Kirsten Tan’s Pop Aye remains beholden to both the rhetoric and recipe of quirk-fueled redemption.
The trilogy finally arrives on Blu-ray boasting a radiant image and a boatload of extras worthy of Marcel Pagnol’s inimitable wit and style.
Bertrand Tavernier’s exquisite documentary avoids mere hagiography by looking to the films themselves.
It mistakes its access to quotidian behaviors as evidence of the need for comprehensive educational reform.
The set is best viewed as another fine product from the hopefully ongoing collaboration between Criterion and the World Cinema Project.
Criterion has done a commendable job in supplementing Audiard’s film.
Andrzej Wajda’s film is a lean, unwavering look at the effects of artistic idealism in the face of fascist doctrine.
Nearly every line of dialogue in Maria Schrader’s film explicitly comments on a larger matter of global diplomacy.
Tarkovsky’s pacing is less moved by narrative detail than thematic and metaphorical suggestion.
The choice of low-grade, handheld digital images reduces the film to the clichés of revisionist literary filmmaking.
The film is intended to be placed at the altar of Julian Schnabel, an artist so singular that words simply fail.
The film ascribes to a conventionally contrapuntal take on the lives of those who spend all day surrounded by death.
Dash’s seminal work of African-American historical fiction receives a valuable and hauntingly beautiful transfer.
If you’re looking to step into a rain shower before diving headfirst into Demy’s cinematic pool, this release is the best place to start.
The film confounds its surface narrative with hints of layered meanings to come through a jockeying of story threads.
It uses self-absorption to deconstruct the sentimentalizing impulse that often informs personal documentary.
Its headiness exists beyond its more pseudo-philosophical dialogue about the differences between fantasy and reality.
Its depiction of friendship seldom pushes past insights predicated on a fundamental tension between characters.
Waters’s film receives a pristine 4K restoration and some solid supplements from Criterion.
This Blu-ray arrives at a moment when the film’s warning against a simplistic understanding of human fallibility seems as urgent as ever.