Set during London’s so-called “Three-Day Week” period — just over two months in 1974 when Conservatives in Britain rationed electricity as part of a dispute with the coal miners whose output supplied most of the country’s energy — Corinna Faith’s The Power is an impressively accomplished debut feature that yokes a classic ghost story to the dynamics of the contemporary #MeToo movement. Val is an apprentice nurse working her first night shift in an aging East London hospital. There are plenty of shadows as lights go out in unused areas, and gas lanterns are the most frequent source of illumination. […]

When writer, director, and film historian Bertrand Tavernier passed away on March 25, the art of cinema lost one of its most eloquent, passionate, and informed partisans. Thankfully, his last great work, the eight-hour documentary series Journeys Through French Cinema, is newly available on Blu-ray from Cohen Media Group and provides a beautiful summation of Tavernier’s devotion and an enlightening introduction to many of his favorite filmmakers. The documentary is a follow-up to Tavernier’s 2016 theatrical feature My Journey Through French Cinema and essentially picks up where that movie left off, exploring directors, actors, composers, and other artists Tavernier wasn’t […]

The best film by America’s greatest comic filmmaker arrives on Blu-ray this week in the form of Criterion’s release of Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life. Some Brooks partisans might argue on behalf of the more acidic and self-flagellating Modern Romance or the more influential Real Life (and if you caught me on certain days I could probably be convinced that Mother is as great a movie as anyone has ever made), but Defending Your Life is the director’s most philosophically dense, emotionally satisfying, and conceptually ambitious comedy, an inquiry into the meaning of existence as serious as Tree of Life […]

The Criterion Collection adds another indispensable boxed set to its library with this month’s release of World of Wong Kar Wai, a package of seven essential features, all restored and remastered and accompanied by an abundance of interviews, deleted scenes, and alternate endings. Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love have been released by Criterion before, but the remaining five films – As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and 2046 – are new to the label and presented here in vastly superior presentations to prior U.S. home video releases. The early films are […]

One of the surprise hits of the 1973 Cannes Film Festival was the low-budget coming of age film Jeremy, an unassuming drama starring two unknowns and directed by an American documentarian whose low-key approach yielded powerful emotional effects. Sixteen-year old Robby Benson had been acting on Broadway since he was nine but was fairly new to movies; his co-star, Glynnis O’Connor, was even less experienced and fluked into her part when she tagged along with her brother Darren (who starred in another interesting 70s high school movie, To Find a Man, the year before) on his audition for the part […]

The potential for horror films to serve as vehicles for provocative moral inquiry is fully realized in a pair of excellent thrillers new to Blu-ray and DVD from Lionsgate, writer-director Alex McAulay’s Don’t Tell a Soul and the surprisingly original 2021 reboot of the 2003 cult classic Wrong Turn. Both films seem, at first glance, to be routine low-budget programmers, but it quickly becomes apparent that the filmmakers are up to something more ambitious and rewarding than simply jerking the audience around with cheap shock effects. Don’t Tell a Soul follows two young brothers who break into an elderly woman’s […]

Drawing from the world of gaming, writer/director Pete Ohs is embarking on a post-production experiment for his pandemic-shot film, Jethica: live-streaming his edit. “I know that YouTube is overflowing with editing and software tutorials but I’ve never heard of anyone actually editing a movie live,” he writes in an email, and I can’t think of anyone who has done this either. Beginning this week, Ohs is using Twitch to transmit his editing screen as well as webcam footage of himself behind the console, allowing viewers to track his process cut-by-cut. “I imagine the audience for this stream is going to […]

No director of the classical Hollywood studio era capitalized on hot-button social issues or pushed the boundaries of censorship as successfully as Otto Preminger, who scored artistic and commercial triumphs with a number of films (Anatomy of a Murder, The Moon is Blue, Advise and Consent, The Man with the Golden Arm) that addressed rape, homosexuality, drug addiction, and various political and religious controversies at a time when few other filmmakers would dare. By the 1970s, however, Preminger became a victim of his own reputation; when young auteurs of the New Hollywood like Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich […]

A spectral and hypnotic entry in this year’s Slamdance Film Festival is Chris Peters’s “film experiment,” 24,483 Dreams of Death, which uses a Mario Bava film (Mask of the Demon) as the sole source material for an A.I.’s imagination of our visual world. Over six days, Peters — a filmmaker, painter as well as software engineer — fed the frames of the film into the computer, producing images that represent, he writes, “… the machine’s neural network forming in real time, not footage in the traditional sense of photographed scenes, but footage of the internal experience of a new intelligence […]

Black music. White privilege. Chicago. 1927. What could possibly go wrong? Indeed, nearly everything, and it’s chronicled with artful intensity in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the second in a cycle of ten plays that compassionately detail the 20th-century experiences of African Americans. Ma Rainey’s was brought to the screen this season in a stellar production directed by George Wolfe that stars Viola Davis in the title role and, in his final role, Chadwick Boseman as the upstart young trumpeter and rake in her band. Wolfe, a Tony Award-winning theater director and writer, is gradually building a formidable resume […]