The Movie:

As a secular person who has never flirted with Christianity as a lifestyle choice, it might seem surprising that gospel music plays heavily into two of my favorite recent movie experiences. The decades-delayed Aretha Franklin gospel concert film Amazing Grace gave me chills all three times that I saw it in a movie theater -- and the handful of times I've seen it on video since. This past year, the most electrifying moment depicted onscreen came in Questlove's documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Summer of Soul, when gospel legend Mahalia Jackson shared the microphone with a y...Read the entire review

Filibus:

Telling the tale of a slyly villainous anti-hero who goes by the code name Filibus, Filibus is a super-oldie from the Silent Era of films, 1915 to be more exact. The Italian movie, directed by Mario Roncoroni and written by future science fiction scribe Giovanni Bertinetti, takes a mildly futuristic tone as Filibus flies about in a specialized dirigible doing crimes.

Starring long-necked, thin-lipped Valeria Creti as Filibus, a character with three identities in this movie, Filibus is an early cinematic depiction of the anti-hero, a style of movie fiction popular at the time, with other such entries like Fantomas achieving success. Filibus is really the Baroness Troix Monde, (clever name, that) a powerful high society woman. Apparently her station in life is not enough, however, as she delights in robbing people of their treasures. There's a bounty on Filibus' h...Read the entire review

Maborosiis the debutfeature film from acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda (NobodyKnows, Still Walking). The film is donein the same styleof legendary Japanese filmmaker Ozu. It's a quiet meditation on itscharacters. Executive produced by Yutaka Shigenobu (Air Doll,Still Walking), Maborosi is afilm that will dividemost audiences with its slow narrative and minimalist storytelling.

The filmexplores the life ofa young woman, Yumiko (Makiko Esumi), who lost her grandmother as achild and whose first husband commits suicide for an unknown reason.She str...Read the entire review

At a time when the Italian film industry at large was embroiled in the production of peplum, "sword and sandal" epics, and otherwise cashing in on whatever genre trends seemed to be emerging, Luchino Visconti directed and co-wrote Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960), a nonjudgmental, unsentimental drama about an immigrant family from the poor, rural South trying to find a better life in Milano.

The nearly three-hour film was a French-Italian co-production, hence the casting of French star Alain Delon and actress Annie Giradot as Italians. Greek monies may also have been at play, as Greek actors Spiros Focás and Katina Paxinou likewise have prominent roles, the latter having also worked in Hollywood and other international productions (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Mr. Arkadin).

Leisurely paced but always fascinating, the film is a portrait of a t...Read the entire review

The Movie
Milestone Films' great Daughter of Dawn Blu-ray release should be of interest to those who read American history, watch silent cinema, or are interested in the possibilities of the Western genre. Norbert Myle's obscure silent Western from 1920 recounts a love triangle between Indigenous people from the Kiowa and Comanche tribes of the Southern Plains and is most notable for being the only film with an all Native American cast and for being the only silent Western in which the Native American characters are played by real Native people. Milestone has transferred the meticulously restored Oklahoma Historical Society print to Blu-ray in an edition of the film that underlines its romantic epic aspirations and its unique mode of representation.

The Movie:

In the late '70s and early '80s, some of the most striking examples of American independent cinema were starting to be produced by black filmmakers. Unfortunately, for various logistical and legal reasons, many of these shoestring-budgeted masterpieces failed to secure theatrical distribution and for decades have surfaced only in sporadic film-class and repertory screenings. In 2007, Charles Burnett's jaw-dropping debut Killer of Sheep finally got clear of red tape and received an overdue theatrical run before arriving on DVD, paired with Burnett's also-great second film, My Brother's Wedding. Now, at long last, one o...Read the entire review

In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) is a fascinating viewing experience. While watching it, I realized that my wife's grandmother, now 103, was a toddler thousands of miles away but very much co-existing with director-ethnologist Edward S. Curtis as he filmed this part-documentary, part-melodrama starring Kwakwakka'wakw Indians. Though some of what they do onscreen was dated and anachronistic even then, one still is enthralled by the shadows of these indigenous peoples whose culture and technology probably hadn't changed all that much for hundreds, perhaps even a thousand years.

It was the first movie to feature an all-Native North American cast, and is the oldest feature film made in Canada known to survive. (However, those who made it, working for The Seattle Film Company, were primarily from the U.S., including Wisconsin-born Curtis.) And it was made eight years before Robert Flaherty's...Read the entire review

The Connection (1961) is a historically significant if very stagey and virtually unreleased feature directed and edited by independent experimental filmmaker Shirley Clarke (1919-1997). An adaptation of Jack Gelber's 1959 Obie-winning play, the entire story takes place in a grungy New York loft - there are no exteriors and no other sets - where junkies, including jazz musicians who jam occasionally, anxiously await a heroin dealer delivering their fix. In the play, a producer and writer are contemplating a theatrical production using the addicts as non-professional performers (other sources say these characters were journalists), but the movie changes them to filmmakers attempting to shoot a documentary. The Connection itself is an early "mockumentary," supposedly found footage pieced together by the mostly unseen cameraman (Roscoe Lee Browne).

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Fes...Read the entire review

The Movie:

"Jason Holliday was created in San Francisco, and San Francisco is a place to be created, believe me."

"It's nice that I'm doing what I want to do and someone is taking a picture of it. This is a picture that I can save forever."

"I can say whatever I gahdam please, but it's got to be righteous."

Shirley Clarke's 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason is a one-of-a-kind film. Restored and remastered by Milestone Films, it arrives on home video at the same time as Clarke's final film, Ornette: Made In America, as part of the company's concerted effort to pull this interesting filmmaker out ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The folks over at Milestone Films have taken it upon themselves to resurrect the largely forgotten career of underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke. The first film they revived was the 1961 junkie drama The Connection. (It is currently only available for sale to institutions, but reportedly it is getting a home video release in early 2015.) And now comes the one-two punch of 1967's Portrait of Jason (listed on the package as "Project Shirley, Volume Two") and Clarke's final film, 1985's Ornette: Made In America ("Project Shirley, Volume Three").

Both of these documentary films profile black men, striving to...Read the entire review

The Movies:

Milestone has finally delivered another double feature of films from influential but under-recognized director Lionel Rogosin. The first set featured his landmark drama/documentary hybrid On The Bowery and the experimental anti-war documentary Good Times, Wonderful Times, plus gobs of supplementary programs. This second collection follows much the same template as the first, including another outstanding drama/documentary hybrid, Come Back, Africa, another experimental documentary, Black Roots, and gobs of supplementary programs.

First up is Come Back, Africa, a clandestinely...Read the entire review

A must for silent comedy fans. Milestone has released Cut to the Chase! The Charley Chase Collection, a 2-disc, 16-short gathering of silent comedian Charley Chase's work from the years 1924 to 1926, with several of the titles apparently new to DVD. A silent clown whom appreciative audiences considered an "A-lister" among the likes of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, Chase never received the whole auteur canonization those three masters were given back in the 1960s and 1970s (even though Chase was directly involved in the writing and direction of his shorts, too). However, after watching Cut to the Chase! The Charley Chase Collection, what's readily apparent is that almost one hundred years later, Chase can make you laugh just as long and hard as The Big Three do―and that's all that really counts in the end. No extras for these as-good-as-you-can-get black and white t...Read the entire review

THE FILMS:

Mary Pickford was both the most famous female Hollywood star of the silent era and, in some respects, an "auteur," though of a different stripe than the Chaplins and Keatons: She didn't direct or write her own pictures (at least not in any official, credited capacity), but she controlled her career in a way that remains rare and impressive for a film actor even today. Pickford cultivated a plucky, young, innocent persona that made her a hugely popular box-office draw, shrewdly handpicking her scenarists and directors to create films of artistic merit that would also showcase her distinctive appeal; sh...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

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

Lionel Rogosin's 1957 film On the Bowery is a landmark of independent cinema and a key component in the expansion of the documentary genre. Shot over several months in New York's infamous skid row district, Rogosin adopts the ethos of the Italian Neorealists and applies it to the American experience. His movie, while not perfect, is an emotional document of a harsh reality, teeming with honest interest that goes far beyond mere voyeurism or common exploitation.

The son of a wealthy textile family, Rogosin turned to filmmaking as a response to WWII. He wanted to make sense of a world he though...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

The Araya peninsula, on the Venezuelan coast, was for hundreds of years home to salt-mining and fishing villages in which generation after generation of struggling but resilient residents lived and worked. In the late 1950s, industrialization finally reached these remote communities, instantaneously beginning to erode their way of life. Right on the cusp of the arrival of the machines that would soon replace most of the human hands needed for the available work on the peninsula, filmmaker Margot Benacerraf brought a crew to the coastal villages of Araya with the project of capturing something of the vitality, beauty, and severe difficulty of the villagers' lives and work. The result is Araya, a towering work of cinema that, while strictly sp...Read the entire review

Araya (1959), a rarely shown French-Venezuelan ethnological documentary/tone poem about salt miners, is the kind of revelatory movie-watching experience passed from one enthusiastic viewer to another. After reviewing it for his column, DVD Savant noticed an extra screener in our DVD reviewer's pool and to me emailed the following: "Quick - ARAYA." Savant's recommendation was good enough for me, and I'm glad I scooped it up.

The Venezuelan-born, French-educated filmmaker who directed Araya, Margot Benacerraf (b. 1926), made just two movies; this, her second, was her only feature-length work. Though Araya shared, with Hiroshima mon amour, the International Critics Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, she struggled for years afterward to get financing for her next project. She finally gave up. The only explanation for this is that both Araya and her 1952 short R...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

There are a couple of different ways Margot Benacerraf's 1959 film Araya could be referred to as a cinematic time capsule. For one, it preserves a way of life that, at the time, was quite possibly going to disappear, thanks to the ever-expanding reach of industrial technology. For another, despite winning accolades around the world, including a prize at Cannes, Araya fell off the map until a theatrical restoration and re-release in 2009. This rediscovery lead to a new appreciation of Araya, a compelling appropriation of the documentary format, turning real life into filmic poetry.

The Araya region was a peninsula in Venezuela known for its extensive salt marsh. The Spanish stumbled on it in 1500 A.D. and quickly began to exploit...Read the entire review

Lionel Rogosin's 1957 film On the Bowery is a landmark of independent cinema and a key component in the expansion of the documentary genre. Shot over several months in New York's infamous skid row district, Rogosin adopts the ethos of the Italian Neorealists and applies it to the American experience. His movie, while not perfect, is an emotional document of a harsh reality, teeming with honest interest that goes far beyond mere voyeurism or common exploitation.

The son of a wealthy textile family, Rogosin turned to filmmaking as a response to WWII. He wanted to make sense of a world he thought had gone crazy and to use his family's riches for something more important than just making more money. It took him a while to suss out just how to make a film, and to assemble his...Read the entire review

...Read the entire review