Ah, the dog days of summer, when temps are hot and movies are not. You could just wait for fall, or you can catch up at home. The flow of catalog releases from the major studios may never return to its pre-crash highs, but the trickle has at least increased to a modest rill, and independents have stepped in to pick up some of the slack.

As ever, it would be easy to devote this entire column to the Criterion Collection's recent output. Among its recent treasures are upgrades (on both DVD and Blu-ray) for Powell and Pressburger masterworks Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, as well as a new Blu-ray for Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, with its sinuously graceful lead performance by Burt Lancaster. New to the collection are Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (here's hoping Criterion continues to work backward through Kiarostami's underserved early years) and a four-disc boxed set of Akira Kurosawa's first films, which, minus Madadayo, mops up the titles formerly exclusive to the massive 25 Films compendium. But let's focus for a moment on a title from earlier this year: Leo McCarey's heartrending Make Way for Tomorrow.

Originally (if barely) released in 1937, McCarey's tender tearjerker took more than seven decades to find its way to home video, extending for nearly three-quarters of a century the disdain with which the movie was greeted by Universal executives. What they expected, no doubt, was a crackerjack comedy of the kind McCarey was known for, a movie like those he'd directed for Laurel and Hardy and the Marx brothers. What they got was a comic-tinged drama about the indignities of old age, one that, as Orson Welles put it, "could make a stone cry." Victor Moore ...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/06/03/savantgarde http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/06/03/savantgarde

With no disrespect to the "special collector's edition" of the latest garish blockbuster, it seems safe to say there won't be a more important Blu-ray this year than Criterion's By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two. It's not just that the three-disc set extends the previous two-DVD edition to more than 11 hours (volume one is available separately in standard-def), but that it's the first significant release of experimental film in the HD realm. Digitally massaged action swill may light up the display models at Best Buy, but by and large, big-budget movies are so worked over that it doesn't make much difference how or why you watch them. The cartoon palette of Transformers 2 will pop on an iPhone the same way it does on a 50-inch plasma.

But with avant-garde film, the texture and tenor of the viewing experience is integral to the film; in some ways, it is the film. Stan Brakhage's films aren't about what you see so much as how you see it, the physical and neurochemical interaction between the light on the screen and your optic nerve. In some of his films, particularly those he made without using a camera by painting directly onto strips of blank leader, were meant to recall what he called "closed-ey...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/02/19/disc-world http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/02/19/disc-world

Like an underachieving high school student, chances are your flat-screen TV hasn't been living up to its potential. DVDs are the cat's meow, but if you've ever researched the format, you know they don't have the resolution to exploit the full range of that plasma you broke the piggy bank for, which is why even the greatest of celluloid treasures can't measure up, spec-wise, to a hi-def episode of CSI: Miami.

The jump from DVD to Blu-ray isn't as dramatic as the move from VHS; it's an increase in quality rather than a quantum leap. But the results can still be spectacular. Watching Warner Bros.' Blu-ray of Being There, I was mesmerized by the inky black and chestnut browns of Caleb Deschanel's cinematography, far deeper and richer than anything I've seen in standard def. The big-box sales displays may flaunt the sharp-edged purity of action movies and special effects extravaganzas, but it's every bit as dramatic when applied to a pre-digital source.

That's not to say it can't deliver on more recent material. Universal's Bourne Trilogy, with its silvery tones and fast-cut camera work, went down like a glass of cold, clear water. The Bourne Ultimatum's Waterloo Station sequence is a master class in whiplash precision that puts The International's generic gunplay to shame.

Of course, as with the aforementioned CSI: Miami, Blu-ray's eye-candy appeal may suck you in to movies you have no business...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/10/23/disc-world http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/10/23/disc-world

Any genuine cinephile can reel off at the drop of a hat a list of stone-cold masterpieces that have never been released on home video. The movie industry has taken to issuing and reissuing the same handful of titles while letting treasures molder in the vault. Far be it for me to suggest that we don't need three editions of Reno 911!: Miami, but that's three more than The Magnificent Ambersons.

Of course, some reissues are more welcome than others. The first issue of the Godfather trilogy was a travesty, drawn from a visibly worn print, but the new restoration rights that wrong, making even Part III worth watching again.

Unless you're some sort of featurette nut, there's no reason to replace your old single discs with Universal's new two-disc editions of Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo. But their two-disc edition of Orson Welles' decadent noir Touch of Evil more than merits the double-dip. Along with the "restored" 1998 version, posthumously re-edited in accordance with Welles' unheeded studio memo, the set includes the original theatrical cut as well as a rarely seen preview version that bridges some of the gaps b...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/06/05/disc-world http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/06/05/disc-world

The Democrats' intraparty squabbles are nothing compared to the old-school left's flair for self-immolation, vividly displayed in Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise. Set, perhaps for practical as much as aesthetic reasons, entirely in Godard and then-wife Anne Wiazemsky's Paris apartment, the movie is a claustrophobic examination of the faddish Maoism that swept through France's student bodies in 1967, a product of anti-imperialist intoxication with the North Vietnamese and disillusionment with the Soviet Union's cold warmongering. The film's full title adds the caveat "ou plutôt à la chinoise" — or rather, in the Chinese style —a sly denunciation of the movie's play-acting revolutionaries.

Godard, however, was increasingly dubious that theater, filmed or otherwise, could foment political change; at Cannes the next year, he denounced the assembled filmmakers, himself include...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/02/28/disc-world http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/02/28/disc-world

In Pierrot le fou, Jean-Paul Belmondo's renegade TV producer announces his intention "not to write about people's lives any more, but only about life — life itself. What lies in between people: space, sound and color." Although the lines are delivered in the hoarse voice of a toothless old coot, it's not much of a leap to assume that he's speaking for his director, Jean-Luc Godard.

By 1965, Godard's waning interest in conventional narrative had all but evaporated. Pierrot has characters, namely Belmondo and his outlaw lover, Anna Karina, and a fitful narrative that prefigures Bonnie and Clyde. But, driven by his increasingly radical Maoist politics, Godard had come to see storytelling as no more than a means to explore the existential stuff of life, and he was eager to cut out the middleman.

In the movie's most famous exchange, cinema-fist auteur Samuel Fuller appears as himself, at a cocktail party where the guests speak in advertising slogans. "A film is like a battleground," he tells Belmondo. "Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word, emotion." Shot in bold primary colors by Godard's mainstay Raoul Coutard (who supervised the Criterion DVD's eye-popping transfer), the ...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/07/05/disc-world http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/07/05/disc-world

In an interview on Criterion's La Jetée/Sans Soleil disc, Jean-Pierre Gorin, a longtime associate of the elusive cineaste Chris Marker, calls Marker a "hijacker," which is his way of describing how Marker reuses images for his own ends. For Marker, as perhaps for no other filmmaker whose work can loosely be called "documentary," an image is not a fact but a gateway, a noble but doomed attempt to master the fluidity of space and, especially, time.

In plot terms, Marker's 1962 short La Jetée is the story of a post-apocalyptic time traveler trying to save humanity from itself. But the film announces its true subject with its opening title: "This is the story of a man marked by an image of childhood." Represented, like (almost) all of the film's shots, by a still photograph, his attachment to the image of a woman, her hair tousled, her fingers pressed tentatively to her mouth, is so powerful it allows him to travel through time.

All films are a succession of still frames, but La Jetée exposes the process of image-making. It takes the movement out of moving pictures, the better to question the unconscious complicity with which we accept a string of images as a pretense to truth. Perhaps the image fixed in the...]]>