Essentially the story of one Russian woman's untimely death and the effort of the two men in her life to honor her passing by adhering to the traditions of their shared, threatened culture, Aleksey Fedorchenko's Silent Souls presents itself as a modern-day folk fable that becomes an act of tragic mythology and melancholy cultural preservation. Its fable-likeness derives from its seeming simplicity but actually complex, unfathomable pockets of mystery and irony; the story it tells has meanings and resonances that seem to lie just beyond our ability to rationally comprehend or literally interpret them. Its mythological aspect comes from the unfamiliar, nearly lost folkways -- one of which is t...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are from promotional materials and stills provided by Criterion, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

It's no coincidence that, of all the multifarious masterpieces the great French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard has given us over the years and decades, it's 1964's Band of Outsiders (Bande part) that revved American auteur Quentin Tarantino's motor, to the point that every Tarantino film opens with the tributary title "A Band Apart" (the name of his production company). Band of Outsiders is richly, excitingly exemplary of "classic" Godard, from his most prolific, pop-c...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are stills provided by director Hal Hartley's Possible Films website, not the current Blu-ray edition under review.

Writer/director Hal Hartley (Henry Fool), with his pictures' eccentric ratios of cerebral, philosophically-minded intellectualism to wackiness and romance, is himself already something of an anomaly in the American-indie-filmmaker milieu, making his 1995 film Flirt, by far the most experimental and odd of Hartley's features, a curiosity's curiosity. Telling and retelling the same tale thr...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are stills provided by director Hal Hartley's Possible Films website, not the current Blu-ray edition under review.

Joseph Fulton (D.J. Mendel) is the least troubled of writer/director Hal Hartley's typically down-on-their-luck leading men, a gallery that ranges from Martin Donovan's suffocated genius in 1990's Trust to Thomas Jay Ryan's...suffocated genius in Hartley's masterpiece, 1997's Henry Fool. Fulton, too, is a genius whose ample gifts g...Read the entire review

Masha Drokova, a hugely successful Russian TV journalist and the "star" of Lise Birk Pedersen's documentary Putin's Kiss, was born in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet communism began its quick and irreversible crumble. She's one of the most prominent success stories from the first generation of Russian youth to never have known Cold War-era privations -- an educated, pretty, well-dressed exemplar of the New Russia and its prosperous middle class. This, along with Drokova's air of ambitious but wide-eyed innocence, makes her the perfect symbolic figure for Pedersen's investigation into what turns out to be the very compromised soul of the shiny new Russia long presided over ...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials, not the current Blu-ray edition under review.

Well before and long after he became a filmmaker, Pierre taix's real forte and calling has always been as a clown -- a French clown, in particular -- and in a way, that tells you much of what you need to know about him and the charmingly off-center sensibility and aesthetic he brought to the five features and several shorts now brought together in Criterion's new Pierre taix box set. The idea of a subtle clown or of sublime slapstick would seem to be highly counterintuitive to us more straightforward, blunter Americans, t...Read the entire review

Scott Thurman's documentary The Revisionaries focuses in, for our amusement and enlightenment, on one more episode of the United States' seemingly endless "culture wars," the vying for political and cultural power at every level between those convinced that the U.S. is a "Christian nation" and those who take a more pluralistic/egalitarian view. It's a microcosm of something that's been going on for decades all over the country, which is ostensibly its relevance to all of us, not just the red state (Texas) where it documents a heated debate going down over public-school textbook standards; the terms employed in that debate, the arguments raised and rebutted and counter-rebutted, the oil-a...Read the entire review

Much like the foreigner-in-Korea character(s) played by French screen legend Isabelle Huppert in In Another Country -- Korean director Hong Sang-soo's (Night and Day) latest deceptively easygoing stroke of genius -- we have no idea what adventures and twisty-turny, unpredictably forking and interconnecting paths await us during our stay in Hong's movie wonderland. As with many of Hong's works, the film is at first glance quite pleasantly modest and compact, a delicate contrapuntal piano piece, pretty with a melancholy undertow, by scorer Jeong Yong-jin accompanying the colorful, childlike scrawl of the credits; ther...Read the entire review

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is technically a documentary by Sophie Fiennes about an especially bold and rich period in the career of German-born painter/sculptor/all-around celebrated artist Anselm Kiefer. But, even more so than Corinna Belz's similarly-minded artist doc Gerhard Richter Painting, the aim of Fiennes's film is much less informational than experiential, with Kiefer's biography, wider body of work, and the huge amount of criticism/appreciation/interpretation that's built up around it over the decades all kept at a radical (but, at least according to Fiennes's sensibility, necessa...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials, not the current Blu-ray edition under review.

To a socially conscious filmmaker like Hector Babenco (an Argentine-born Brazilian filmmaker who, before he took Hollywood and Oscar with 1985's Kiss of the Spider Woman, made more or less directly activist narrative features in Brazil), it must have seemed like the right time for Ironweed. It was 1987, the "trickle-down" (or, more accurately, "leech-up") Reagan era; William Kennedy's 1984 Pulitzer prizewinning novel had harked ...Read the entire review

You'd think it would be the foreign/art-house film fanatic's dream come true: "Wim Wenders [legendary director of Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire] presents a film by Michelangelo Antonioni [the even more legendary director of visionary masterpieces from L'Avventura to Red Desert and beyond]." That's the alluring DVD-sleeve verbiage announcing Beyond the Clouds, Antonioni the elder s...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Both the pitfalls and the achievement of the film are already hinted at in the title of Pip Chodorov's documentary Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film. It avoids making any false promises by wisely referring to itself as "a" history, not "the" history, of the diverse kinds of short, small-scale, non-narrative movies that can be described as experimental (any comprehensiveness clearly being impossible at its compact running time of 82 minutes), and its somewhat lopsided focus -- on the direct predecessors of Chodorov (himself an experimental filmmaker from NYC) from the '60s-era Greenwich Village boom in experimental cinema, a critical mass reached in the messy but intent and fruitful venturing outside of commercial/storytelling fil...Read the entire review

I've always found it a shame that writer/director Julia Loktev's highly impressive debut narrative feature, 2006's Day Night Day Night (a terrorist procedural as brilliant, riveting, and moving as it is disturbing, offering no specifics as to the attacker's motivating beliefs other than that the characters in the film believe they're worth killing for) didn't find as large an audience as it deserved. The audacity of that film's theme and story were readily matched by Loktev's fantastic eye for images, lean and razor-sharp way with narrative, and preternatural feel for pacing, montage, and performance; it was clearly ...Read the entire review

French-Canadian filmmaker Denis C t takes us behind the scenes of a functioning, open-for-business Quebecois zoo/animal park in Bestiaire, and it's tempting to slot the film into the documentary category. That would be a mistake, however: Despite the obvious reality of what C t is showing us (it's Parc Safari in Hemmingford, evidently a popular tourist destination), that's not what the film is "about"; though he had to go through all the clearances and approvals the same as any documentarian would have, it's often unclear within the completed movie (especially at first) exactly where we are or what the nature of this place is, with its exotic African creatures and tourists amassing to ...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from the film's 2001 DVD release, not the current Blu-ray edition under review.

Like most films by Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill, Blow Out), 1978's The Fury is of dubious genre: Is it a horror film, with its eerie supernatural story elements? Is it a suspense/political-thriller picture, with its nefarious, secretive, CIA-like government agency waiting around every corner to thwart what's humane, unsullied, and...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from stills provided by The Criterion Collection and promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition of the film under review.

Robert Bresson's 1956 film A Man Escaped is, you could accurately say, a prison-break picture. Its tale of French Resistance fighter Fontaine's (Fran ois Leterrier) capture and condemnation by, and escape from, the Nazis during their occupation of France has story elements in common with The Great Escape, Stalag 17...Read the entire review

Attempts for amateurs like myself to approach and understand avant-garde/experimental films -- like those, collected in Materialfilme, of German husband-and-wife team Wilhelm and Birgit Hein -- require making equivalencies and looking for overlaps. To pose the overlap question: What, in my much more extensive experience with narrative/dramatic movies, might allow me to make a connection with them? There's that moment in Bergman's Persona where the film gets stuck and melts before our very eyes, calling attention to the mechanism of the celluloid in the projector itself and creating a shocking disruption of the "story,"; or th...Read the entire review

The headline-grabbing efforts of AIDS-awareness/advocacy protest group ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) didn't happen all that long ago. But, thanks in large part to the effectiveness of their controversial tactics (nonviolent but aggressive marches, sit-ins, obstructions, and shut-downs) and the ultimate successful attainment of their political aims, ACT-UP's most active years -- from 1987, when the group was founded, to the mid-1990s, when combination-drug "cocktail" therapy began prolonging the lives of persons with HIV, often all the way back to normal life spans -- are now settled enough in the past to qualify as history of the sort that can be surveyed in a film like David France'...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from stills provided by The Criterion Collection and promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition of the film under review.

For those who know of the character's origins, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's "Colonel Blimp" -- played by Roger Livesey, with shape-shifting prowess, from a young, cocky man to an old, left-behind one -- is "Colonel Blimp" in name only. The comically proper, perspective-lacking Englishman from whom the 1943 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp gets its name, who only develops more clueless and blowhard-ish tendencies the older he gets, is based on a satirical character from news...Read the entire review

Please Note: The screen grabs used here are taken from the DVD-R check disc provided for review, not the official DVD edition of the film.

Jafar Panahi, the Iranian filmmaker whose best-known film outside of his homeland is probably 1995's The White Balloon, is by most definitions a successful artist, and he wears his success with an assured but humble degree of comfort and confidence. In his 2011 movie This Is Not a Film, a quasi-documentary in which Panahi is present in every shot, his demeanor and temperament are even-keeled and relaxed; he seems perfectly at ease as he discusses the ins and outs of every aspect of his work and craft from writi...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials provided by the film's distributor, not the Blu-ray edition of the film under review.

It's an epiphany that will come at different points for different viewers of L os Carax's Holy Motors -- that moment amid the film's mysterious, increasingly bizarre plot(s) when you realize that what it's "about," in the largest sense (not that you can entirely pin it down or reduce it), is what the incurably cinephilic Carax evidently regards as the mechanical, certainly, but also the sacred spirit of the medium itself, right now, in a transitional moment of simultaneous elation and crisis ...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional and other sources, not the Blu-ray edition of the film under review.

We're all fairly well-accustomed by now to movies that openly, self-reflexively acknowledge their own artificiality -- so many different filmmakers, from Godard to De Palma to Tarantino, have been doing it for so long, each for their own purposes ranging from post-modern playfulness to agonized intellectual frustration -...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition of the film under review.

When it comes to Robert Altman, I'm an iconoclast's iconoclast: My favorite work by that reliably rebellious, hit-or-miss, sometimes truly great American independent-film (or, at least, independent-spirited film) godfather isn't one of his popular hits (The Player) or rightly famous cinephile's-pick classics (Nashville), but...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from the 2005 DVD edition, not the Blu-ray disc under review.

The opening credits of Otto Preminger's Laura come up over an instantly captivating, then eternally unforgettable piece of cinematic iconography: A painted portrait of the title character (Gene Tierney, whom the film's producer, Fox's (in)famous Darryl F. Zanuck, once very understandably referred to as "The most beautiful woman in movie history"), which gazes out at us with a mixture of allure, defiance, and forbidding that might make even the Mona Lisa blush. As a whole, the film is Preminger's...Read the entire review

I must confess to never having seen director Joseph Losey's mid-career debacles (or masterpieces; depends on whose take you listen to) Modesty Blaise (1966) or Boom! (1968), but judging from what I've read and heard regarding those films, Losey -- an expat American who fled McCarthyism in the '50s and made an unusually varied string of films in the U.K. and Europe over the subsequent decades -- had an ability and a willingness to go over the top not quite hinted at by, say, his more widely-respected collaborations with playwright Harold Pinter (as in 1963's ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I have to confess to making a flippant joke as we settled in to watch the DVD of Yi Seungjun's remarkable, lyrical, very moving documentary Planet of Snail: Knowing that the film deals intimately with profound matters of human existence, I proffered some inept crack about how disappointed I'd be if it wasn't a monster movie about a fantastical world, in a galaxy far away, run by scary warlord-molluscs. The film, as intriguing, affecting, and mysterious as it is simple and direct, in no way deserved my disposable stab at insouciance, least of all for its seemingly gnomic title, which makes perfect sense: The planet we're being taken to is our own, but the film lets us know that familiar place in new and beautiful ways through the experience ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I love a challenging, rich, not readily comprehensible movie (I'll go on at length about what flat-out great, important films Persona or Au Hasard Balthazar are), and I love movies about difficult characters who are hard to "like" (I've always had a hard time with measuring a movie by the "likeability" of its characters; it's much more important that the film lets us really see and understand them, likeable or not). I say this lest anyone infer from my nonplussed impression of Christophe Honor 's Making Plans for Lena that I was unimpressed because confounded by its meandering q...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray disc under review.

It almost makes you nervous, the consistent heights that Belgium's Dardenne brothers (Rosetta, The Son, L'Enfant) -- easily among the very greatest filmmakers working today -- reach in their work; it seems too good to be true that any director could turn out one masterpiece after another for what now stands at six features (the ones they've made since 1996...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The screen grabs used here are from the standard-definition 2007 release, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

To call Andrei Tarkovsky's 1962 debut feature, Ivan's Childhood, a "transitional" film implies something more compromised and less accomplished than it actually is. But for a filmmaker who grew into the singular artistic force that Tarkovsky became five years later with (only) his second film, Andrei Rublev, even something that works as well, and often as flat-out brilliantly, as Ivan's Childhoo...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

South Korea has, over the last 15 years or so, developed quite the reputation as home to a robust, diverse, and internationally successful national cinema, one that's been consistently topping itself since around the turn of the millennium: From the art-house hits of Ki-duk Kim (3 Iron, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring) to the surprise commercial breakout of eccentric horror/suspensemeister Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Mother) to the more delica...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Like any bit of iconography, the image -- a woman dressed in quasi-fetish fishnets and black bodice, adorned with heavy makeup and sporting a bowler hat as she prepares to spring into action and strut her stuff on the stage -- often seems taken out of context; it suggests something brassy and strutting, selling much too short the multifaceted, turbulent, exceptionally dark stuff of which Cabaret, the 1972 Bob Fosse film from which this fascinating, suggestive figure is taken, is made. But its appearances have never before been misleading to quite this extent: Those responsible for the packaging design of the new Blu-ray version of Cabaret are apparently bound and determined to evoke the neutered, Fosse-lite likes of Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional images and from stills provided by StudioCanal, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

The great Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who had worked in the U.S., Mexico, and France as well as in his homeland since the silent era, experienced the last of his multiple transformations/rebirths in France in the '60s and '70s. With his final film, 1977's That Obscure Object of Desire, he ended a run of bourgeois-baiting, surrealist comedy-dramas that he'd kicked off in '67 with his rightly legendary Belle de Jour (and reached a...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials provided by Music Box Films, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

The latest feature from writer/director Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue, Married Life), Keep the Lights On is the portrait of a relationship between two men -- documentary filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and lawyer Paul (Zachary Booth, virtually unrecognizable from Dark HorseRead the entire review

THE FILM:

The Well-Digger's Daughter is a coming full-circle of sorts, and also in a way a continuation of a well-worn, seemingly endless loop in French cinema (and culture). Its director, adapter, and star, Daniel Auteuil (Cach , The Girl on the Bridge), is presenting us with a remake of a 1940 film of the same name by Marcel Pagnol, a mid-20th-century French playwright, novelist, and filmmaker; twenty-five years ago, Pagnol was indirectly responsible for Auteuil's rise to international art-house stardom, when Jean de FloretteRead the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials and filmmaker Hal Hartley's website, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

Writer/director Hal Hartley's take on lower-middle- and working-class American life (uncertain, rickety rungs on the social ladder, and he's observant and sensible enough to casually depict them that way) is one of the more deeply unusual things independent cinema managed to smuggle through that commercially arid, artistically rich window of time between Blue Velvet and the coming of Tarantino (Hartley's first feature, Read the entire review