Weekend DVDs.

Robert W Welkos reviews Animated Soviet Propaganda (click that title for a preview): "The anthology is divided into categories titled 'American Imperialists,' 'Fascist Barbarians,' 'Capitalist Sharks' and 'Onward to the Shining Future: Communism.' The DVDs include interviews with Russian film school professors, directors and animators, including famed animator Boris Yefimov, who was 101 and died two years after being interviewed."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King: "The revelatory new Alfred Hitchcock: The Early Years Collection (Lionsgate, $40) offers cineastes a rare opportunity to see five of the Master of Suspense's early films: 1927's The Ring, 1929's The Manxman (both of these silent), 1930's Murder!, 1931's Skin Game and Rich and Strange. Though these films range in quality, Hitchcock was very much the master of the medium, even during his salad days as a director."

Nick Schager reviews two from Russia at Slant: "Marina Razbezhkina's Harvest Time uses nostalgia as more of an emotional than intellectual device, looking back fondly—if still somewhat critically—at a hardship-wracked collective farming family in the Soviet Union of 1950." And: "Brother's titular sibling is a figurative child of Mother Russia, a modern-day Raskolnikov bereft of critical self-consciousness whose amorphous moral code reflects the precarious condition of his late-90s homeland."

"This has always been my personal favourite of all Fritz Lang's silent films, the one that gets the balance right between its pulp fiction story and its exposition through setting and character." Ian Johnston on Dr Mabuse, The Gambler at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

"With the possible exception of Nic Roeg, one would be hard pressed to name a director fallen so far from art house grace as Wim Wenders," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for Stop Smiling. The new Wim Wenders Collection "would be a chance to refurbish the poor reputation the director has earned over the last two decades if the mixed bag didn't draw attention to his conspicuous deficiencies."

Glenn Kenny on The Heiress: "Adapted from Ruth and Augustus Goetz's theatrical adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square, it's a finest-hour candidate for all involved: [William] Wyler, costars Ralph Richardson and Montgomery Clift, and most of all leading lady Olivia de Havilland, who gives a wrenching performance and earned her second Best Actress Oscar for it. I had the privilege of interviewing Miss de Havilland for Premiere a few years back and thought the release of this classic on DVD would be a good pretext to provide you all with an expanded version of her reminiscences of the making of the film."

Peter Sobczynski has a DVD roundup at Hollywood Bitchslap.

In the Austin Chronicle, Raoul Hernandez has background on Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

Flickhead explores the various elements that make up The House on Telegraph Hill.

Posted by dwhudson at February 3, 2007 1:50 PM