Word: criterion
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...that were all there was to say about Louise Brooks, we would not be celebrating her centenary today. The Victoria Theatre in San Francisco would not be holding "Happy Birthday, Louise" party to accompany a performance of Lulu, a play based on her signature film Pandora's Box. The Criterion Collection would not be issuing a double-disc edition of the Pandora's Box DVD. And Rizzoli would not have published Louise Brooks; Lulu Forever, a handsome volume with more than 100 large photos and a warm consideration of her career by Peter Cowie. (Yes, that's the same Peter...
...every film in the Criterion list is a textbook classic. Quite a few are just hugely enjoyable bagatelles that deserve to be treated with care. As you probably already know, Donen's 1963 comic thriller is about a young American widow (the ever-stylish Audrey Hepburn) on the run in Paris from a trio of criminals who think she can lead them to the fortune her late husband stole from them. The is-he-or-isn't-he-trustworthy stranger who takes her under his wing is Cary Grant. The digital transfer is every bit as lustrous as what Kurosawa...
...Criterion has a gift for pairing films that belong together. One example is its release of Maxim Gorky's play The Lower Depths as filmed by Renoir in 1936 and Kurosawa 21 years later. Another is its dual set of The Killers, both the 1946 Robert Siodmak original of Hemingway's story about a man who welcomes his own murder - it's Burt Lancaster's sleepy-eyed, long-muscled film debut - and Don Siegel's hyped-up 1964 remake that was made for TV but too violent for broadcast...
...Another: Criterion's Ozu two-fer is a superb instance of one director revisiting his own earlier work, the way Hitchcock remade The Man Who Knew Too Much. In 1934 Ozu directed an 86-minute silent (the Japanese were late in making the transition to sound) about an aging actor who returns with his theater troupe and his current mistress to his home town, where he reunites with his former lover and their now grown son. Bittersweet misery ensues. In 1959, when Ozu's reserved style was fully formed, he remade the story as two-hour color film photographed...
...Maybe Criterion's chief service to film lovers is not its restoration of the titles we all know are classics but its insistence that certain recent titles, especially the ones on the outer edges of the mainstream, are classics of the future - movies like David Gordon Green's George Washington, Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl and Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven. Ramsay's 1999 story of a boy's troubled childhood in Glasgow in the 1970s is tender and harrowing at the same time. The disc includes three of her short films, two of which won prizes at the Cannes...