Criterion have released an excellent two-disk edition of Claude Berri’s adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s epic tragedy of idealism brought down by greed and petty rivalries in early 20th Century rural Provence. New 4K restorations of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (both 1986) are visually ravishing, while the drama is embodied in superb performances from Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart and an excellent supporting cast.
Two key films from the era of peak paranoia, the late-’60s and early ’70s, are given exemplary disk releases – Theordore J. Flicker’s darkly comic The President’s Analst (1967) on Blu-ray from Imprint and Francis Ford Coppola’s nightmarish The Conversation (1974) on 4K in a dual-format edition from StudioCanal.
Criterion’s new dual-format 4K UHD/Blu-ray release of The Wages of Fear (1953) presents an opportunity to revisit Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic and examine just why it troubled its U.S. distributor and some critics with its political and sexual implications.
Performance (1970), co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, is one of the key films to emerge from Britain towards the end of the 1960s, a turbulent decade during which the post-war order was challenged by a generation seeking to redefine society; the film’s radical style – with disorienting editing and a rejection of conventional linear narrative – both reflected and embodied the chaos in a story which deconstructed class, sexuality and individual identity in a welter of violence clashing with art and music. More than fifty years later, the film seems fresher and more pertinent than ever.
Three recent releases from England explore the survival into the modern world of ancient mystical forces, illustrating different aspects of folk horror. In Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre (2023) a pagan entity brings tragedy to a family; in Robert Wynne-Simmons’ The Outcasts (1982), villagers in 19th Century Ireland believe a farm girl is a witch: and in Peter Sasdy’s The Stone Tape (1972), scripted by Nigel Kneale, a research team believe they’ve found the mechanism behind hauntings.
Criterion’s new release presents a stunning restoration of Jean Eustache’s intimate epic The Mother and the Whore (1973), a bleak epitaph for the failed promise of social change which climaxed and crashed with the May 1968 uprising in Paris: a few years later, the film’s characters are adrift and trying to rebuild a sense of themselves in a society which has rejected them and their dreams.
Grindhouse Releasing have done a stellar job of resurrecting a little-known low-budget exploitation movie from the early ’70s. Set on the fringes of the film business in Los Angeles, Hollywood 90028 (1973) was the only feature directed by Christina Hornisher who approached the story of a homicidal film cameraman with the cool detachment of a European director and an emphasis on the experience of women being exploited by the industry.
Criterion gives Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Sam Peckinpah’s final, unfinished Western, stellar treatment in a two-disk Blu-ray set (also in a 4K UHD edition) with three different cuts plus extensive extras. The original theatrical release is presented alongside Peckinpah’s final preview cut and a more polished 50th Anniversary edit which restores and refines much of the material originally removed after the director walked away from the project.
Japanese New Wave filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda uses a range of styles and registers to evoke Japan’s tumultuous Twentieth Century history in the allegorical fantasy Demon Pond (1979), newly restored in 4K and released in dual formats by Criterion.
Indicator have taken a break from their recent spate of Mexican genre movies by dipping a little deeper into the Calderón family archives. Untouched (Sombra Verde, 1954) is a torrid romantic melodrama with allegorical notes which trades in the urban noir of a movie like Emilio Fernández’s Victims of Sin (1950) for the primal jungle of Veracruz. Both were produced by Guillermo Calderón and show him pushing against the boundaries of censorship and testing how far cinema could push a frank depiction of sexuality in a society still very much under the sway of the Catholic Church.