Last week's "Luis Buñuel in Mexico" three-night master class with Guillermo del Toro at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto was a fantastic event. Before I get to some screening takeaways, I want to say up front that I really like how TIFF is delivering on curation...
Film disc collectors often talk guiltily, or regretfully, or occasionally scornfully, about "double-dipping"—buying a new Blu-ray edition of a film previously purchased on DVD or on an inferior Blu-ray. But if there was ever a case for it (as well as for owning a multi-region player),...
"The best thing in my half of the film—the only part of the film worth saving—is the sequence dedicated to the death of Marilyn Monroe." Let me cut to the chase and skip to the most useful bit of information that I can share—the 83-minute "reconstructed...
My fall 2013 encounter with Rossellini has transpired in a strange order...
The explicit political content of the film has as its object, as its historical situation, Germany. But the film does not speak of Germany; rather, of the ambiguous relationship between old and new capitalism. Germany was chosen as the extreme instance. The implicit political content of the film is a...
It had been about seven years since the first and last time that I saw Pasolini's Teorema. It seemed a bolt from the blue; my only previous exposure to Pasolini had been The Gospel According to Matthew, and I wasn't quite sure what to expect....
I agree it is not very funny. It makes you think more than laugh. But when it was put on in Montreal and New York the audiences laughed a lot, to my great astonishment, unlike in Italy, where they were a bit disappointed...
In North America, only the final four Pasolini features are available on Blu-ray, three of these in Criterion's Trilogy of Life package that was released just last month. A further four (Accatone, The Gospel According to Matthew, Oedipus Rex, Medea) are now available on Blu-ray...
I'm playing catchup with Bela Tarr, now, because just over a year ago I saw The Turin Horse and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. That's a film that is pardigmatic difficult viewing, gruelling by any measure, minimal, oblique, demanding—so...