DVDs, 7/5.

Lately, I've been wondering - and I've been sure I'm not alone - if the collective love beamed at the festival-friendly art film will turn sour in much the same way a long lost love for the "quirky" American indie did more than a few years ago. Turns out, this has been on Michael Atkinson's mind, too. "[Y]ou know the drill, the long static shots, the non-communicative acting, the oblique narratives, the attention to passing time and natural phenomena and what exactly we don't know about what's going on. But I sometimes grow suspicious; it seems so easy, doesn't it?" At any rate, the film at hand in his piece this week for IFC News is Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates: "Rather than a one-man Turkish new wave, Ceylan seems to be the Turkish representative in a global trend, inspired by Antonioni and guided by Kiarostami and Hou, and meant not just for local audiences but for the Earthly citizens of Cannes-istan."

"The Falls turns cinema into a puzzle or game - one that [Peter] Greenaway continues to play, with increasing indifference to the amusement of lesser minds." Nathan Lee surveys the oeuvre in the Voice.

"Dorothy Arzner's 1940 Dance, Girl, Dance was intensely examined by the feminist critics of the 1970s," notes Dave Kehr. "But now that the ideological battles have moved on to other territories, and the smoke around Dance, Girl, Dance has cleared, it's probably safe to admit that it isn't a very good movie." Also reviewed is Yasuzo Masumura's Black Test Car, a "slippery, intriguing film [that] hovers between blunt moral outrage and sly social satire."

Jason Bogdaneris in the L Magazine on Criterion's release of Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara: "Seemingly tethered to nothing except his own socially conscious imagination, the films are a remarkable testament to the wedding of a rigorous, if overextended talent and a uniquely damaged moment in the history of a culture."

"Watching the opening sequence of Tony Scott's Déjà Vu on DVD, I had a feeling of... déjà vu!" exclaims C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark. "There was something familiar about the tone, the editing, the elegiac music, the way these fragmented images of people arriving at a port - specifically, the port of New Orleans - passed in front of the viewer like shards of recollection. Then it hit me. I was watching yet another version of Chris Marker's 1962 time-travel film, La Jetée."

"As far as The Shamus is concerned, The Great McGinty is the most important motion picture in film history. Not because it's a great film, although it's mostly a very good one. But because for the price of 10 bucks, Preston Sturges sold the script of this political-romantic comedy to Paramount with the proviso that he would also be able to direct it. And in 1940, thus began perhaps the greatest decade-long run of any filmmaker. He made eight classic films (nine, if you wish to count The Great Moment), and American film (not just American film comedy) owes a monumental debt to his peculiar genius."

"The Black Pirate (1926) was lightning in a bottle, set on the high seas with relentless action, energetic humor, the absence of a pointlessly convoluted plot and held to a sensible 88 minutes." A recommendation from David Jeffers at the Siffblog.

"The Seventh Seal, released 50 years ago when it won the Cannes Jury Prize, marked a turning point in cinema." David Gritten tells its story. Also in the Telegraph, Tim Geary talks with William H Macy about David Mamet.

And Sam Adams has got a DVD roundup in the Philadelphia City Paper.

Posted by dwhudson at July 5, 2007 2:20 PM