DVDs, 10/7.

"Despite his commitment to forward-actuated narratives and his characters' ability to move—and fast; they often run—through the world, Jean-Pierre Melville makes meaty films, a cinema of heft." Ryland Walker Knight begins his review of Le Doulos by lining it up against Army of Shadows: "Both films adhere to a delimited set (often trios, sometimes quartets) of masculine characters with little narrative space for women...; both films are 'about' the world's tests for fraternal bonds; both are about failure; both are marked by a curious attention to giveaway interstitials of clocks, of a look up, of walls empty and plentiful, so many things) and inward trajectories where the end game is less fatal than illuminative, however brutal and deliberate the swath carved across desolate earth winds."

Also in the Auteurs' Notebook is Glenn Kenny's "Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report": "The Warner John Ford Collection, a six-picture sampling of films Ford did during his on-off association with RKO and Warner Brothers, spans from 1934's The Lost Patrol to 1964's Cheyenne Autumn. Conspicuous in its absence, though, is Wagon Master, a 1950 effort with the team of Harry Carey Jr and Ben Johnson standing in for the John Wayne figure. So suffused with Sons of the Pioneers music that it sometimes resembles an operetta of sorts, Wagon Master is, per Ford, 'the purest and simplest' Western he ever made."

"From its opening shot - a distant, foggy view of the Chicago skyline, photographed in slow motion from a moving elevated train - Paul Brickman's Risky Business establishes a languid, dreamlike tone that sets it far apart from the other teen sex comedies of the early 1980s," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "Porky's this is not. Mr Brickman's film was and remains a strikingly original combination of biting satire and moody, romantic reverie."

"FW Murnau's 1924 drama The Last Laugh (a new restoration of which is featured in a two-disk set from Kino) may well be the apogee of silent-film production," writes Richard Brody in the New Yorker. "From its small-scale story—the aging head doorman at a grand hotel can no longer lift heavy luggage, is demoted to men's-room attendant, and can't bear the humiliation - Murnau reconstructs an entire city, while making its every detail a reflection of the humble character's inner life. The visual clarity of the new release reveals the extraordinary means by which Murnau united the emotional, political, psychological, and moral domains in his quasi-Biblical yet modern and naturalistic fable."

More from Dave Kehr: "Past readings of The Last Laugh (or Der Letzte Mann, The Last Man, in its German title) have centered on the anti-militaristic implications of [Emil' Jannings's dismissal: stripped of his coat, he is no longer fearsome, but a shuddering, pathetic figure. But a nationalistic reading also seems possible: Jannings is a Germany stripped and humiliated by American and European demands for war reparations, a world leader turned into the political equivalent of a washroom attendant, the job that Jannings is given after his dismissal as doorman."

"This is T.O. Morrow," announces Thom Ryan. The date is Sunday, October 7, 1951. "Today we're going to discuss atomic warfare, the exploration of outer space, flying saucers, and a new science fiction (SF) feature film titled The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). We're going to examine these things as free thinking citizens, perhaps as cinephiles, but not as armchair jesters or water-cooler wiseacres."

Checked the Film Canon recently?

For IFC, Michael Atkinson reviews Boy A, "an honest, empathetic dissection of guilt and criminal justice and the question of how long social persecution must persist for a juvenile crime," and The Unforeseen, which "delivers on the righteous dread that comes when contemplating what's being bulldozed for the sake of millionaires' bank accounts."

James Rocchi on Reprise: "[W]atching it I had one of those rare moviegoing experiences where, by the end of the opening credits, I was completely on board, enthralled, impressed and waiting to find out what happens next."

"The tone and style of Ry Russo-Young's debut feature Orphans might take some getting used to," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "That's a compliment."

"[I]t's hard to make a movie that's both funny and romantic," writes J Robert Parks at Daily Plastic. "But Forgetting Sarah Marshall is able to pull off that winning double."

The release of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour "at long last [offers] an opportunity to see what all the fuss was about," writes Greg Evans in the NYT.

Bogeyman has the Noir of the Week: Road House.

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker, DVD Talk, Ambrose Heron, Peter Martin (Cinematical), Noel Murray (Los Angeles Times), PopMatters and Slant.

Posted by dwhudson at October 7, 2008 2:35 PM