Bong historic international breakthrough receives a superlative Blu-ray package from Criterion. Yet Lynch brings to this story an ecstatic, hallucinatory tactility that belies the understanding of audiences (including some critics) who seem to experience films only in terms of their narrative beats. Except this time the monster isn’t some amphibious abomination that results from extreme genetic mutation, but the insidious forces of class and capital that divide a society’s people. Merrick is so present, even disguised, that we’re never led to anticipate his “reveal” cheaply, as we might a monster in a horror film. After splitting from her writer boyfriend, Riccardo, Vittoria meets Piero, a lively stockbroker, on the hectic floor of the Roman stock exchange. For mono audio, the track also captures things like street noise and the roar of the stock exchange with surprising fullness. But about halfway through the script flips, and the timeframe alters, going back over events from the POV of Rinko’s husband, Shigehiko (Yûji Kôtari). The film begins with Ferdinand (Belmondo) apparently scraping together a nice bourgeois existence for himself and his wife, whose economic contentment is summed up by the fact that she can go to parties in her new panty-less, invisible girdle—a device that Godard, through Ferdinand, declares the apotheosis of modernism. Maybe it is simply about beautiful images, about how beautiful the world can seem like in cinema? He understands that Merrick’s story is inherently heartbreaking, and frequently ends scenes the second they reach a catharsis, without wallowing in aggrandizing joy or misery. More details at This is a film of the modern world of 1960s Italy. Cast: James Murray, Barbara Kent, George Kotsonaros, Jack Hanlon, Harry Gribbon, Wheeler Oakman Director: William Wyler Screenwriter: Charles Logue, Albert DeMond Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 65 min Rating: NR Year: 1929 Release Date: July 27, 2020 Buy: Video. Ferdinand tries to devote himself to the lost art of reading, but sneaks into movies (sitting behind Jean-Pierre Léaud), and Marianne insists they move onto their next adventure, preferably one with a little bit more connection with the material world that previously provided her with so many enjoyable 45s. In an interview from 2007, Anna Karina discusses how her working relationship with Jean-Luc Godard gave her the opportunity to play very different characters from film to film, how they worked from a daily script installment, and how important her relationship with him was for her personal development. Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. Then, out of nowhere, the accused gangsters break out into an impromptu rendition of “We’ll Meet Again,” a moment that surreally blends menace and mirth. Antonioni gets knocked for his ostensible despair, but no one who invests every object, whether artificial or natural, with such loving aesthetic care can be indifferent to or repulsed by his surroundings. An unconventional British gangster film from director Stephen Frears, The Hit largely avoids the usual trappings of the genre—in particular, the penchant for ultraviolence on display in roughly contemporary films like The Krays—opting instead for a thoughtful, even philosophical, character study. This ends my indulgence into the Antonioni, Monica Vitti trilogy. Nothing is trying to be solved or worked out, it is existential like the others, but more in a selfish and pessimistic way. It’s beautifully shot in the localities of Rome and Verona, but what particularly sets L’Eclisse apart from the previous movies is the directness of its politics, such as the shallowness of materialism. The film’s relentless sound editing and Clint Mansell’s remarkable score is perfectly presented, never sacrificing the clarity of the dialogue. At one point in the film, the slum village where Ki-taek and his family live is devastated by a massive flood during a night of severe weather. Formally, this film is a more mature examination of exploitation than a mere plot summary can convey. Käutner’s damning film sees a nation of people unwilling or unable to confront their history of violence—a notion further complicated when the owner of the aforementioned dog, Inge (Ingmar Zeisberg), is revealed to be a past lover of Robert’s. Why can't my existential despair ever look this good? She proves to be patient zero in the outbreak of slug-like parasites that invade the Starliner Towers, creatures described by Hobbes’s fellow medical researcher, Dr. Rollo Linsky (Joe Silver), as “part aphrodisiac, part venereal disease.” They are, of course, the result of a medical experiment gone horribly awry. (The first half of the latter is Antonioni's zenith, imo, though I prefer Blowup and Le Amiche start to finish.) The extras are rounded out by five minutes of behind-the-scenes footage. But whereas in They Live this threat is literal, in L'Eclisse, the issue is not actual aliens but the materialistic modern lifestyle, which stands in opposition to the protagonists' fullfillment and their vital energy. It made me think of Monica Vitti and Alain Delon lying together and not knowing where to put their hands in the way. The action opens in a smoky pool hall, where pretty boy Dave Roberts (James Murray) convinces patrons that he can’t be punched before storming out the door to save a damsel in distress from a brawny meathead boxer, Battling Roff (George Kotsonaros). But it also serves as a potent metaphor for the volatile state of post-war Germany. But dark and dangerous impulses are roiling just below the flawless surfaces of the complex. On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, Darren Aronofsky’s influential hellride of a film gets a sturdy 4K upgrade and a few new extras that extol its technical merits. On Disc 1, you will find a full length audio commentary by Richard … One scene, in which a moment of tenderness between Harry and Marion is presented through split-screened close-ups, may be the finest sequence of Aronofsky’s career, exquisitely expressing the characters’ intimacy as well as their fundamental distance. Ki-jung (Park So-dam) and her brother, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), scurry about as their father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), instructs them to try holding their phones up to the ceiling, and to stand in every nook and cranny of their home until they find a new connection. Criterion presents Pierrot le Fou in a new 2K restoration that’s a few notches above their already excellent—and long out-of-print—2009 release in terms of color saturation and the clarity of fine details. Made by fans in Auckland, New Zealand. The soundtrack on both cuts is as enveloping as the film’s visual schema, calling particular attention to the retro sci-fi aspects of Jung Jae-il’s eerie, theremin-filled score while keeping dialogue and ambient effects clear in the mix. We soon learn, though, that Dave isn’t much of a hero and all that commotion was part of a scam cooked up by Roff and his manager (Wheeler Oakman) to sucker locals into betting their drinking money on Dave, who’s been paid off to take a dive in the second round of an upcoming match with Roff. Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2006. Nary a shot in Furie’s film goes without a canted camera angle or a busy mise-en-scène with objects deliberately obfuscating that action on screen. I did not marvel at the breath of his direction as I did after seeing “The Passenger” for the third or fourth time and afterall Mark Peploe's marvelous story potential (he contributed to Rene Clement final film's story and screenplay “Wanted: Babysitter”), but this time, the ending left me a little disappointed, perhaps as his ending initially do, save “Blow-Up” and “Zabriskie Point”, but I was thinking. There’s little information about source materials in the set’s accompanying book, other than the bald disclaimer: “HD transfers provided by the Nikkatsu Corporation.” Luckily, the films collected here look excellent overall, certainly several noticeable steps above previous DVD releases. Gone is the high-contrast monochrome, traded in for full-color film stock that brings out the blues and grays of the modern and more prominently featured Tokyo cityscape. Employing a series of sinuous mobile crane and tracking shots, often combined with wide-angle lenses for some fashionable distortion, the film’s prologue, set in the early 1970s, succinctly lays out the requisite backstory: From his safe house, we follow informer Parker into the courtroom, where his testimony against leading mob bosses clinches his subsequent fate. In its Verona, our Romeo and Juliet‘s love is not teenaged passion and anger; it’s adult mundanity and silence (and it’s not really there). Greg Dunning, son of Cinépix co-founder John Dunning, reminisces about the company’s working relationship with Cronenberg on both Shivers and Rabid, and his father’s preference for putting women in lead roles. Where Robert is keen to resume their affair as if nothing happened in the intervening years, Inge dreams of moving to Canada with her American husband and leaving Germany forever behind. Once Käutner was out from under the censorial thumb of Adolf Hilter and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s minister of propaganda, he sought to make amends, expressing his disdain for Nazism and directly addressing Germany’s recent transgressions through films such as Seven Journeys (the first German film released after WWII) and, later, Black Gravel, a savagely bleak portrait of a wholly corrupt Germany that’s yet to come to terms with its wartime legacy.