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Culver City, Calif. – Celebrate 100 years of Columbia Pictures and complete your Columbia Classics collection as Sony Pictures Home Entertainment proudly debuts six more iconic films from its library on 4K Ultra HD disc for the first time ever, exclusively within the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 5, available October 1. This must-own set includes a variety of powerful and moving award-winning favorites: All The King’S Men, On The Waterfront, A Man For All Seasons, Tootsie, The Age Of Innocence and Little Women (2019). Each film is presented in 4K resolution with Dolby Vision High Dynamic Range, and five of the films include immersive Dolby Atmos mixes.

The six films in the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 5 are only available on 4K Ultra HD disc within this special limited edition collector’s set. Included with the collection is a gorgeous hardbound 80-page book, featuring in-depth sections about the making of...

Lewis John Carlino’s family-oriented Mafia tale was filmed four years before The Godfather: Kirk Douglas is a loose-cannon capo who bosses his own brother Alex Cord and won’t listen when his fellow kingpins talk about modernization. Irene Papas and Susan Strasberg are married to the mob, while veteran hoods Luther Adler and Eduardo Ciannelli provide the menacing atmosphere. Director Martin Ritt was supposedly not thrilled with the project yet it’s a polished, involving crime-time drama set both in New York City and Palermo, Sicily.

The Brotherhood

Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] #119

1968 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 96 min. / Street Date April 27, 2022 / Available from / £34.95

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Alex Cord, Irene Papas, Luther Adler, Susan Strasberg, Murray Hamilton, Eduardo Ciannelli, Joe De Santis, Connie Scott, Val Avery, Val Bisoglio, Alan Hewitt, Barry Primus, Michele Cimarosa, Louis Badolati.

Cinematography: Boris Kaufman

Art Director: Tambi Larsen

Film Editor: Frank Bracht

Original Music: Lalo Schifrin

Written...

Baby Doll

Blu ray

Warner Archive

1956 / 1.85:1 / 114 min.

Starring Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach

Cinematography by Boris Kaufman

Directed by Elia Kazan

Depraved, degenerate, and dreadfully funny, the genre known as Southern Gothic blurred the line between humor and horror and helped define the work of artists like William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Tennessee Williams. Depending on who you talked to, the experience was either a bracing walk on the wild side or freak show sensationalism. Poetry or not, books like Sanctuary and Reflections in a Golden Eye were catnip to thrill-hungry Hollywood execs who gobbled up the rights and, true to form, removed the raw carnality that made the original stories so… stimulating. That wasn’t the case with Williams’ screenplay for 1957’s Baby Doll—though its Rabelaisian spirit made it one of the most controversial and widely condemned events in movie history, the driving force behind Elia...

From "Modern Lusts," Berghahn 2020, 340PPErnest Borneman not only wrote the greatest detective novel set in the movie-business, with one of the best titles, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor (1937), but was also a screenwriter, editor, producer, distributor and director who worked closely with two cinema colossi, John Grierson and Orson Welles. He was also a painter, musician, revered jazz critic and historian of African-American life, a radical agitator and sexologist whose stated aim was to destroy the patriarchy. Modern Lusts, the first biography of this protean polymath, reveals a man who did everything, knew everyone, and remained in the forefront of avant-garde art and politics, Black liberation and sexual freedom, like some ultra-woke Zelig. Never in the field of human culture was so much done, so many met, now known to so few.Born in Berlin in 1915, Borneman attended Karl Marx school and by 15 had met Brecht, with whom he collaborated over the decades,...

It’s that time again! Yes folks, welcome back to another recurring series of mine. Which one is this? Well, the title of the piece is kind of self explanatory. However, I’ll reiterate what I’ve previously said before, in case you’re new to it: for this weekly series I’m going to be running down the top 25 Oscar winners in just about all of the categories. Aside from the shorts and possibly something like Best Sound Editing or Best Sound Mixing (though I might add those in this year), I’ll be hitting them all, including of course the big eight categories. For starters though, I figured I’d go with one of the most highly regarded of the technical categories…Best Cinematography. Depending on the category, I may discuss the individual winners I’m citing specifically or just sort of give a broad overview of the winners,...

Marlon Brando is back in an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play Orpheus Descending. The cameraman is Boris Kaufman and the director is Sidney Lumet; Marlon’s a classic tomcat drifter in a dangerous parish, who attracts two women. Acting styles mesh, or mix without blending — Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward each get opportunities to shine. It’s all poetics and symbolism — dig the snakeskin jacket! — in a fairly realistic setting.

The Fugitive Kind

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 515

1960 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 121 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 14, 2020 / 39.95

Starring: Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, Maureen Stapleton, Victor Jory, R.G. Armstrong.

Cinematography: Boris Kaufman

Film Editor: Carl Lerner

Original Music: Kenyon Hopkins

Written by Meade Roberts, Tennessee Williams from his play Orpheus Descending

Produced by Martin Jurow, Richard Shepherd

Directed by Sidney Lumet

Tennessee Williams sometimes seemed a continuation of William Faulkner’s literary legacy. This story’s...

Welcome back to another recurring series of mine. Which one is this? Well, the title of the piece is kind of self explanatory. But I’ll reiterate what I’ve previously said before: for this weekly series I’m going to be doing surrounds the top 25 Oscar winners in just about all of the categories. Aside from the shorts and something like Best Sound Mixing, I’ll be hitting them all, including of course the big eight categories. For starters though, I figured I’d go with one of the most highly regarded of the technical categories…Best Cinematography. Depending on the category, I may discuss the individual winners I’m citing specifically or just sort of give a broad overview of the winners, but for now, I’ll keep it simple. Honestly though, you all mostly want to see the list anyway, so I have no problem obliging you there.

In celebration of its 100th anniversary, the American Society of Cinematographers has released a list of the 100 best shot films of the 20th century.

This list was released to "showcase the best of cinematography as selected by professional cinematographers.” Here's how the list was put together:

The process of cultivating the 100 films began with Asc members each submitting 10 to 25 titles that were personally inspirational or perhaps changed the way they approached their craft. “I asked them — as cinematographers, members of the Asc, artists, filmmakers and people who love film and whose lives were shaped by films — to list the films that were most influential,” Fierberg explains. A master list was then complied, and members voted on what they considered to be the most essential 100 titles.

Here's a little sizzle reel that was cut together showcasing some of the films on the list:

It's hard to argue with the Top 10 films,...

Stars: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Martin Balsam, Ed Begley, Jack Warden | Written by Reginald Rose | Directed by Sidney Lumet

It’s the hottest day of the year and a dozen men – not universally perturbed at this point – are put in a room and asked to consider the guilt of a young man accused of killing his father. It’s premeditated murder in the first degree and the sentence is death. The jury takes their first vote and it’s unanimous. Almost.

Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) is the sole dissenting voice. It’s not that he believes the kid did not do it; he’s just not sure. Over the next 90 real-time minutes, #8 will test his doubts against the others, to understand whether or not those doubts are reasonable.

12 Angry Men began life as a teleplay. Written by Reginald Rose (inspired by his own experiences as a juror...

An experimental film by an Irish playwright, shot in New York with a silent comedian at the twilight of his career? Samuel Beckett’s inquiry into the nature of movies (and existence?) befuddled viewers not versed in film theory; Ross Lipman’s retrospective documentary about its making asks all the questions and gets some good answers.

First there’s the film itself, called just Film from 1965. By that year our high school textbooks had already enshrined Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a key item for introducing kids to modern theater, existentialism, etc. … the California school system was pretty progressive in those days. But Beckett had a yen to say something in the film medium, and his publisher Barney Rosset helped him put a movie together. The Milestone Cinematheque presents the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s restoration of Film on its own disc, accompanied by a videotaped TV production...

This past weekend, the American Society of Cinematographers awarded Greig Fraser for his contribution to Lion as last year’s greatest accomplishment in the field. Of course, his achievement was just a small sampling of the fantastic work from directors of photography, but it did give us a stronger hint at what may be the winner on Oscar night. Ahead of the ceremony, we have a new video compilation that honors all the past winners in the category at the Academy Awards

Created by Burger Fiction, it spans the stunning silent landmark Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans all the way up to the end of Emmanuel Lubezki‘s three-peat win for The Revenant. Aside from the advancements in color and aspect ration, it’s a thrill to see some of cinema’s most iconic shots side-by-side. However, the best way to experience the evolution of the craft is by...

Is this Rod Serling's best teleplay ever? Van Heflin, Everett Sloane and Ed Begley are at the center of a business power squeeze. Is it all about staying competitive, or is it corporate murder? With terrific early performances from Elizabeth Wilson and Beatrice Straight. Patterns Blu-ray The Film Detective 1956 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 83 min. / Street Date September 27, 2016 / 14.99 Starring Van Heflin, Everett Sloane, Ed Begley, Beatrice Straight, Elizabeth Wilson, Joanna Roos, Valerie Cossart, Eleni Kiamos, Ronnie Welsh, Shirley Standlee, Andrew Duggan, Jack Livesy, John Seymour, James Kelly, John Shelly, Victor Harrison, Sally Gracie, Sally Chamberlin, Edward Binns, Lauren Bacall, Ethel Britton, Michael Dreyfuss, Elaine Kaye, Adrienne Moore. Cinematography Boris Kaufman Film Editors Dave Kummis, Carl Lerner Art Direction Richard Sylbert Assistant Director Charles Maguire Written by Rod Serling Produced by Michael Myerberg Directed by Fielder Cook

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Let me roll off the titles of some 'fifties 'organization...

Troubling fact: the great director Otto Preminger's worst film is not Skidoo. Three physical misfits form an alternative family as a defense against the world. It's a good idea for a movie, but the writer and director do just about everything wrong that a writer and director can do. Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon Blu-ray Olive Films 1970 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 113 min. / Street Date August 16, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98 Starring Liza Minnelli, Ken Howard, Robert Moore, James Coco, Kay Thompson, Fred Williamson, Anne Revere, Pete Seeger, Pacific Gas & Electric, Ben Piazza, Emily Yancy, Leonard Frey, Clarice Taylor, Julie Bovasso, Barbara Logan, Nancy Marchand, Angelique Pettyjohn. Cinematography Boris Kaufman, Stanley Cortez Production Design Lyle R. Wheeler Charles Schramm Makeup effects Charles Schramm Film Editors Dean Ball, Henry Berman Original Music Philip Springer Written by Marjorie Kellogg from her novel Produced and Directed by Otto Preminger

Reviewed...

Notfilm screens this Friday through Sunday (July 22nd-24th) at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 E. Lockwood, Webster Groves, Mo 63119). The film begins each evening at 8:00.

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, titleless avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

April 9th will mark the four year anniversary of director Sidney Lumet's passing, at age 86. Lumet was the first director I interviewed whose one-sheet posters hung on my wall as a kid. He was an idol, an icon, and an inspiration. I wasn't yet 30 in April 1997, when I met him at The Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills for our interview at the press junket for "Night Falls On Manhattan," one of his solid, authentic urban dramas that blended crime, politics and personal revelations that became his signature.

Lumet immediately put any butterflies I had at ease. Diminutive, but with the infectious energy of a teenager, his was a disarming presence. He paid me a compliment on my sportcoat, saying that I looked a bit like the young Mickey Rourke (which I still don't see, but what the hell), then went on to regale me for an hour with...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: April 22, 2014

Price: DVD $24.95, Blu-ray $29.95

Studio: Olive Films

Rod Steiger is The Pawnbroker.

Rod Steiger (On the Waterfront) earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance in the classic 1964 drama The Pawnbroker, directed by the great Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Network).

Steiger plays Sol Nazerman, a survivor of a WWII Nazi death camp where his wife, parents and children were murdered. His soul robbed of hope, he takes refuge in misery and a bitter condemnation of humanity while managing a Harlem pawnshop subjected to an endless parade of prostitutes, pimps and thieves.

The film co-stars Geraldine Fitzgerald (Wuthering Heights), Brock Peters (To Kill a Mockingbird), Raymond St. Jacques (Cotton Comes to Harlem) and.Jamie Sanchez (The Wild Bunch).

Shot in gorgeous black-and-white by respected cinematographer Boris Kaufman (On the Waterfront) and featuring a memorably evocative trumpet score by Quincy Jones, The Pawnbroker is making its Blu-ray...

Hollywood News Network: Another new weekly series I’m going to be doing surrounds the top 25 Oscar winners in just about all of the categories. Aside from the shorts and something like Best Sound Mixing, I’ll be hitting them all, including of course the big eight categories. For starters though, I figured I’d go with one of the most highly regarded of the technical categories…Best Cinematography. Depending on the category, I may discuss the individual winners I’m citing specifically or just sort of give a broad overview of the winners, but for now, I’ll keep it simple. Honestly though, you all mostly want to see the list anyway, so I have no problem obliging you there. Just be patient over the next few paragraphs… There are few categories more overtly artistic than this one, though the category has undergone some major changes over the decades.

Buster Keaton appeared in some very weird movies following the advent of sound pictures. There’s that Mexican sci-fi comedy Boom in the Moon I mentioned on Fsr a while back. There’s the Eastman Kodak industrial film The Triumph of Lester Snapwell, in which he plays a clumsy photographer who travels through time so he can experience an easy-use Instamatic camera. And of course all those crazy ’60s beach movies, where he performed silly slapstick involving bikinis, boobs and a politically incorrect portrayal of a Native American. But his oddest has to be Film, the 1965 short he reluctantly starred in, which was scripted by absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett (his only original written directly for the screen), helmed by theatre director Alan Schneider, produced by controversial publisher Barney Rosset, edited by Oscar-nominated documentarian Sidney Meyers (The Quiet One; The Savage Eye) and shot by legendary cinematographer Boris Kaufman (L’Atalante; On the Waterfront). Almost 50 years since its...

Cinema, as Jean-Luc Godard wrote, is truth 24 times a second. Documentaries both prove and disprove the point; but the truth is their strongest weapon. Here, Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best

• Top 10 arthouse movies

• Top 10 family movies

• Top 10 war movies

• Top 10 teen movies

• Top 10 superhero movies

• Top 10 westerns

• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s

10. Man With a Movie Camera

To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium...

Samuel Beckett made one motion picture, the short, almost-silent avant-garde film, "Film," starring Buster Keaton. In 1964, Beckett travelled to America for his first and only visit -- to undertake the ambitious project. Theater director Alan Schneider, publisher Barney Rosset and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman worked on the notoriously difficult production, which was riddled with problems from the start. Beckett and Keaton disagreed about the film from early on and shooting during the hottest days of summer only exacerbated tension on the set.  While working on the restoration of "Film," archivist Ross Lipman visited Rosset and discovered reels of film and audio that had been under Rosset's sink for decades-- including the legendary first scene, which had been cut from the film. "Two weeks or so before the production, Alan Schneider, Barney Rosset and Samuel Beckett decided to have a production meeting. Barney recorded it. This is a pretty incredible find,...

Elitist and pretentious, or an endangered species? Whatever your feelings, there's no doubt that arthouse movies are among the finest ever made. Here the Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best

• Top 10 romantic movies

• Top 10 action movies

• Top 10 comedy movies

• Top 10 horror movies

• Top 10 sci-fi movies

• Top 10 crime movies

Peter Bradshaw on art movies

This is a red rag to a number of different bulls. Lovers of what are called arthouse movies resent the label for being derisive and philistine. And those who detest it bristle at the implication that there is no artistry or intelligence in mainstream entertainment.

For many, the stereotypical arthouse film is Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was a classic art film from the 1920s and Luis Buñuel investigated cinema's potential for surreality like no one before or since. The Italian neorealists applied the severity of art to a representation...

Baby Doll

Directed by Elia Kazan

Written by Tennessee Williams

1956, USA

Two of Tennessee Williams’ one-act plays – Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton and The Long Stay Cut Short – are the basis for Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll. The film stars Karl Malden as a sexually frustrated, dimwitted, middle-aged owner of a Southern cotton gin, and Carroll Baker (in her debut) as his luscious teenage-trophy wife, who desperately holds on to her virginity until she reaches the age of 20. Her nickname is “Baby Doll” – appropriate, since she sleeps alone in a baby crib, sucking her thumb and wearing only a short nightie, as her husband Archie spies on her through a hole in the wall. Eli Wallach (also making his first big screen appearance) shows up as a a shady Sicilian businessman named Silva Vacarro, who takes advantage of Archie’s troubles and tries to claim Baby Doll as “compensation” for...

Sight & Sound magazine has announced the results of its latest critics' poll to decide the greatest film of all time. Philip French charts the history of the poll

In the early 1950s, the British Film Institute was transformed by Denis Forman and Gavin Lambert. Forman was appointed director of the BFI in 1948, and one year later, he invited Lambert to edit what Lambert recalled as "the institute's terminally boring magazine Sight & Sound and bring it back to life". Both left the institute in 1955, Forman to help create Granada TV, Lambert to become a Hollywood screenwriter and novelist, and by then the National Film Theatre had been established on the South Bank, and Sight & Sound had become one of the world's pre-eminent film journals.

Among Lambert's innovations was a worldwide poll of critics to vote each decade on the top 10 films of all time, an immense undertaking that utilises the resources...

(Jean Vigo, 1930-34, PG, Artificial Eye)

One of France's most revered film-makers, his father an anarchist murdered in jail during the first world war, Vigo died of leukaemia in 1934 at the age of 29. He left behind an oddly attractive short featuring the French swimming champion Jean Taris and three masterpieces: the silent, satirical portrait of life on the Côte d'Azur À propos de Nice (1930); Zéro de conduite (1933), a surreal comedy about a revolt in a horrendous boarding school; and above all L'Atalante (1934), which he didn't live to see in its complete version.

L'Atalante is a beguiling, truthful love story about the ups and downs of the marriage between a young man and the country girl (the beautiful Dita Parlo) he brings to live with him on the barge he plies on the Seine with a cranky old seafarer (the great Michel Simon). Inventive, poetic, funny and deeply moving, it's magnificently...

Completed by the 29-year-old genius, a true poet of the cinema, shortly before his premature death, this sublime masterpiece represents more than half his total oeuvre (the rest is constituted by the surreal documentary A propos de Nice and the anarchic fable of boarding-school life Zéro de conduite). Its simple tale focuses on the marital problems of a French bargee and his young provincial wife, and there's an unforgettable performance from Michel Simon as an eccentric seafarer. The glowing monochrome photography is the work of the Polish-born Boris Kaufman, who shot all Vigo's pictures. Later, as an independent cameraman in New York, he won an Oscar for On the Waterfront and lit 12 Angry Men.

DramaWorld cinemaPhilip French

guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds...

Jean Vigo's sole feature-length film is a masterpiece of sophistication, technique and human feeling

Jean Vigo achieved a mature masterpiece with this movie, his only full-length feature film, made in 1934 just before his death at the age of 29, now in a restored version. Combining simplicity and delicacy with enormous sophistication and technique, it is an urban pastoral that to an extraordinary degree inspires love – both love for the film and love generally. Dita Parlo is Juliette, who marries Jean (Jean Dasté), a barge captain. For their honeymoon, they will go on a journey on his craft, L'Atalante. The boat is somehow both cramped and yet as unexpectedly capacious as a haunted house. They are joined by the eccentric seadog Père Jules (Michel Simon). Juliette and Jean's relationship almost founders entirely, and yet this expedition cannot quite be reduced to a metaphor for love's pilgrimage. It is too playful, anarchic,...

Chicago – Few films from the ’50s have held up quite as remarkably as “12 Angry Men.” It’s a human drama that’s constantly being remade, re-told, and even re-imagined into other stories. What is it about this one-room story that has such timeless power? Why has it survived generations, working as much today as it did 54 years ago? Does anyone think it won’t have the same power 54 years from now?

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0

The story of “12 Angry Men” was originally told on television as a part of a dramatic movie series in 1955 and, in typically awesome Criterion fashion, the entire TV movie is included here. As detailed in the excellent production history featurettes on the Criterion version, this instant classic wasn’t expected to have much an impact. They hired a rookie director in Sidney Lumet and essentially lucked into one of the best debuts of all time. So many...

Next month, a new sitcom called "Work It," about two out-of-work salesmen who dress up as women to get jobs, will make its debut on ABC. There's nothing new about the premise -- Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari covered the same ground on the early-80s sitcom "Bosom Buddies" -- and the tone isn't exactly novel either. The stars of the show, Ben Koldyke and Amaury Nolasco, are operating in the prevailing frat-boy mode perfected by Bradley Cooper and Seann William Scott.

In May, an 84-second trailer of "Work It" hit the Internet, instantly attracting more blogger rage than most shows accumulate over the course of several seasons. Gobsmacked by the very fact that "This got made! And is going to series!", The Futon Critic lambasted the show's "limp attempts at misogyny," "groan worthy madcappery" and "Mrs. Doubtfire hijinx."

The Best Week Ever blog took special umbrage at the network's...

Next month, a new sitcom called "Work It," about two out-of-work salesmen who dress up as women to get jobs, will make its debut on ABC. There's nothing new about the premise -- Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari covered the same ground on the early-80s sitcom "Bosom Buddies" -- and the tone isn't exactly novel either. The stars of the show, Ben Koldyke and Amaury Nolasco, are operating in the prevailing frat-boy mode perfected by Bradley Cooper and Seann William Scott.

In May, an 84-second trailer of "Work It" hit the Internet, instantly attracting more blogger rage than most shows accumulate over the course of several seasons. Gobsmacked by the very fact that "This got made! And is going to series!", The Futon Critic lambasted the show's "limp attempts at misogyny," "groan worthy madcappery" and "Mrs. Doubtfire hijinx."

The Best Week Ever blog took special umbrage at the network's...

When, in 1934, Jean Vigo died of tuberculosis, he was only 29, "a neglected figure at the margins of the industry who had seen one of his films (Zéro de Conduite) banned by the French authorities and another (L'Atalante) recut and retitled by its producer." Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times: "Vigo lends himself to romanticization, and not just because of his tragic early death and the aura of unfulfilled promise. He led a brief but colorful life as a fellow traveler of the French surrealists and the son of a well-known anarchist who was apparently murdered in prison. Vigo's first film, the silent, 23-minute À Propos de Nice (On the Subject of Nice), part of the 'city symphony' genre that flourished in the 1920s, confirmed that the young Jean was very much his father's son…. All of Vigo's films were shot by Boris Kaufman, brother of the Soviet film pioneer...

The Sidney Lumet classic, based off of the hit stage play, 12 Angry Men is coming back to DVD and for the first time ever, Blu-ray.

The 1957 film, released a few times before on DVD, is getting the full-on Criterion treatment, as if we were expecting anything less, with an all-new HD transfer, Frank Schaffner’s 1955 television version, with an introduction by Ron Simon; Twelve Angry Men”: From Television to the Big Screen, a video essay by film scholar Vance; Kepley comparing the Sidney Lumet and Schaffner versions; Archival interviews with Lumet; New interview about the director with writer Walter Bernstein; New interview with Simon about television writer Reginald Rose; New interview with cinematographer John Bailey in which he discusses cinematographer Boris Kaufman; Tragedy in a Temporary Town (1956), a teleplay directed by Lumet and written by Rose; Original theatrical trailer; and a booklet featuring an essay by writer and law...

It’s so strange, writing this so long after the announcement yesterday. In today’s internet world of instant information, and twenty four second news cycles, yesterday’s August 2011 Criterion Collection new releases may as well have happened last week, or last month. I’m sure that the page views for this post will be markedly smaller than the usual, as I have tried consistently to have the new release post up within minutes of the pages going live on Criterion’s website. I know this all sounds like inside baseball stuff, but it’s on my mind, and darn it, this is my website.

I had a whole, several paragraph long, write up of the August titles, but since I’m finding myself writing this at 10pm on Tuesday evening, I think it’s better if I just scrap that whole thing and start over. I was going on...

Jean Vigo, 1934

At the age of 29, Jean Vigo died from rheumatic septicaemia, just a few days after the opening of his only feature film, L'Atalante. Those bare facts are a landmark not just in French cinema, but in the larger history of artistic film-making, and of the absolute commitment of film-makers. Moreover, the poetic lyricism of L'Atalante, far from dating, has been more appreciated over the years. L'Atalante is 75 years old, yet its beauty and its harshness are still hauntingly alive.

Three men work a barge (it is named L'Atalante) on the waterways of northern France: Jean, the skipper is young and hopeful (Jean Dasté); le père Jules, a tattooed veteran of the world's oceans (Michel Simon) and a cabin boy. They stop at a small town. Jean meets a girl, Juliette (Dita Parlo), and they are married, while hardly knowing each other. So the barge moves on. It is...

My experience with Tennessee Williams's work is limited to multiple viewings of both A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I love both of those films and still have yet to entirely crack into the rest of my Tennessee Williams Collection from 2006 to get more acquainted, but after watching Sidney Lumet's adaptation of The Fugitive Kind I am certainly more likely to do so.

Starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, The Fugitive Kind swallows you whole. It's an atmospheric romance of class and conflict that slowly warms but has enough restraint to never boil over even if its players might. Brando stars as the drifter Valentine Xavier. Just released from jail, Val finds himself caught in a torrential downpour when he is offered a place to stay for the night by Vee Talbot (Maureen Stapleton). Vee helps him find work in his effort to "turn over a new leaf.