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

I’ve been playing catch-up this week, so there haven’t been any updates, but I did pick up the Frankenstein: Legacy Collection (a five-film DVD box set, of which I’m only interested in James Whales’ two classics, but at $20 for the whole collection, it’s impossible to pass up) as well as the Criterion Collection’s new [...]

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I’m very pleased to announce that my cohorts and I at Masters of Cinema have entered into an agreement with the independently-owned Eureka Video in the UK to distribute a collection of DVDs, The Masters of Cinema Series, representing classics of world cinema. Future titles will include Arnold Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926), Carl [...]

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The last few years, I’ve taken advantage of the fact that the San Francisco International Film Festival falls on my birthday in late April, and this year is no exception. I needed little convincing to attend the oldest film festival in the US, and even less reason to take a vacation in one of [...]

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Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) is a classic of cinema, renowned for its atmospheric cinematography, tragic themes, and the introduction of Marlene Dietrich to international audiences shortly before she and Sternberg left Germany and emigrated to Hollywood. But less well known in this country is Kurt Gerron, the actor who played [...]

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This weekend, I attended the Russian Nights film festival, which features a smattering of titles gleaned from the touring Russian International Film Festival (RIFF) organized by the Stas Namin Center in Moscow (an arts organization championed in the West by such musicians as Frank Zappa and the Scorpions). I wasn’t able to attend last [...]

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After a couple of years of rumors and delays, New Yorker Video is finally scheduled to release one of my all-time favorite movies, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), as well as Bresson’s Lancelot du lac (Lancelot of the Lake) (1974) and potentially L’Argent (Money) (1983) on DVD on May 25th. Amazon.com is already [...]

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The new 12th edition of the Time Out Film Guide has recently been published, and for my money it’s by far the best collection of capsule reviews in book form that’s widely available. Utilizing an extensive group of UK writers and covering a spectrum of films that far surpasses the Leonard Maltin or Martin/Porter [...]

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It’s not often that I find myself wholly embracing contemporary thrillers–I’ve seen enough of them to recognize formulas in the trailers alone; their emphasis on gruesome aesthetics and heavy-handed shock tactics, sexy serial killers, or cops who decide that this time, it’s personal.
Happily, I can fully recommend two exemplary thrillers currently getting some play: [...]

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While breezing through Roger Ebert’s site this morning, I was surprised to see his three-star (good) rating of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s mesmerizing Distant (2003), a film he indirectly panned 1 last year in his disparaging remarks toward the Cannes Film Festival.
Occasionally at Filmjourney, I’ve critiqued Ebert’s populist dismissals of highly regarded art cinema in light [...]

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A few blogs back, I noted the latest issue of Cineaste includes the editors’ Ten Favorite Historical Films and sneaking in at tenth place is Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1961), a film which has recently been released as a 2-disc DVD from the Criterion Collection.
Its subject is a notorious mountain bandit who was recruited to [...]

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