Paul Malcolm

Jigoku, Spirit of the Beehive

Paul Malcolm
This Tuesday, Criterion releases two very different kinds of international ghost stories, each infused with its own haunting local flavor. A Buddhist buffet of otherworldly torments awaits the sinners in Japanese director Nobuo Nakagawa’s gruesome cult classic Jigoku (1960). While in Spanish director Víctor Erice’s quietly devastating Spirit of the......
Flicker Alley

Phantom

Paul Malcolm
Based on a magazine serial (later published in novel form) by Nobel Prize winner Gerhart Hauptmann, Phantom (1922), despite being one of F.W. Murnau’s minor films, is worthy of more attention than the best films of most. Production began on Phantom with most of its participants still riding high on......
Photo by Jesper Hm

Hunger

Paul Malcolm
In an extra on New Yorker Video’s DVD release of Danish director Henning Carlsen’s Hunger (1966), based on the novel by Norwegian Nobel Prize winner and later Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun, Hamsun’s granddaughter reads the book’s first line to author Paul Auster: “Those were the days when I wandered around......
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The Hidden Blade

Paul Malcolm
Over the course of his 40-year career, veteran Japanese filmmaker Yôji Yamada has become known for telling stories about the “little people” of feudal Japan. His most recent feature proves no different. A follow-up to Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai (2002) and part of a planned trilogy, The Hidden Blade (2004)......
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Born in '45

Paul Malcolm
Divorce, East German–style, is the starting point of Born in ’45, in which cowriter and director Jürgen Böttcher gradually pulls back from the young couple at the story’s center to reveal an entire restless postwar generation unwilling to commit. When maternity-ward nurse Lisa calls it quits with Alfred, a 23-year-old......
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Wanda

Paul Malcolm
Protégée (and, later, wife) to Elia Kazan, Barbara Loden left a modeling career for Hollywood fame, playing Warren Beatty’s fierce and wounded sister in Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961). A series of subsequent powerhouse Broadway turns established her as more than a pretty face, but Loden didn’t return to......
On Dangerous Ground (Warner Home Video)

Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 3

Paul Malcolm
Film noir has always embraced the eccentric, but Warner Bros. pushes the envelope with the third volume of its Film Noir Classic Collection. There are, to be sure, several certified classics among the five films in this box set (which also includes the documentary Film Noir: Bringing Darkness to Light)......
The stoners of Stoner Park

Cut Shorts

Paul Malcolm
Eclectic DVD recently brought a slice, or rather 20 slices, of Los Angeles underground-film history to light with its release of Cut Shorts:A Collection of Short Films and Music Videos by David Markey From 1974–2004. Markey, a Los Angeles native who started making Super-8 movies when he was 11, is......
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Anxious Animation

Paul Malcolm
The title of Other Cinema’s recently released collection of work by four avant-garde animators, Anxious Animation, doesn’t even begin to suggest the extent to which fears sexual, social, biological and spiritual course through the DVD’s 10 films. For these artists, anxiety itself is their true métier. Perhaps the best known......