Criterion’sdeluxeDVD set AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa, the largest collection of the Japanese director’s work ever released in the United States, is now available. Created in honor of Kurosawa’s centenary, this linen-bound box contains one legendary film after another (Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Kagemusha ), spanning the master’s fifty years making movies, as well as four rare films never before available on DVD and a beautifully illustrated, ninety-six-page hardcover book featuring writing by Stephen Prince and Donald Richie. This anticipated collector’s set has become one of the most talked-about gifts of the holiday season, having turned up in the Los Angeles Times (“flat-out masterpieces”), New York (“fabulous”), and Time (“the biggest and most rewarding box set of the year”). At the Auteurs, Glenn Kenny calls it “a genuine triumph ... a work of art in itself,” and Time Out New York ’s David Fear writes, “Criterion’s AK 100 essentially gives you Kurosawa’s entire career in one container. It’s a stunning collection in both quality and quantity ... Any true appreciation of Japanese cinema begins here.”
Few films of recent years feel more urgent than Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah. A devastating inside look at organized crime in contemporary Naples, Gomorrah is based on the book of the same name by Italian undercover reporter Roberto Saviano, who had to go into hiding after its publication. Garrone’s film, consisting of five interconnected stories, makes cinematically vivid the Mafia underworld that Saviano exposed, a crime syndicate whose tendrils snake from the poorest tenements to the highest fashion circles. Gomorrah—which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and has garnered numerous film awards around the world since—is contemporary cinema at its finest, a virtuosic, shockingly realistic look at how violence shapes our world.
The least sentimental and most beautiful movie about angels ever made, Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire arrives in Criterion DVD and Blu-ray special editions just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Filmed in a shimmering yet realistic cold-war Berlin only a few years before that momentous event, Wenders’s ode to a troubled city takes a fanciful look at the afterlife, narrated by a gloomy guardian angel: Bruno Ganz’s Damiel, who must choose whether to give up his immortality when he falls in love with a very human trapeze artist. With its wistful, collagelike impressions of urban life and its pristine, ethereal cinematography (plus Peter Falk!), Wings of Desire is an unforgettable experience. Take it from these just-in reviews: Says DVD Talk,“Wings of Desire is the work of an artist who can see a better world on the horizon and is using his art to reach out for it ... This is one of those movies that belongs in every home.” And according to Film.com’s Amanda Mae Meyncke, “The wholly perfect release from Criterion leaves nothing to be desired.”
The first film by a director is the hardest project to pull off. Being artistic and true to yourself and your sensibilities is an imposing task to start with, and on top of the pressure, you have to present your work and hope audiences embrace your art and that some studio executives are willing to give you money the next time you ask. Many directors have astonished critics and crowds alike. Orson Welles made what is possibly the greatest American movie on his first try with Citizen Kane, Breathless started a decade long string of wonderful hits for Jean-Luc Godard, and 400 Blows cemented Francois Truffaut’s reputation until the end of time. While some directors find fame and fortune with their films, others quietly craft their art and focus on the content and not the box office.
One such contemporary director is Pedro Costa. While studying history at the University of Lisbon in his native Portugal, Costa found his calling in cinema and soon enrolled in the university’s School of Theatre and Cinema. After schooling, he found himself as the assistant director to prolific director Joao Botelho and actor turned director Jorge Silva Melo; both of which provided the foundation and inspiration that led him to his own first feature O Sangue (Blood).
As both writer and director, Costa set about crafting an intimate portrait of two brothers and their struggle. The referential treatment Costa gives to his first feature is imminent throughout as would be expected by a newly minted student of film school. Tinges of Robert Bresson to Jean-Luc Goddard are present but the feel of the film is not hindered by classic tactics and camera shots, but instead act as an ample homage to the history and scope of cinema. Costa would find his own way in future films like Ossos (Bones), No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room), and Juventude em Marcha (Youth on the March), but pure originality was not the first item on his list. His first line in 1989 read, “Create Art!” and create he did.
O Sangue is inherently about change. Simple change, no; but instead change wrought through times that are hard from the start. Painful change as brothers Vicente (Pedro Hestnes), seventeen and caring, and Nino (Nuno Ferreira), ten years old and slightly naïve to his father’s (Canto e Castro) sickness and absence must traipse through life while always being threatened with separation. To confuse matters more are the lovely Clara, who tempts Vicente and comforts Nino, and the boys’ uncle (Luis Miguel Cintra) who wants Nino to have an actual father figure. The change is sometimes sudden, the change is sometimes subtle, and sometimes the change is not explained. Watching O Sangue once and understanding it is not possible. Costa is an artist, and as with all art it must be studied, dissected, reassembled, and studied again.
After twenty years it is finally time to see the movies of Pedro Costa on DVD. Within the next few months, auteurs will finally get to experience the greatness of Costa with several new releases by the Criterion Collection, Masters of Cinema, and his debut film here on Second Run. The film festival darling Costa now comes to home theatre and will give wonderment for many generations to come.
Politics and pastry make unlikely bedfellows in the films of Dušan Makavejev. The Serbian director of such wildly controversial films as WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie, ultimately exiled from Yugoslavia for his insistent censor baiting, was never content to depict his Communist country straightforwardly. Instead, his provocative pastiches mix fiction and documentary, sobering character drama and fearless flights of fancy. Our new Eclipse set features his first three free-for-alls: groundbreaking, crazy entertaining movies that reflect his belief in liberation—from social convention, sexual repression, even the rules of storytelling. And you’re unlikely to find more delicious-looking strudel on-screen.
Man Is Not a Bird is an antic, free-form portrait of the love lives of two less-than-heroic men who labor in a copper factory. This is one of cinema’s most assured and daring debuts.
This story of the tragic romance between a young telephonist (Eva Ras) and a middle-aged rodent-sanitation specialist (Slobodan Aligrudic) in Belgrade is an endlessly surprising, time-shifting exploration of love and freedom.
This utterly unclassifiable film—assembled from the “lost” footage of the first Serbian talkie, made during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia—is one of Makavejev’s most freewheeling farces.
