September marks the start of Autumn (or football season for a lot of us) and the time that major film festivals come with big-time Oscar players. September is also a great month for Criterion with new entries and re-editions, namely from one of the best directors in the world working today. Kurosawa, Lizzie Borden, a double-dose of Jacques Audiard (not Emilia Perez, don’t worry), and Rob Reiner, keeping active today with his role on The Bear, are all part of Criterion’s monthly release, and it is stacked with what is in store now.
High And Low (1963)
Before seeing Spike Lee’s version of Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom, do watch the original adaptation by Akira Kurosawa, a beautifully tight-knit thriller about a businessman who has to make a serious choice between his family’s future and the kidnapped son of his chauffeur. One of his contemporary dramas is mixed in with his historical pieces, and is still a high-wire thriller of class and moral authority. With his main lead, Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa again put up a mirror of society about the financial gap between people in the context of a serious crime.
Born In Flames (1983)
Amid a conservative turn socially, writer-director Lizzie Borden came out with a radical punk, female-driven utopia that comes with a revolutionary message. In a single film, Borden comes after viewers with her themes of racism, sexism, and heterosexual power against a class of gay women. It would be decades before a retrospective gave Born in Flames credit for pursuing a feminist theory in movies way ahead of everyone else, and it is a landmark in independent cinema. In a side note, one person who had a small acting role in the film is Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow.
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
An original Criterion film makes its triumphant return with the same hilarious style that many copied afterward. Rob Reiner made his directorial debut and starred as a documentarian who follows a British rock band coming to America – and going through screw-up after screw-up. An amplifier that goes to 11, the two-foot Stonehenge stage prop, and getting lost on the stage are among the hijinks the band goes through on their tour. More than forty years later, with the upcoming release of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, it’s a great time to come back to “one of England’s loudest bands.”
Read My Lips (2001)
In one of his earliest films, Jacques Audiard tells the story about a deaf woman (Emmanuelle Devos) who joins an ex-con (Vincent Cassel) and becomes entangled in a criminal scheme where her lip-reading is essential. The uneasiness of working with each other slowly dissipates as they start a relationship of trust. It’s a psychological thriller that explores the range of emotions of a woman from solitude to a unique companionship with its risks, and Audiard draws it out with intensity between the sounds of silence and timely movement.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)
Director Jacques Audiard made his breakthrough with this riveting drama about a man torn between his criminal father and a passion for music. Born to a family of crime, Thomas (Romain Duris) knows he can break that cycle if he chooses to follow his dead mother’s musical dreams and talents, and aligns himself with a pianist from Vietnam who does not speak French, only through the notes of a piano. Like Read My Lips, the core of breaking through a language barrier is through other means, and Audiard strikes a deep chord in the balance of crime and true passions.
Isle of Dogs/The French Dispatch (2018/2021)
Wes Anderson has a new movie out this year, and his previous ones are all coming in for Criterion this month. Isle of Dogs is a return to stop-motion with a story of a dystopian Japan that has put all their dogs with a rare virus onto an island to isolate them from the humans. When a boy, the mayor’s nephew, decides to go find his pet dog, he leads a revolt to release them from captivity and against a human-canine war. For the lengthy titled The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, Anderson tells of episodes from a newspaper of artists, kidnappings, and revolutions in the paper’s history that stand out in their history. Massive ensembles, eccentric stories, big sets, and some beautifully cut dialogue from Anderson remain as strong with his more recent films as with his past work.
The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years
Including those two recent titles, Anderson’s full-length pictures from his debut, Bottle Rocket, up to his Oscar-winning Grand Budapest Hotel, are all in one big book of masterpieces from the auteur from Austin, Texas. They’ve already been given the individual release treatment, but now to get them all on 4K will be the perfect gift for those Wes lovers. Twenty-five hours of special features and plenty of illustrations of his behind-the-scenes work, especially those stop-animated works, all come in this special deluxe package.
