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

QuÈbecois actor, and film and theatre writer/director Robert Lepage (US audiences may remember him for his role in Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal) has built a reputation over the last ten years as a maker of intelligent and offbeat productions that explore inner human themes amid larger technological or historical contexts. And although [...]

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One of the more interesting programs the American Film Institute puts on in Los Angeles is the Cinema Legacy series, which invites filmmakers to present a movie by a filmmaker who inspires them. I’ve had the good fortune to catch Agnieska Holland presenting AgnËs Varda’s Le Bonheur, Paul Schrader presenting Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, and [...]

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I’ve been meaning to post an alert for a few days now, but following my previous blog on public radio donations, it’s only appropriate that I go ahead and mention the DVDBeaver donations drive that’s currently underway.
If you refer to DVDBeaver’s screengrabbed visual reviews and region comparisons even half as often as I do, you [...]

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I saw several screenings the past few days, so expect assorted updates this week…
Last week, I discovered a wonderful opportunity. Since I don’t own a television, I get a lot of my news from US public radio (and its incorporation of CBC and BBC programs) and, of course, the Internet. And for a [...]

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Image Entertainment and Milestone Films recently released the complete extant works of Winsor McCay on DVD, Winsor McCay: The Master Edition, totaling ten short films from 1911-1922. It’s a direct transfer of the region 2 DVD, so some PAL-to-NTSC ghosting occurs, but should only upset the purists. McCay, who was a respected New [...]

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Tod Browning is probably best remembered for directing BÈla Lugosi in Dracula (1931), but of the handful of his films I’ve seen, his most extraordinary are The Unknown (1927) and Freaks (1932), two movies that use the auspices of the horror convention to reveal complex notions about physical and social “normalcy.” Both films have [...]

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Unlike Heaven (2002), which tapped into the double lives and blind chances of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s earlier work, the newly-released film The Big Animal (2000), based on another of his unproduced screenplays, taps into his dry wit and sense of the absurd. It’s directed by the great Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr, who appeared in such [...]

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Maria Full of Grace is a remarkable film for several reasons. It tells a harrowing story of a teenaged Columbian woman who finds herself at a crossroads in an unhappy romantic relationship. Her financially struggling and hard-working family, three generations under one roof, insists that Maria labor in a factory dethorning crates of [...]

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The British Film Institute will release Robert Bresson’s second feature, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) on DVD at the end of the month, and MovieMail, a UK seller that specializes in world cinema and commentary asked me to contribute a few words on the film for their latest catalogue. You can read [...]

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