“Best of Criterion’s New Releases, October 2019”

All I want is to talk about Godzilla, but I’ll have to just settle for talking about Josef von Sternberg instead, even though his movies do not have radioactive thunder lizards in them. Continue reading →

“Best of Criterion’s New Releases, July 2018”

This month via The Criterion Collection: Dragon Inn. That’s pretty much all you need to know. I went nuts over A Touch of Zen, King Hu’s other grand wuxia film, back in July of 2016, when Criterion added that one to their library and I wrote about the release, though apparently my writing on the matter never published … Continue reading →

Review: Anatahan, 1953, dir. Josef von Sternberg

There are two primary reasons to see Josef von Sternberg’s <i>Anatahan</i>. The first is that it’s a rarity, the final film in Sternberg’s solo directing career before co-directing <i>Jet Pilot</i> in 1957 with Fred Fleck. <i>Anatahan</i> is a picture obscured by the passage of time and by its own financial failure, a box office stumble … Continue reading →