
Le Jour Se Lève (Daybreak) movie review: man on the edge
Serious film fans will appreciate the 4K restoration of this 1939 French melodrama, which has been all but unseen for 75 years.
film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
Serious film fans will appreciate the 4K restoration of this 1939 French melodrama, which has been all but unseen for 75 years.
As with every other 3D conversion of older classic films, it’s the chance to see a wonderful movie once more up on the big screen that’s the real reason to revisit it.
I had just begun my career as a film critic when Titanic was first released in late 1997. So I missed it, back then, what it was about James Cameron’s magnificent movie that was (and still is) so extraordinary.
If I had been introduced to this film at a more impressionable age, I might today have pleasant adolescent memories of it that would color my grownup response to it today, and perhaps I could be kinder to a movie considered a comedy classic by some. But I wasn’t, I haven’t, and I can’t.
Writer-director Adam Green has been hailed as the future of horror: The future of horror is the past of horror, apparently.
It’s an enormous pleasure to see a film such as John Ford’s 1939 masterpiece via the Criterion Collection’s two-disc set, new in Region 1…
First thing the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes made me think? (Okay, second thing, after ‘Sexiest Holmes evah!’) ‘I have got to see Young Sherlock Holmes again.’
It’s almost impossible to watch this 1983 Robert Altman film today with the mindset of the time in which it was created. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing…
What with the new DVD release of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 *King Kong* and the anticipation over Peter Jackson’s about-to-be-released homage, the eternal question is renewed: Just why the hell did the natives on Skull Island build an anti-Kong wall… and then put a Kong-size door in it?
Are they puppets? Are they some sort of clay-animated figures? Or are they some kind of beasts hitherto unknown and the likes of which the world has not seen again since? It doesn’t matter. The creatures Rankin & Bass brought to life in their animated holiday specials are so much a part of my psyche that I no more think about their nature than I pause to consider what constitutes the air I breathe.