DVDs, 7/11.

"Digging into the murky depths of the United Artists film library, MGM Home Entertainment has come up with four significant films noirs, all independent productions released in the 40s and 50s." In the New York Times, Dave Kehr reviews Kansas City Confidential, directed by Phil Karlson and starring John Payne, "a popular crooner of the 40s who was working his way down from Technicolor musicals at 20th Century Fox"; Fritz Lang's "slow-moving, deliberately morose" Woman in the Window; The Stranger, which "may be Welles's most explicitly political work, made at a time when his activism was at its height"; and Lewis Allen's "minor but enjoyable" Bullet for Joey warrants a passing mention. Related: Vince Keenan from Noir City: "Phil Karlson is a treasured name among noir aficionados because he made spare, no-nonsense films."

"As one of the key members of the informal Japanese New Wave of the 1960s, Masahiro Shinoda was a youthful survivor of World War II, an event that so marked his psyche, he has been attempting to understand his country's national character ever since." So begins the first half of Doug Cummings's essay on Silence, the latest release in the Masters of Cinema series.

MS Smith has been watching Ozu lately: "The End of Summer, as the title implies, is about the inevitability of change, the temptation to resist it, and the fading of tradition and the onset of modernity."

"Call it art film nostalgia, but every newly forgotten, newly resurrected "classic" from the post-Truman era of international cinema still looks as bold, brave and original as the next, and is often more telling and pertinent than the frequently lugubrious art films of today," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "The new Criterion box of films by Japanese modernist Hiroshi Teshigahara proves the point, and not just with the justly hallowed, yet today mostly forgotten Woman in the Dunes (1964)."

Also: "Missing Victor Pellerin isn't a hoax, or a documentary, or a mockumentary - it's something for which we have no proper name, a kind of speculative tale told in non-fiction form, like a Borges story. Maybe."

In the Voice, Nathan Lee tops a DVD round up with a list of the five best of this week's releases.

"My mother refers cynically to A Dry White Season as 'Hollywood does Apartheid,' and at times it does feel like a sort of cinematic SparkNotes, checking off the key themes of the apartheid years in South Africa one by one," writes Eve Holland at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "But there are other times when the film moves beyond the bullet-point presentation of information, and manages instead to powerfully recreate the attitudes and harsh realities of the time. It is particularly strong in its depiction of the whites who sustained, and benefited from, the regime."

Marking the 25th anniversary of Tron, Scott Kirsner chats with director Steven Lisberger.

Another roundup: Cinema Strikes Back.

Posted by dwhudson at July 11, 2007 3:14 PM