We can’t really look at Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless with fresh eyes, any more than we can see Citizen Kane or Sunrise for the first time.
Ozu made a lot of films in the ’30s, many of which are silent, some of which are lost, and these early films are seldom screened.
It serves as a sturdy bookend to Bette Davis’s first fling at Queen Elizabeth I, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.
The film is worth seeing for its tense first half, and for Bette Davis’s carefully controlled performance.
Standard costume fare enlivened by Bette Davis’s fuming and growling.
Ultimately disappointing, but Bette Davis gives Mary Poppins a run for her money.
How about Cabin in the Cotten, Dangerous, Juarez, The Corn is Green, and A Stolen Life for volume four?
Throughout, Otto Preminger delights in scrutinizing the often inscrutable masks of his three lead actors.
A great Otto Preminger film and a solid DVD presentation overall.
The film is less failed vanity project than it is an often sensitive and rather death-obsessed character study.
This is a spotty but interesting early Al Pacino vehicle that rewards another look.
Shelley Duvall is one of the weirdest and most beguiling performers to ever find regular work in movies.
An essential set of big-ticket Joan Crawford films.
The four Ernst Lubitsch musicals collected in this box set mark a transitional period in his work.
André Téchiné moves his narrative along with a perilous kind of speed.
Fleshy, often blowsy, and intrinsically good-humored, Joan Blondell was a Warner Bros. dame of all trades.
Tim Burton lets loose with big bursts of stylized bloodletting, and achieves some extremely pretty effects as jugular veins explode all over the place.
It’s so good on divorce, plate-smashing fights, and the bad behavior of disappointed lovers that it remains a small classic.
The film is a major, unwieldy film about breaking up.
When Bibi Andersson cries in an Ingmar Bergman film, it really seems to hurt her.