DVDs, 12/4.

"Ever since its inception as a fan-oriented tape trading collective (back in the late 80s/early 90s) [Something Weird Video] has marched to its own dare to be bare drummer." And now, PopMatters' Bill Gibron bids a fond farewell.

Filmbrain announces the next release coming from Benten Films: Quiet City and Dance Party, USA: Two Films by Aaron Katz.

"A semi-secret, anxiety-cranked daydream movie released briefly to a few American cities in 2005, and one of the most original French films of the decade, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence (2004) is pure code, metaphor and mystery, and at the same it's seethingly tangible," writes Michael Atkinson. "[T]he movie feels genuinely sui generis, a verdant, ambiguous reverie on childhood, consciousness and oppression." Also, Drunken Angel, "a rarely seen classic of the Japanese postwar era, which is distinctive in world cinema as out-noiring noir."

Also at IFC News: "There's no safer present for the cinephile in your life than a DVD box set — even (or especially) if that cinephile is you," write Matt Singer and Alison Willmore. "Here are our picks of some of 2007's most covetable collections."

"The Lady Vanishes represents a major turning point in Hitchcock's career, and not just because it was the last film he made before producer David Selznick lured him to Hollywood in 1939," writes Nathaniel Rich. "The film displays the best qualities of his British career - immaculate timing, delicacy, and danger - but here Hitchcock delves more deeply than ever before into the anxieties and secret terrors of prewar English society. By doing so, the film provided a template to which Hitchcock often returned in his American masterpieces, revisiting the same narrative strategies in increasingly devious and innovative ways." Also in Slate, a slide show essay from Juliet Lapidos, "The Man Who Did It All."

"Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth is a love song to the beauty of city streets at nights," writes Ed Howard. "It's also a love song about conversation, and storytelling, and the collisions (fortuitous or ugly) of strangers that make up the fabric of the urban landscape."

"Killer of Sheep presents people the movies haven't found," writes Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe:

Wasn't that the guilty Beltway shock after Hurricane Katrina? We didn't know these people were there. (The rapturous critical response to the movie last spring has led the professionally combative critic Armond White, in the DVD's liner notes, to accuse the film's enthusiasts of "do-gooder condescension.") Obviously, [Charles] Burnett's movie is pre-Katrina yet post-Watts riots, post-Raisin in the Sun, post-"I'm Black and I'm Proud," post-Black Power, post-jive, and anti-pity, anti-empty uplift, anti-blaxploitation. It unfolds in a limbo of urban progress and upward mobility.

Via Movie City News.

For the Observer's Philip French, Sansho the Bailiff "is a heartbreaking story, tragic, unsentimental, but suffused with a belief in the ability of decency and dignity to survive under the most terrible circumstances."

"Nowadays, some consider Baby Doll a classic, others a disappointment or even an embarrassment," writes Kathy Fennesy at the Siffblog. "To me, it's none of those things. Rather, it plays more like parody - self-parody (specifically of Kazan's previous Williams adaptation, A Streetcar Named Desire), Tennessee Williams in general (his first script combines two one-act plays), the Actors Studio (from which the core trio originated), and the Deep South (though the cast denies it)."

"Behold a Pale Horse is Fred Zinnemann's most visually accomplished film," writes Peter Nellhaus.

Peter Sobczynski has a huge DVD roundup over at Hollywood Bitchslap.

Joe Leydon calls out to Warner Home Video: Give us a DVD release for Claude Lelouch's Les Miserables!

DVD Roundups: Bryant Frazer; Susan King in the Los Angeles Times; and Peter Martin at Cinematical.

"The DVD businesses, one of the movie industry's biggest sources of profits, is expected to post a year-over-year sales decline for the first time since the format's rise a decade ago," reports Brian Garrity for the New York Post. "The DVD drop isn't unexpected. Some analysts at the end of last year were forecasting a 2007 decline due to saturation, advances in technology like video-on-demand, Internet downloading and growing competition from entertainment like video games."

Posted by dwhudson at December 4, 2007 1:32 PM