Cronos (The Criterion Assortment) [Blu-ray]

Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) produced an auspicious, audacious function debut with CRONOS, a highly unorthodox tale about the seductiveness of the thought of immortality. Kindly antiques dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) takes place upon an historic golden system in the form of a scarab, and soon finds himself possessor and victim of its sinister, addictive powers, as effectively as the target of a mysterious, crude American named Angel (a delightfully deranged Ron Perlman [Hellboy]). Featuring marvelous particular makeup effects and the unforgettably haunting imagery for which del Toro has turn into world-renowned, CRONOS is a visually rich and emotionally captivating darkish fantasy.Guillermo del Toro’s facility with baroque visuals, gothic horror, and black comedy arrives to the fore in his initial feature (his affection for creepy-crawlies also anticipates the underrated Mimic). A 16th-century prologue reveals the origins of the scarab-shaped Cronos device, which authorized a Spanish alchemist to increase his lifetime by various centuries. In the present day, Mexican antiquities dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi, who reunited with del Toro for The Devil’s Backbone) dotes on his unflappable granddaughter, Aurora (Tamara Shanath). When the device ends up in Gris’s shop, he tangles with the petulant Angel (Hellboy‘s Ron Perlman), whose critically ill uncle, Dieter (Claudio Brook, Exterminating Angel), longs to obtain the relic, but Gris is not selling. Right after the mechanism stings the merchant, he feels more youthful, and becomes addicted to the sensation. His newfound taste for blood, even so, only increases after he morphs into a nocturnal creature, much like Mimic‘s man-sized cockroach. With Cronos, del Toro developed a exclusive vampire-zombie hybrid, given that Gris’s resistance to age blooms just as his flesh starts to wither. In an outstanding commentary track, he describes the movie as a reinvention of the vampire myth in alchemical terms. Other extras incorporate commentary from the producers, a gory student brief, a tour of the director’s incredible offices, interviews with cast and crew (including Luppi and Perlman), a stills gallery (like family members photographs), and an essay by film critic Maitland McDonagh, who praises del Toro as a filmmaker with an eye “attuned to the attractiveness in the darkness.” –Kathleen C. Fennessy

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Port of Shadows – Criterion Collection

Down a foggy, desolate road to the port metropolis of Le Havre travels Jean (Jean Gabin), an army deserter seeking for yet another likelihood to make great on daily life. Fate, even so, has a diverse prepare for him, when functions of the two revenge and kindness turn him into front-page news. Also starring the blue-eyed phenomenon Michèle Morgan in her very first significant function, and the menacing Michel Simon, Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) starkly portrays an underworld of lonely souls wrestling with their very own destinies. Based mostly on the novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, the inimitable staff of director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert provide a quintessential illustration of poetic realism, one particular of the classics of the golden age of French cinema.On a foggy highway, a lonely soldier hitches a experience and ends up in a lonely bar on the outskirts of town, where lost souls collect for a melancholy repast. The soldier is Jean (Jean Gabin), a deserter on the run whose flight is interrupted when he meets sad runaway Nelly (Michele Morgan) and falls in really like. He becomes entwined in the troubles of her existence, notably the lascivious guardian (Michel Simon) who lusts after Nelly and attempts to blackmail Jean, and a cocky, very hot-headed gangster (Pierre Brasseur) who tries to scare Jean off, only to be humiliated in front his men and the town. It’s not hard to see wherever this spiral of threats and confrontations is top (the title, after all, translates to “Port of Shadows,” as ominous a title as any American film noir, particularly in a modest town wherever everyone’s lives turn out to be tightly wound collectively. Director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert (who went on to collaborate on the French masterpiece Kids of Paradise) infuse the movie with a sense of dignity and quiet poetry. At night the port town is like a entire world in the clouds, cut off from the relaxation of the globe, wherever all the sordid yearnings and desperate plans of the ambitious gamers take on a mythic resonance. It is only by light of day that every little thing returns to its shabby place. A classic of French poetic realism. –Sean Axmaker

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Senso: The Criterion Assortment [Blu-ray]

This lush, Technicolor tragic romance from Luchino Visconti (Le notti bianche, The Leopard) stars Alida Valli (The 3rd Man, Eyes Devoid of a Deal with) as a nineteenth-century Italian countess who, amid the Austrian occupation of her country, puts her marriage and political concepts on the line by engaging in a torrid affair with a dashing Austrian lieutenant, played by Farley Granger (Rope, Strangers on a Train). Gilded with fearless performances, ornate costumes and sets, and a rich classical soundtrack, Visconti?s operatic melodrama is an extraordinary evocation of reckless feelings and deranged lust from one particular of the cinema?s great sensualists.

Checklist Price tag: $ 39.98

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Connected Criterion Films

Mouchette – (The Criterion Assortment)

MOUCHETTE – DVD MoviePerhaps the most accessible of Robert Bresson’s movies, this story of a 14-year-old schoolgirl at the mercy of the world about her is like a melodrama stripped of flourish. Mouchette is an angry adolescent in the French provinces, the daughter of a drunken bootlegger and a dying, bedridden mom, a pariah in college and a figure of village gossip. She rebels in normally adolescent approaches, lobbing mud at teasing classmates and defying wagging tongues with a willful stare, but her deep ache and loneliness pour from her hollow, unhappy eyes. There’s no sentimentality in Bresson’s portrait of village existence, but for a couple of brief moments the movie explodes with energy and emotion. Mouchette rides the bumper vehicles at a regional fair, flirting with a young boy in loving bumps and deliberate rams, and her dour expression flowers in a smile as the fairground speakers blare a rock & roll tune… till her father’s major hand slaps her back to reality. It really is a moment as opposed to any other in a Bresson movie, a joyous reprieve from the monotony of her lifestyle, but if the relaxation of her existence is glum and hopeless, the movie is unexpectedly gorgeous. The style is usually fragmented–the movie opens on a spectacular play of hands, feet, and spying eyes as poacher and police each wait for their prey–but the elegance of the forests and meadows creates an idyllic naturalism that leavens Bresson’s harsh portrait of the human problem. –Sean Axmaker

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The Wages of Worry – (The Criterion Collection)

In the squalid, impoverished South American town of Las Piedras, desperate guys and women from all around the planet scrape out a dwelling and dream of escape, underneath the watchful eye of the ruling Southern Oil Firm.Henri-Georges Clouzot’s gripping 1953 thriller throws four guys into a primal struggle in opposition to the jungle armed with modern day machinery and their own nerves and endurance. The squalid, isolated South American town of Las Piedras is a veritable refuge turned prison for criminals from all over the globe. When an oil fire ignites 300 miles away, dozens of desperate volunteers use for the harmful career of driving highly volatile nitroglycerin across rugged jungle roads–for a ,000 payday. The bulk of the film charts the sluggish, grueling trek more than bumpy, pothole-dotted dirt roads and worse. A harmful cutback forces the trucks to back again more than a rotting wooden platform created around a cliff, a boulder in the road should be blasted away, and a river of oil (gushing from a damaged pipeline) ought to be forded–all with one ton of explosive nitro resting in the back of every single truck. The ordeal forges a tough-man trust among German Bimba (Peter Van Eyck) and Italian Luigi (Folco Lulli) but tears apart Frenchmen Mario (Yves Montand) and Jo (Charles Vanel). Former gangland hotshot Jo finds his once-fearless exterior cracked, while Mario discovers in himself a new grit and tenacity. Clouzot’s stark, basic imagery and painstaking attention to detail produce a riveting tension that never lets up, intensified by the ruthless drive of Mario, who proves he will do anything at all–anything at all–to get his truck through. William Freidkin remade the film in 1977 as the fashionable Sorcerer. –Sean Axmaker

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A Christmas Tale (The Criterion Collection)

In Arnaud Desplechin’s beguiling A Xmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), Catherine Deneuve brings her legendary poise to the function of Junon, matriarch of the troubled Vuillard family members, who come together at Christmas soon after she learns she needs a bone marrow transplant from a blood relative. That basic family reunion setup, however, cannot get started to explain the unpredictable, emotionally volatile expertise of this movie, an inventive, magical drama that’s equal elements merriment and melancholy. Unrequited childhood loves and blinding grudges, brutal outbursts and sudden slapstick, music, movies, and poetry, A Xmas Tale ties it all collectively in a marvelously messy deal.

Stills from A Xmas Tale (Click for more substantial picture)

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The Fire Inside – (The Criterion Collection)

• After rising to worldwide stardom with this kind of seminal crowd-pleasers as The Lovers and Zazie dans le metro, Louis Malle gave his followers a shock with The Fire Within (Le feu follet), a penetrating review of individual and social inertia. Maurice Ronet (Elevator to the Gallows), in an implosive, haunted performance, plays Alain Leroy, a self-destructive writer who resolves to kill himself and spends

Right after garnering global acclaim for these seminal crowd-pleasers as The Lovers and Zazie dans le métro, Louis Malle gave his followers a shock with The Fire Inside of (Le feu follet), a penetrating research of individual and social inertia. Maurice Ronet (Elevator to the Gallows), in an implosive, haunted efficiency, plays Alain Leroy, a self-destructive writer who resolves to kill himself and spends the following twenty-4 hrs attempting to reconnect with a host of wayward buddies. Unsparing in its portrait of Alain s interior turmoil and shot with impressive clarity, The Fire Within is 1 of Malle’s darkest and most individual movies.

Particular Functions
* – New, restored high-definition digital transfer
* – Archival interviews with director Louis Malle and actor Maurice Ronet
* – Malle’s Fire Within, a new video clip system featuring interviews with actor Alexandra Stewart and filmmakers Philippe Collin and Volker Schlöndorff
* – Jusqu’au 23 Juillet, a 2005 documentary quick about the film and its source novel Le feu follet, by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, featuring actor Mathieu Amalric, writer Didier Daeninckx, and Cannes festival curator Pierre-Henri Deleau
* – New and improved English subtitle translation
* – PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by critic Michel Ciment and film historian Peter Cowie

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Connected French Criterion Films

Topsy-Turvy (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

The globe of Gilbert and Sulliavan arrives to vivid life in this extraordinary dramatization of the staging of their legendary 1885 comic opera The Mikado from Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets and Lies). Jim Broadbent (Moulin Rouge, Iris) and Allan Corduner (Yentl, Vera Drake) brilliantly inhabit the roles of the planet-popular Victorian librettist and composer, respectively, who, along with their troupe of temperamental actors, should battle private and expert demons even though mounting this key production. A lushly created epic about the harsh realities of creative expression, featuring bravura performances and Oscar-profitable costume layout and make-up, Topsy-Turvy is an unexpected period delight from one particular of modern cinema’s wonderful artists.

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