The Criterion Current

The Original Piece of Wood I Left in Your Head

2012-05-15T11:19:38-04:00

Circumlocutory critic Perkus Tooth sits down with a very patient Spike Jonze to talk gerunds and colons.

Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich

2012-05-14T12:50:13-04:00

What’s Happening on Hulu

2012-05-14T12:02:42-04:00

With this week’s Criterion festival of free films on Hulu Plus, we pay tribute to French cinema’s great matinee idol, the legendary Jean Gabin. He excelled at embodying unflappable everymen caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Whether he’s playing a petty criminal eluding the law in classics like his breakout, Jean Duvivier’s Pépé le moko, or Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths; a conflicted working-class hero in Renoir’s Zola adaptation La bête humaine; or the Moulin Rouge’s debonair, no-nonsense impresario in Renoir’s glorious French Cancan, Gabin is never less than compelling—rarely do your eyes stray to anyone else when he’s on-screen. The rarest film on offer is Jean Grémillon’s Remorques, an emotionally devastating work of poetic realism that will be available in July for the first time on DVD in the U.S., as part of our thirty-fourth Eclipse series, Jean Grémillon During the Occupation. See it first, below or at Hulu. And to watch the hundreds of other Criterion films at Hulu Plus, sign up for just $7.99 a month.

Did You See This?

2012-05-11T15:38:15-04:00

• Robert Pattinson is crazy for Cronenberg

• Wim Wenders’s strange and quiet places

• Vidal Sassoon, a cut above

From the Eclipse Shelf: The Ascent

2012-05-11T14:06:12-04:00

We spread the word about Larisa Shepitko, one of the true visionaries of Soviet cinema, when we released two of her incredible films in 2008, but she remains an under-the-radar figure for most movie lovers. By 1979, when she was tragically killed in a car accident at the age of forty, Shepitko had already built up an impressive oeuvre. Probably her most staggering accomplishment, though, is her last film, 1977’s The Ascent, is a frightening vision of World War II that’s at once visceral and numinous.

Shepitko conceived of this very dark film during some of her grimmest days: she was pregnant with her son, and a serious spine injury had made her condition life-threatening. She funneled her morbid thoughts into The Ascent, a brutal and brilliantly made morality tale that follows two Belorussian peasant soldiers—the angelic Sotnikov and the more self-interested, weak-willed Rybak—on the run from occupying Nazi forces. It’s a work of startling violence and hushed spirituality, sometimes within the same scene. In the following sequence, in which Sotnikov and Rybak try to elude capture by hiding out in a widow’s attic, Shepitko also establishes her mastery of space and cinematic suspense.

Three Reasons: The Gold Rush

2012-05-10T12:03:31-04:00

Repertory Pick: A Grand Return

2012-05-10T12:10:57-04:00

Orson Welles once said, “If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be Grand Illusion.” Thankfully he wouldn’t have had to worry, as the film world continues to treasure Jean Renoir’s mega-classic. This week in New York, years after its famed late-nineties restoration, the movie returns, with more restoration done digitally by STUDIOCANAL and the Cinémathèque de Toulouse for its seventy-fifth anniversary. This new 35 mm print from Rialto Pictures promises to be the most vivid version yet seen, and features a major audio restoration as well, plus new subtitles. Film Forum will show the rejuvenated masterpiece May 11–May 24.

Preservation efforts aside, to revisit Renoir’s overwhelming work of compassion in wartime is to fall back in love with screenwriters Renoir and Charles Spaak’s eloquently drawn characters: Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay’s socially opposed POW French officers; their antagonist, the Teutonic officer Captain von Rauffenstein, played by Erich von Stroheim; Marcel Dalio’s generous Jewish fellow captive; Dita Parlo’s good-hearted German farm widow. Here’s Rialto’s new trailer for the film to reacquaint you with Renoir’s beautiful souls.

Personal Jesus

2012-04-06T15:43:26-04:00

The valiant, frail honesty of Jesus as portrayed by Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ is what’s missing from nearly every other screen Messiah.

La haine: Images from the Outskirts

2012-05-08T12:20:05-04:00

“A Metaphor for Our World”

2012-05-07T18:28:02-04:00

Z director Costa-Gavras’s thoughts on La haine.