New Releases Index of Titles
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<br> With the melancholy open-road epic Two-Lane Blacktop, American auteur Monte Hellman (The Shooting, Cockfighter, and the recent Road to Nowhere) poeticised the beautiful, terrible rootlessness of his nation in the era of Vietnam. Funded by Universal in a bid to recreate the success of Easy Rider – by giving a number of filmmakers $1m and final cut – Hellman’s effort is now regarded as one of the key films of the New Hollywood renaissance of the early 1970s. While driving eastward on Route 66, two rival car owners – The Driver (singer-songwriter James Taylor) and The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson … More Information
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Le Silence de la mer – Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film – is an adaptation of the novella of the same title by celebrated French Resistance author Vercors (the pen name of Jean Bruller). Clandestinely written in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France and furtively distributed, it captured the spirit of the moment, and quickly became a staple of the Resistance. Melville’s cinematic adaptation – partly shot in Vercors’ own house – tells the story of a German officer, Werner von Ebrennac (Howard Vernon), who is billeted to the house of an elderly man (Jean-Marie Robain) and his niece (Nicole … More Information
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<br> Both controversial and relentless in its depiction of suppression and brutality, Punishment Park was heavily attacked by the mainstream press and permitted only the barest of releases in 1971. However, like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) and Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969), Peter Watkins’ film has established itself as one of the key, yet rarely seen, radical films of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Giving voice to the disaffected youth of America that had lived through the campus riots at Berkeley, the trial of the Chicago Seven, and who were witnessing the escalation of the Vietnam War, Punishment Park was named … More Information
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Three years after helping to achieve some of the most amazing imagery in cinema history with 2001: A Space Odyssey, special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull made an auspicious directorial debut at age 29 with the environmentally themed science fiction classic Silent Running. In the distant future, plant life on our planet is extinct. Remaining specimens are cultivated in vast greenhouse-like domes orbiting in space. Bruce Dern stars as Freeman Lowell, dedicated botanist aboard the “Valley Forge”, awaiting the call to refoliate Earth – despite the scorn of his crewmates. When an order comes to instead destroy the domes and return … More Information
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Touch of Evil begins with one of the most brilliant sequences in the history of cinema; and ends with one of the most brilliant final scenes ever committed to celluloid. In between unfurls a picture whose moral, sexual, racial, and aesthetic attitudes remain so radical as to cross borders established not only in 1958, but in the present age also. Yet, Touch of Evil has taken many forms. The film as released in 1958 was certainly compromised from Orson Welles’ vision, but a lengthy, arresting memo written by Welles to studio heads in 1957 – taking issue with a studio … More Information
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It is difficult to summarise ShĹŤhei Imamura’s legendary 1967 film, the first picture produced by Japan’s countercultural Art Theatre Guild (ATG). Is it a documentary that turns into a fiction? A narrative film from beginning to end? A record of improvisation populated with actors or non-actors (and in what proportion)? Is it the investigation into a true disappearance, or a work merely inspired by actual events? Even at the conclusion of its final movement, A Man Vanishes [Ningen jĹŤhatsu, or The Unexplained Disappearance of a Human Being] mirrors its subject in deflecting inquiries into the precise nature of its own … More Information
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Cinematic anthropologist extraordinaire ShĹŤhei Imamura won his first Palme d’Or at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival for The Ballad of Narayama [Narayama bushikĹŤ], his transcendent adaptation of two classic stories by ShichirĹŤ Fukazawa. In a small village in a remote valley where the harshness of life dictates that survival overrules compassion, elderly widow Orin is approaching her 70th birthday – the age when village law says she must go up to the mythic Mount Narayama to die. But there are several loose ends within her own family to tie up first. Creating a vividly realised inverse image of “civilised” society … More Information
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Of all Masaki Kobayashi’s attacks on the cruelty and inhumanity perpetrated by authoritarian power (including The Human Condition and Samurai Rebellion), perhaps none are more brilliant than his visceral, mesmerising Harakiri [aka Seppuku]. In a magnificent performance, Tatsuya Nakadai (Yojimbo, The Face of Another, Ran) stars as Hanshiro Tsugumo, a masterless down-and-out samurai who enters the manor of Lord Iyi, requesting to commit ritual suicide on his property. Suspected of simply fishing for charity, Hanshiro is told the gruesome tale of the last samurai who made the same request – but Hanshiro will not be moved… With its intricate structure … More Information
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The 1924 blockbuster that launched John Ford into Hollywood’s emerging A-list of directors, The Iron Horse is an epic mythification of the American railroad’s birth: a rambunctious blend of historical drama and Western actioner, revenge story and saloon comedy, noble biopic and all-bets-off tall tale. Neighbour to the pre-presidential Abe Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, young Davy Brandon accompanies his father westward to realise the elder’s dream of a rail line bridging the ends of the continent. Years after Brandon Sr.’s murder and scalping by a two-fingered Cheyenne half-breed, the adult David (played by George O’Brien, three years before his lead … More Information
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One of the earliest (and eeriest) works by the legendary filmmaker F. W. Murnau, SchloĂź Vogelöd: Die EnthĂĽllung eines Geheimnisses [Castle Vogelöd: The Revelation of a Secret, often referred to as The Haunted Castle] provides a vital glimpse into the development of the uncanny-suffused expressionistic style that became Murnau’s hallmark and legacy. A party of aristocrats assemble at a country manor for an autumn hunt. But a long-lingering question threatens once more to rear its head: who really murdered the Baroness’s late husband? With a riveting nightmare sequence that foreshadows the nocturnal fantasias of both Nosferatu and Phantom, and a … More Information
