f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

I’m having a bad week, so my post today will only be an announcement. DVDPlanet is now pre-ordering one of the cinema’s supreme masterpieces, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), to be released as a 2-disc Criterion Collection package on October 14.
Details will include:
ï New high-definition digital transfer, with restored image
and sound
ï Audio commentary [...]

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This weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the American Film Institute’s Cinema’s Legacy program, which featured Paul Schrader and a screening/discussion of his favorite film, Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). Schrader, whose claim to fame probably remains his screenplays for early Martin Scorsese pictures like Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), has [...]

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Photo by Piotr Jaxa.
Well, the latest issue of everyone’s favorite film journal is up, Senses of Cinema, No. 27. Published in Melbourne, Australia, it specializes in “serious and eclectic discussion of cinema” and contains a few years worth of challenging, invigorating essays. Visit the archives and enjoy.
This particular issue includes a career [...]

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In case you haven’t heard, on June 2, the Federal Communications Commission (the government agency charged with regulating media in the US) granted sweeping new freedoms to individual media companies–the most extensive in decades. Among the changes were the freedom to own a newspaper as well as multiple television, radio, and cable stations within [...]

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Movies compliment and critique the 20th century in such a way that one can almost trace world history through the aesthetic development of the cinema alone. One of the most pivotal movements in film, for example, was Italian neorealism, a style predicated on engaging the realities of postwar European life.
Born in antagonistic response to the [...]

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One of the pleasures of the Internet is getting access to companies and voices which one might otherwise have difficulty finding–in the electronic world, all websites are created equal. For those seeking documentary options (particularly films which address social, political, or environmental issues), Bullfrog Films offers an extensive catalogue at the click of a [...]

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What will they think of next?
Giving new meaning to the phrase “an underground film festival,” Interfilm organizers in Berlin have come up with a genuinely new idea: exhibit a series of short films on monitors in Berlin subway trains and allow the passengers to be the jury.
The festival will run from January 29 to February [...]

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I work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and last night was the second week of our film club’s summer series. The night air cooled with a comfortable breeze and the screening was held outdoors in a small amphitheatre with a simple setup comprised of a video projector, a projection screen, and the [...]

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After what seems like an eternity of hand-wringing and navel-gazing, Woody Allen’s protagonist in Stardust Memories (1980), a burned-out movie director, suddenly finds himself face-to-face with a descending spacecraft. As super-intelligent extraterrestrials greet the human race for the first time, the filmmaker blurts out his abiding angst: “If nothing lasts, why am I bothering [...]

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Although I’ve long included classical Hollywood in my realm of cinephilia, I’m somewhat new to the films of Nicholas Ray (1911-1979), the director of such classics as Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life. An intensely personal filmmaker who worked within the studio system, Ray is known for his attention to setting, [...]

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