Cinema

This June the Criterion Collection released a restored edition of noted French playwright and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol’s famous Marseilles trilogy to Blu-ray, “Marius” (1931), “Fanny” (1932), and “César” (1936).

A year ago the Shout Factory label released the 1961 American remake “Fanny,” which condenses all three into one film and was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Actor, and Color Cinematography.

When movie sound technology finally arrived,…

Read more...

The indefatigable Tom Cruise, still able to carry off youthful mock-insouciance at the age of 55, has plenty of fun as Barry Seal in “American Made.”

Seal, an American pilot who smuggled drugs for the Medellin Cartel and informed and testified for the D.E.A., probably wouldn’t have recognized much of his lived experience in Doug Liman’s entertaining fantasy, but the “true story” epigraphs affixed to feature films allow us to assign plausibility to the implausible.

Cruise’s…

Read more...

Artificial Intelligence, robotic workers, unmanned space travel, fatherless children, and Korean conflicts are all recent hot news topics. In September of 1954 all of these were major themes of a low-budget sci-fi thriller targeted at children but with enough plotting and subtext to keep adults interested (perhaps more so today as a cultural artifact than during its original release as popular entertainment).

Earlier this month Kino-Lorber released “Tobor the Great” to Blu-ray. Also…

Read more...

“Strong Island,” Yance Ford’s vital cinematic elegy to his slain brother, is a gripping documentary presented with control and precision. That careful formality serves both the story and the filmmaker’s underlying thematic questions addressing the absurd but commonplace outcomes of the notion of justifiable homicide and the use of reasonable fear as a means for perpetrators to claim self-defense.

In 1992, Ford’s then 24-year-old sibling, William Ford, Jr., was shot to death by…

Read more...

Rom-coms are a staple of modern movies and have been for well over a century. This summer two very different variations on the genre spotlighting iconic 20th-century superstars made their Blu-ray debuts from Kino-Lorber.

One is a classic updating of a popular 19th-century stage play, the other a wacky cartoon-like sequel to a western comedy musical.

“Zaza” (1923) was a vehicle for popular and rising silent legend Gloria Swanson, directed by prolific and versatile Hollywood veteran…

Read more...

WARNING: The following review reveals plot information. Read only if you have seen “Mother!”

With a tongue-in-cheek exclamation point distinguishing it from the likes of Joon-ho Bong’s superior 2009 film and the more than 180 other movies sharing the title, Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!” offers fair warning to the curious.

Eschewing proper names for characters and saddling them instead with the likes of Penitent, Defiler, Herald, Pilferer, Supplicant, Hewer, Lingerer, and…

Read more...

With 2017 so far one of the lowest summers for movie attendance this century, the year 1946 was perhaps the all-time peak year of movie attendance, with close to 60% of Americans providing 90 million individual ticket sales, according to statistics from “Variety” and other sources. The number two-grossing movie released that year (which actually premiered in late December but played throughout 1947) was producer David O. Selznick’s trouble-plagued “Duel in the Sun.” Its…

Read more...

The snaky production history of the long delayed “Tulip Fever,” detailed most thoroughly in a “Telegraph” article by Adam White, proves more intriguing than the final version of the movie. Wilting in cinemas during a particularly painful Labor Day weekend, the arrestingly photographed period melodrama was at one time expected to attract award season accolades under the careful orchestration of Harvey Weinstein, apparently looking to duplicate some of his “Shakespeare in…

Read more...

The first Academy Award ceremonies were held in 1929 but covered the 1927-28 movie season that began 90 years ago this month. That first year, the Oscars for Best Actor and Actress and a few others covered two or more films the nominee had made, rather than one specific title.

The very first winner for Best Actor was internationally acclaimed character actor Emil Jannings, a major star in Germany since the 1910s, who happened to be making films for Paramount in Hollywood during the late…

Read more...

By Brittney Goodman and Tom Bixby

The Fargo-Moorhead LGBT Film Festival, now in its ninth year, will be showing a variety of LGBT-themed films starting this weekend but with an expanded program this year, September 11-16 with five screenings, each with distinct content.

The Festival “seeks to celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lived experience through the visions of innovative film and video makers. We seek films and videos that enrich, entertain, and encourage a sense of…

Read more...