926 and 1928).

This week sees a deluge of riches in the form of nine films starring Greta Garbo. For years, we had nothing at all on DVD, then The Grand Hotel - and now, nine!

Well. Let's take them chronologically, starting with this amazing collection of three silent features, made not long after she arrived in Hollywood.

The Temptress (1926, featured on Disc 2) "is crammed full of melodramatic action, much of it preposterous," writes Silents are Golden, but "Greta Garbo makes the proceedings not only believable but compelling.... She is beautiful, she flashes and scintillates with a singular appeal. The Temptress is all Greta Garbo. Nothing else matters."

"Greta Garbo was merely an immigrant actress of considerable promise when she began Flesh and the Devil (1926, Disc 1) at MGM," writes TCM, "but when the film was finished, she emerged as the divine Garbo, one of the most mysterious, glamorous stars of the American screen, a distinction she maintained well into the 1930s."

"The Mysterious Lady (1928, Disc 2) exhibits Garbo's uncanny ability to anchor a film through the sheer power of her presence," writes the Cinematheque Ontario. "Garbo statuesquely presides over all the genre-bending turns and comedic flourishes of this at times majestically overwrought romantic thriller.

Anna Christie (1930).

And with this film, audiences could hear Garbo for the first time. No other tagline was needed: "Garbo Talks!"

The UK's Channel 4 sums up the critical consensus: "Shades of melodrama throughout, but Garbo is as watchable as ever."

"Worth seeing, for the Presence most of all," adds the Chicago Reader.

Mata Hari (1932).

One of Garbo's biggest box office hits. "The most spectacular aspect of Mata Hari," notes a fan site, Greta Garbo: The Ultimate Star, "is not the story or the actors but the fabulous array of bizarre gowns and headgear designed by Adrian."

Queen Christina (1933).

"The one and only Greta Garbo gives the drag performance of her career," proclaims PopcornQ. "Swaggering about castle and countryside in male attire, the Swedish queen is as butch as they come and then some.... And an early scene in the film features one of the nicest girl-girl kisses in Hollywood history."

In its 5-out-of-5-star review, TV Guide calls the film a "revelation, wrung from the usual MGM bio identikit, but given shape by [director Rouben] Mamoulian's painterly eye, and immortality by Garbo's ability to transcend."

Anna Karenina (1935).

"Anna Karenina is considered to be the most cinematic of Tolstoy's great novels," notes Brian Koller at filmsgraded.com. "The best version is still one of the first.... And such a cast! Hissable Basil Rathbone deftly turns Anna's husband into a cold villain. Freddie Bartholomew, the leading male child actor of the decade, is only slightly too precious as her beloved son Sergei. Gorgeous and childish Maureen O'Sullivan makes a superlative Kitty. Fredric March... ably plays the determined Count Vronsky, whose obsession with Anna gradually (but predictably) leads to her ruin."

Camille (1936).

"The great Garbo at her radiant peak, and certainly among the top five most romantic movies ever made," declares TV Guide. "[Director George] Cukor's renowned 'rapport' with actresses is unfailing here. MGM's glamour shows unmistakable care."

Ninotchka (1939).

Ernst Lubitsch's Oscar-nominated classic (no small feat in the legendary year of 1939) is a "highly enjoyable comedy - one of the greatest ever made," writes Jeffrey M. Anderson in a 4-out-of-4-star review at his site, Combustible Celluloid.

Adds TV Guide: "Combining farce, romance and satire, yet still maintaining moments of that soaring Garbo intensity, Ninotchka is special indeed."

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944).

TV Guide calls it Preston Sturges's "miraculously mad masterpiece. The marvel of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is how the film ever got made in the first place. This onslaught against American morals in small towns, against the wartime romances of servicemen, against just about everything that the country held sacred during WWII was reckless, exaggerated, and very funny."

The Blue Bird. (1918).

Recently in the Boston Phoenix, Chris Fujiwara, author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, called for a reappraisal of the famed director's father, Maurice Tourneur, since it has, over the years, fallen under the shadow of his son's.

"Tourneur made all kinds of films, but he had a predilection for romance, a genre that The Blue Bird brings to heady perfection," writes Fujiwara. "He's a director of light that pulses and streams, of shadow plays, of foreground silhouettes in archways, of the graceful interplay of human poses with landscape and architecture. He combines with his love of stylization an interest in special effects that anticipate Cocteau: clothes magnetically put themselves on a young boy's body; women's disembodied heads pop into a black frame."

The Bela Lugosi Collection (2004).

Will technological wonders ever cease? Five films on a single DVD, all from Universal and from a period when the studio was redefining American horror. There's certainly nothing wrong with calling this "The Bela Lugosi Collection," but it's also a little odd; why not "The Lugosi/Karloff Collection"? Only one of the five - Murders in the Rue Morgue - doesn't feature Universal's Frankenstein as well as its Dracula.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) is "one of the formative films in the great 1930s Golden Age of mad scientist films," writes Richard Scheib in the SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review. "And of all the mad scientist films of the era it seems the most primal and Gothic."

The Raven (1935), "so chock full of Lugosi's sinister dialogue delivery and evil presence that no Lugosi fan can go without seeing it," writes Jake Tucker at Classic-Horror.

The Invisible Ray (1936), sort of a mix of horror, sci-fi and murder mystery.

Black Friday (1940), written by Curt Siodmak, "a peculiar mixture of gangland melodrama and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review).

The Black Cat (1941), "perhaps one of the most revolutionary studio films ever made," noted Jonathan Marlow in his recent talk with Arianné Ulmer Cipes, daughter of director Edgar G. Ulmer. "Not only that [Boris] Karloff and [Bela] Lugosi shared the screen, which is usually why people seek it out, but then they are surprised by how fascinatingly well-photographed and how beautifully directed it is."

Career Girls (1997).

"There is something to startle you in [Mike] Leigh's crooked, bittersweet little comedy Career Girls," wrote David Edelstein in Slate back in 1997. "It's called Katrin Cartlidge, and every director should have one - and build an altar to it." Few would disagree, which made losing her in 2002 to something as insultingly mundane as pneumonia all the more painful (she was only 41).

As for the film, "It's more a morsel than a meal," wrote Laura Miller in Salon, also in '97, "not as substantial and cathartic as last year's Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, but anything at all by Leigh reminds us that movies can be about what it means to be alive in this world, right now, surrounded by real people - not just offer fantasy thrill rides through celebrityland."

The Complete Ripping Yarns (1976).

Once Monty Python's Flying Circus had run its course, each of the members of the original troupe, some on their own and some pairing off, ran off to follow fresh pursuits, most of them comedic. John Cleese, for example, famously tried - meeting tremendous success, of course - a more traditional sitcom set-up with Fawlty Towers. Between the first and second seasons of his show, Michael Palin and Terry Jones aired their first post-Circus television program, Ripping Yarns, "deliberately built around Jones's fascination with historical fiction, and Palin's versatility as a performer and his penchant for all things silly," as Stuart Galbraith IV writes at DVD Talk.

Nine episodes on two discs.

Lost. The Complete First Season (2004).

One of the major TV hits of last year (so it hardly needs an introduction), subject of seemingly infinite online speculation as to where its countless subplots would turn, here it is, Lost, already out on DVD.

Gunslinger Girl. Volume 3: Il Silenzio Delle Stelle (2005).

"Is Gunslinger Girl deplorably exploitive in the way it turns little girls into brainwashed, heavily conditioned cyborg killers, or is it an emotional and tragic tale?" asks Theron "Key" Martin at the Anime News Network. Well, GreenCiners seem to like it. A lot.

Browse the New Releases Archive for more recent arrivals.