As the calendar year comes to a close, it’s time to share our annual Top Ten home video releases. As always, this is not so much a list of our favorite movies newly available in 2023, but rather reflects the “best of home video 2023”—and as such great emphasis is placed on packages that offer valuable extras, and new releases of notable films which were previously hard to find or otherwise obscure. And here they are:
After Dark, My Sweet: This nifty little neo-noir from 1990, based on a Jim Thompson novel, features Jason Patrick, Rachel Ward, and Bruce Dern, and as Roger Ebert wrote, “the story is so intimate that everything depends on the performances.” Which are impeccable. As he also observed, the movie “eluded audiences” at the time and “has been almost forgotten,” yet it “remains one of the purest and most uncompromising of modern films noir.” Extras on the Kino Lorber Blu Ray include audio commentary by director James Foley.
La Cérémonie: Mid Century Cinema favorite Claude Chabrol enjoyed a spectacular late-career run, and this 1995 film was among his most well-received entries from that era—and one whose reputation has only increased as history has caught up to its edgy elements of class consciousness. Featuring the invariably outstanding Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire (as well as Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Cassel), this new Criterion edition features a generous helping of extras, including an introduction by Korean auteur Bong Jung Hu, who routinely cites Chabrol and La Cérémonie as important influences on his widely acclaimed Parasite.
Columbo: The great television production, previously available in bare bones DVD sets, has been upgraded in this very fine Blu Ray collection. Columbo – both the production and the detective – is not to be underestimated, anticipating, by decades, the emergence of high quality television drama. Rarely disappointing, its often sky-high quality was the result of the tenacity and perfectionism of Peter Falk, the talented directors often attached (Steven Spielberg, Ben Gazzara, and Jonathan Demme to name a few) and a cavalcade of legendary guest performers too numerous to mention.
Early Short films of the French New Wave: In part due to the limited opportunities for emerging filmmakers imposed by the hidebound rigidities of the postwar production system in France, many young directors turned to the opportunities afforded by documentaries and shorts. Eighteen of the latter, all produced by New Wave impresario Pierre Braunberger, are collected here, including those by future legends Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Agnes Varda, and Maurice Pialat. The giddy exuberance of these “the gang’s all here” productions (Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol all show up in Rivette’s Fool’s Mate) is infectious.
Interrogation: Second Run DVD continues to impress with its restorations of brilliant-but-under-distributed gems from Eastern Europe, films often produced under oppressive censorship regimes. Ryszard Bugajski’s Interrogation, produced in 1982 but promptly banned and unscreened until 1989 (a month after the Berlin Wall fell), is an astonishing effort. I’m not sure I would, um, recommend it – Michał Oleszczyk accurately describes it as “unrelentingly brutal” and I can hear my mother-in-law saying “why do I need to see such things?” – but it is quite something, and will likely to work its way into our “A Cinema of Dissent” seminar. Interrogation can be described as a feminist version of The Confession, and is distinguished by the performance of Krystyna Janda, who also contributed important revisions to the screenplay.
Mean Streets: A bit of an MCC double dip with this one, as it already landed on our Best Films of 1973 list—but that was before Criterion let loose with this sparkling special edition, and the story is worth repeating: Scorsese screens his Boxcar Bertha for John Cassavetes, who gives him a big hug and tells him “you just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit,” and urged him to make movies that he believed in. And so Marty dusted off his draft “Season of the Witch,” which became Mean Streets. Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro and essential rock music, are featured in a career-making film that looked back at Who’s That Knocking at My Door and gestured towards the visual style of Taxi Driver. Pauline Kael saw “a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking,” with an “unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emotional range that is dizzyingly sensual”—and the rest, as they say, is history.
One False Move: We just wrote about Carl Franklin’s breakthrough feature in the winter 2023 Cineaste: “A deeply affecting, perceptive, character-driven drama in the guise of a crime thriller.” “Impeccably structured and superbly paced,” it is “one of the great films of the 1990s.” So rather than repeating ourselves, we’ll had it over to Gene Siskel (“a brilliant detective thriller that . . . demands to be seen right away”) and Janet Maslin (despite working within “the idiom of a conventional crime story . . . Mr. Franklin delivers the kind of symmetry, surprise and detail that easily transcend the limits of the genre.”) If you can endure the violence of the first eight minutes (no mean feat—a preview screening for friends was characterized by a parade of walk-outs), you will witness a great and distinctly American film.
There’s No Tomorrow: It is always a pleasure to discover a new (to us) film by Max Ophüls, one of the all-time greats. Ophüls, who fled Germany after the Reichstag fire in 1933 and then fled France when the Nazis arrived there, is best known for the masterpieces he made in the U.S. in the 1940s (such as The Reckless Moment) and in France in the 1950s (including The Earrings of Madame de . . .). There’s No Tomorrow (1939) is no masterpiece (indeed, it’s a bit of a soap opera, and I would not have been able to call out the director’s signature style in a blind taste test). But this very fine restoration is nevertheless most welcome, and is bracingly frank, especially with its opening scenes (who knew?) and pitch black ending.
Three Days of the Condor: It’s no secret that Condor, directed by Sydney Pollack, shot by Owen Roizman, and distinguished by prodigious performances from Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway and Max von Sydow, is one of our favorite films—we included it on our Sight and Sound ballot for the ten greatest films of all time, and recently wrote about its four spectacular closing scenes. So we were quick to snap up this special edition, a new 4K scan of the original 35mm negative, with extras including commentary by Pollack. (Spoiler alert: we have a feature essay on Condor coming this spring.)
The Trial: A must-have for any cinephile. Orson Welles’ interpretation of the Kafka classic is, in his words, ”much closer to my own feelings about everything than any other picture I’ve ever made.” With Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Akim Tamiroff and Welles himself, The Trial is also distinguished by its stunning locations (mostly in Croatia, but also, notably, in an abandoned Paris railway station) and its wildly ambitious and inventive shooting style. For Guillermo del Toro, “The Trial is as remarkable and rewatchable as any of the other Welles masterpieces.” Indeed, like a Velvet Underground album, Welles’ film may have been seen be a very few—but most of those who saw it were hooked (like Richard Lester, who lifted one shot for a Hard Day’s Night). Copious extras include a delightful mealtime conversation, in English and French, between Welles and Moreau.