But it’s Ki-woo who pulls his family out of their impoverished life, when he gets an opportunity to tutor Da-hye (Jung Ziso), daughter of the rich Park family. As they reach the point of exhaustion, the expedition leader urges them onward, but despite his harsh commands and insistent pleas, they cannot overcome the urge to succumb to the snow angel who lulls them sleep with her siren song. At times, a teacher or a counselor appear empathetic toward Pixote and his ilk, but what’s Babenco really offering here aside from an overwrought glimpse behind the curtain of absolutely inhuman pain and suffering? . 3. The titular substance takes on a literal, material function in regards to reconstruction, specifically the building of a road around the air force base. Such a story, of an outcast reconciling with society, sounds opposed to the radical interests that Lynch displayed in Eraserhead and would go on to refine in future projects.

. And while Ran may have been a Japanese riff on Shakespeare’s King Lear, the filmmaker certainly also saw echoes of himself in its portrait of an aging leader wrestling with his legacy and his sanity.

Both works explore civilization and its discontents via the microcosm of an apartment complex. The commentary track with co-producer Don Carmody, also moderated by Alexander, is a bit more matter-of-fact, yet still covers a lot of interesting ground. In attempting to bring a gritty realism and distinctly middle-class flavor to the milieu of international spycraft, The Ipcress File directly counters the more fantastical elements of the Bond series and deglamorizes the life and work of an intrepid, continent-hopping secret agent. These two opposing impulses—one to return to “glory days” and the other to flee—drive many of the characters’ behaviors, yet both point to an inability to confront the reasons behind the German peoples’ current state of absolute moral bankruptcy. A team of mountaineers battle a snowstorm in order to recover their base camp. From the opening staccato notes of John Barry’s lilting score, so redolent of his music for the early Bond films, Sidney J. Furie’s The Ipcress File is very much in conversation with the spy franchise that rose to pop-cultural prominence in the early 1960s. “They work so hard inventing things that make people unhappy.” This episode is also the one least marked by artifice: the village looks authentic, and there are no strange effects to be seen anywhere.

In “Sunshine Through the Rain,” young Kurosawa (Mitsunori Isaki) witnesses the forbidden festival of a fox wedding, a legendary event that reputedly only happens during sun showers. This imaginative Japanese production presents a series of short films by lauded director Akira Kurosawa. All of the extras on this Blu-ray release of Pierrot le Fou have been ported over from past Criterion releases of the film. Instead, he defies and heads immediately from this warning to woods. Between these men on the film’s moral spectrum is Treves (Anthony Hopkins), whose own exploitation of Merrick, in terms of displaying the man to medical professionals, is mentioned but largely unexamined. Greg Dunning, son of Cinépix co-founder John Dunning, reminisces about the company’s working relationship with Cronenberg on both Shivers and Rabid, and his father’s preference for putting women in lead roles.

Tensions between the two nationalities are unsurprisingly high, but it’s the infighting between the Germans, who are involved in everything from pimping to embezzlement, that causes the most damage in Käutner’s intense crime drama. Dreams’ roots in Noh are also evinced in its pointed artificiality. Kurosawa had wanted to be a painter in his early years but gave up on the idea after realizing that he didn’t have, as he puts it in his memoir, “a completely personal, distinctive way of looking at things.” The director recalls that looking at a painting by Paul Cézanne or Van Gogh would momentarily “change the way the real world looked to me”—which, come to think of it, could be a concise summation of the story of “Crows.”. Parker is captured and handed over to two British hit men, who constitute your somewhat stereotypically mismatched pair: experienced, hardened killer Braddock (John Hurt) and overeager tyro Myron (Tim Roth). Scratches are evident from time to time, but the damage is relatively minor and typically visible for only a few seconds at a time. After those bloodred skies, and comically huge plants, and larger-than-life brushstrokes, we are now finally in the realm of the real. and asks to be told the story associated with the place,” Serper explains. At just 65 minutes, The Shakedown moves as swiftly as a well-trained boxer, and while the director would certainly go on to make better films, this early silent effort displays a keen understanding of the medium and the ability to wring genuine emotion and excitement out of wholly mediocre material. Dreams (夢, Yume, aka Akira Kurosawa's Dreams) is a 1990 Japanese-American magical realist film of eight vignettes written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The platoon commander confesses his despair over sending them to die in combat, and the guilt that torments his days as the sole survivor of the battle. A gorgeous and painterly late-period masterwork, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams gets a stellar 4K transfer and a surfeit of extras from Criterion. Sure enough, once the couple gets past a few murders loosely connected with Marianne’s apparent associations with organized crime, and Ferdinand settles into a Robinson Crusoe-by-way-of-Holden Caulfield lifestyle along a stretch of the French Rivera not a half-mile down from the tourist hotels, the allure of escape begins to fade.

Ferdinand tries to devote himself to the lost art of reading, but sneaks into movies (sitting behind Jean-Pierre Léaud), and Marianne insists they move onto their next adventure, preferably one with a little bit more connection with the material world that previously provided her with so many enjoyable 45s. Some of my favorite directors of all time are Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, and of course Akira Kurosawa.. Utilizing an entire stable of visual tricks, from split-screens to slow- and fast-motion to rhythmically repeated inserts, these early moments are an exciting and purely cinematic experience. "(1990, The Interpretation of Dreams).Kurosawa's dream is extremely potent on not only symbolism, a young boy who represents innocence, and an archetypal relationship between mother and son in which she tries to protect him. The film was screened out of competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, and t… Whether the film is in the midst of depicting murder, tragedy, or revolution—and Lucía abounds in depictions of all three—Solas directs with a focused fury seldom seen in the annals of cinema; he constructs indelible images of beauty and rage with an intensity that’s wild-eyed but simultaneously grounded in the specificity of each era. His guilt and their relationship does not seem to be in a favorable place when the curtain is drawn on this dream. In an entertaining 20-minute archival interview, Michael Caine talks about his outrageous first day on the set when Furie burnt a copy of the script in front of him, deciding to have the film rewritten as they shot. True to the iconoclastic genre cinema of the 1970s, Shivers ends not with the restoration of moral order, but with the newly converted setting out to inaugurate an entirely new order, one that unabashedly embraces the “other” in all its manifestations. The extras are composed mostly of archive material ranging from the 1980s to the early 2000s, including various interviews over the years with actor John Hurt, producer Jonathan Sanger, make-up artist Christopher Tucker, producer Mel Brooks, cinematographer Freddie Francis, and stills photographer Frank Connor. Like Dijbril Diop Mambéty’s subsequent Touki Bouki, Soleil Ô is a tour de force of intellectual and cinematic daring. But counterintuitively, these unreal effects are disquieting. It's bright, yet pouring. Thing is, both camps are sort of right. I arrives in an idyllic village and speaks to a 103-year-old man (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu), who tells him they have abandoned the conveniences of the modern world—that they use no electricity, and burn wood only from trees that have fallen on their own. The 2.0 English LPCM track, which was redone for this edition to recapture lost nuances, is flawless to these ears, especially tending to Lynch’s longtime obsession with the heavy, enslaving, weirdly reassuring sounds of industrial machines chugging away. For this Blu-ray release of The Shakedown, Kino Lorber has sourced Universal’s recent 4K restoration of the film from a 35mm duplicate negative. Two monks (Víctor Urruchúa and Carlos Villatoro) offer their recollections of murder and betrayal to an objective listener, and as their shared past is recounted twice, once from the point of view of each man, the comparisons to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashoman are inevitable; the dialogue exchanges between the monks help to articulate how pride and personal vendettas make constructing truthful histories next to impossible. Ironically enough, at young Kurosawa's fate rests at the end of a rianbow which in western culture is where people often assimilate riches to be found. In writing about 1965’s Alphaville, Gebert wrote that Jean-Luc Godard “was exciting when either you or the whole world was 20.” I’d push the age up at least another decade, but there’s certainly some truth in that notion, and the maxim applied most notably to Godard himself. Given the importance of these restorations, it’s difficult not to be at least a little disappointed with the slim supplements. Lynch, who himself has an exploitive streak, exhibits remarkable tact and delicacy in The Elephant Man. Screen Reader Users: To optimize your experience with your screen reading software, please use our Flixster.com website, which has the same tickets as our Fandango.com and MovieTickets.com websites. Criterion presents Pierrot le Fou in a new 2K restoration that’s a few notches above their already excellent—and long out-of-print—2009 release in terms of color saturation and the clarity of fine details. Pavese, who committed suicide in 1950, emphasized throughout his writings man’s inherent isolation and alienation, and frequently treated the motif of betrayal—themes that are just as germane to Frears’s film. Raoul Coutard’s ravishing Techniscope cinematography looks livelier than ever. The extras are rounded out by five minutes of behind-the-scenes footage. As Kurosawa’s biographer Stuart Galbraith IV notes, this seems more like something from the life of the director’s close friend Ishiro Honda, the famed director of Godzilla and other monster movies, who carries a “creative consultant” credit on Dreams—and one of whose unrealized projects was a film about the ghost of a soldier returning from war.