DVDs, 6/28.

"La Jetée coheadlines a new DVD from the Criterion Collection that's an early candidate for disc of the year," announces Matt Zoller Seitz in Time Out New York. "Delightfully, the La Jetée/Sans Soleil disc is an imaginative tribute to a great filmmaker, conceived in the spirit of his work. For instance, rather than simply interviewing French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, a contemporary of [Chris] Marker, and then editing his remarks into a linear documentary, Criterion has laid out the best bits on a full-page menu of onscreen windows that overlap in a more fragmented, free-associative way." Also: Pacino: An Actor's Vision and This is Tom Jones.

Vue Weekly's Josef Braun recommends Alain Resnais's Muriel, "a film that counterbalances a strong but conventional narrative with a deliriously unstable structure, an uneasy marriage that's initially jarring, then jazzily fun, then mesmerizing, and finally deeply troubling and more than a little melancholy," and Claude Chabrol's Comedy of Power, another "typically scathing survey of the bourgeois and their sense of entitlement."

Updated through 6/29.

Tim Lucas can't wait to take in the 7-disc Thomas Mann Collection; in the meantime, he's enjoyed the "puckish entertainment" of The Old Dark House, William Castle's "one-shot collaboration" with Hammer.

Good reading: Dave Kehr walks us through a collection of a dozen films Warner Home Video is releasing as Cult Camp Classics; many aren't, as he points out, but: "If the condescending 'cult camp' label gives them a commercial hook, I guess that's for the good, at least as long as it means getting prints as carefully restored and transfers as technically perfect as these." More from Dan Callahan and Eric Henderson at Slant.

Recent DVD roundups: Cinema Strikes Back and DVD Talk. And as always, keep an eye on the Guru.

Update, 6/29: Steve Erickson on the Chris Marker package at Nerve: "After watching Sans Soleil, you realize that the paths Marker blazed for documentarians remain largely unfollowed."

Posted by dwhudson at June 28, 2007 1:32 PM