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Ahead of the game’s release date on March 20th, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is unveiling two new animated shorts exclusively on Crunchyroll News. The animations by Sato Creative transport viewers to a vivid world based in feudal Japan, showcasing principal characters, Yasuke — a samurai based in historical legend — and Naoe, a stealthy and agile shinobi. The shorts give a brief look into the characters’ origin stories as the scene is set for a tale of vengeance, renewed purpose and shared destiny in the backdrop of the Iga Province. Assassin’s Creed Shadows marks more than 17 years of the long-standing Assassin’s Creed franchise. The game promises to give both Yasuke and Naoe equal narrative stake in the game, as well as allow the player the ability to swap between the contrasting play styles of both protagonists. Assassin's Creed Shadows Naoe Animated Short Assassin's Creed Shadows Yasuke Animated Short Creative Director Jérôme Perrillat Collomb,...

Premiering in the Cannes sidebar, Un Certain Regard, where it received a special mention for the best newcomer, Chie Hayakawa’s “Plan 75” is a slow-burning drama that pivots on the issue of the rapid-ageing of Japanese society. Set somewhere in the near future, Japan has managed to figure it all out – a titular system enabling to get rid of the elders, through a modus operandi that resembles a modern rendition of “Ballad of Narayama”, albeit as a form of peaceful, quiet, and more importantly, legally authorized by the government euthanasia that is supposed to become a counter-plan for a progressively ageing society. In Hayakawa’s reality of Japan, citizens 75 years old and above can apply for their chance and be dismissed in their last trip by one of the Plan 75 Company’s guides; with that, they can serve the nation as their final act of compliance.

Hayakawa’s “Plan 75...

Jasper Sharp is a writer, curator and filmmaker specialising in Japanese cinema, and co-founder of the Japanese film website Midnighteye.com. His book publications include The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (2003), joint-written with Tom Mes, Behind the Pink Curtain (2008) and The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Film (2011). He is the co-director of The Creeping Garden (2014), alongside Tim Grabham, a documentary about plasmodial slime moulds. He has programmed a number of high profile seasons and retrospectives with organisations including the British Film Institute, Deutches Filmmuseum, Austin Fantastic Fest, the Cinematheque Quebecois and Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

We spoke with Jasper no longer after his talk – in recent, more social times – on Ero Guro for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies in London, and we discussed about how he got sucked into the wild side of Japanese Cinema, the years of Midnight Eye, his latest passions and more.

Hi Jasper. In...

Well, not exactly the elderly, but the mature would be more accurate (over 45 if you prefer), since I felt that some performances could not be missing, despite the initial rule I have considered, of over 50. Furthermore, films like “Ikiru” and “An Autumn Afternoon” could definitely be included in this list, but I chose to list more contemporary films, with the oldest one being produced in the 80’s.

The reason for this list is the fact that I felt that the directors from Se Asia always had the ability to make the most out of actors of later age, in contrast to other regions, where the roles are mostly assigned to the young and “beautiful”, with Hollywood, evidently, holding the lion’s share. The reason behind this tendency may well be that countries like Japan and S. Korea have an aging population, but the fact remains, that quite frequently, impressive performances...

So deeply rooted in metaphor and allegory that it might as well be called “father!,” Alex and Andrew Smith’s “Walking Out” is a strong coming-of-age adventure that buries its vaguely biblical underpinnings beneath the heavy snows of a Jack London epic. Updated from a short story by naturalist David Quammen, it begins as a movie about the circle of life, and then thaws into a movie about survival. But while that might seem like a counterintuitive transition or even a contradiction in terms, this ruggedly elemental journey subsists on the raw knowledge that can be found in the space between the virtues we decide and the values we inherit. Many viewers could be left cold — especially as the Smith men track their characters with a hunter’s patience, and wait until the last possible moment to pull the trigger on the tragedy that defines them — but those interested in...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question: In honor of the Cannes Film Festival, the 70th edition of which starts this week, what is the best film to ever win the coveted Palme d’Or?

For a complete list of Palme d’Or winners, click here.

Erin Whitney (@Cinemabite), ScreenCrush

This question is impossible because I clearly haven’t seen all 40 Palme d’Or winners (it’s on my to do list, I swear). But I could easily say “Apocalypse Now,” “Paris, Texas,” “Taxi Driver,” “Amour,” or even “Pulp Fiction.” But since this is a personal question, I have to say “The Tree of Life.” No film has moved me...

Strand will focus on the history of Cannes for the festival’s 70th anniversary.

Cannes Film Festival (May 17-28) has unveiled the line-up for this year’s Classic programme, with 24 screenings set to take place alongside five documentaries and one short film.

Documentaries about cinema including Filmworker - which focuses of Stanley Kubrick’s right hand man Leon Vitali, who played a crucial role behind the scenes of the director’s films - as well as Cary Grant doc Becoming Cary Grant, are set to feature.

This year’s selection is also set to focus on the history of the festival itself, with prize-winning films such as Michelangelo Antonioni Grand 1966 Prix winning film Blow-Up and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) from 1952 screening.

Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 film Ai No Korîda (In The Realm Of The Senses/L’Empire Des Sens), Luis Buñuel’s 1967 classic Belle De Jour (Beauty Of The Day...

While Cannes Film Festival premieres some of the best new films of the year, they also have a rich history of highlighting cinema history with their Cannes Classics line-up, many of which are new restorations of films that previously premiered at the festival. This year they are taking that idea further, featuring 16 films that made history at the festival, along with a handful of others, and five new documentaries. So, if you can’t make it to Cannes, to get a sense of restorations that may come to your city (or on Blu-ray) in the coming months/years, check out the line-up below.

From 1946 to 1992, from René Clément to Victor Erice, sixteen history-making films of the Festival de Cannes

1946: La Bataille du Rail (Battle of the Rails) by René Clément (1h25, France): Grand Prix International de la mise en scène and Prix du Jury International.

Presented by Ina.

David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

Profound Desire(s) of the Gods is a sprawling, disturbing, ambitiously weird would-be epic about a clash of societies within the territorial boundaries of a rapidly modernizing Japan. It’s set on the fictional southern island of Karuge, where ancient tribal customs and animistic worship rituals still held most of the inhabitants in a strong (though inevitably loosening) grip. The narrative conflict stems from outsiders who want to convert the arable land into a sugar cane plantation and exploit the island’s inherent value as a tourist destination. But the forces of commerce and technological efficiency are ill-prepared to deal with the stubborn resiliency of the people they encounter, or the baffling complex of myths and taboos that compel them.

The film was a major throw down by Shohei Imamura, a director who had achieved enough commercial success with his...

With the exception of several crowd-pleasing samurai epics (like Zatoichi and Three Outlaw Samurai) and a few bargain-priced historical costume dramas (such as The Ballad of Narayama and Gate of Hell), the flow of newly released Japanese art films by the Criterion Collection has slowed to a trickle over the past five years or so. (And for the sake of politeness and avoiding pointless controversy, I won’t invoke Jellyfish Eyes in this argument either.) We’ve obviously enjoyed a steady stream of chanbara, Ozu and especially Kurosawa Blu-ray upgrades during this past half-decade, and there have been several outstanding Japanese sets recently issued as part of the Eclipse Series as well, but we really haven’t seen much else along these lines in the main lineup since Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko came out in the fall of 2011. That’s over 200 spine numbers ago! But I’m happy to report...

For the Trees: Zada’s Moody Locale Squandered by Feeble Narrative

We’ve come to expect studios to unbosom their less desirable horror trinkets during the dawning of every new year, and the annual tradition is alive and well with the equivocally titled The Forest from first time director Jason Zada. On a positive note, it’s a return to more traditional formatting, a move away from the found footage items we usually find released in this quarter (The Devil Inside; Devil’s Due), and it’s also not a remake or a dubious sequel (The Last Exorcism Part II). But Zada’s film is the second English language film revealed over the past year to waste its singularly spooky locale, Japan’s Aokigahara Forest at the base of Mt. Fuji (the first being Gus Van Sant’s Cannes blooper, Sea of Trees, which may explain this horror film’s...

Here are CriterionCast, we receive many, many discs for review consideration. We try to roll out full reviews when we can, offering analyses of the films in the context of their time as well as their relevance today. But sometimes you get a box set of eight films and just don’t have the time. But given that The Shohei Imamura Masterpiece Collection is a limited edition, meant to make these films available one last time before all of them go out of print from Masters of Cinema, we felt it important to write a bit about them, and let people know what a fantastic deal this is.

The set is currently being offered for £37.99 on Amazon.co.uk, and, having skimmed through the release (I’ve seen a couple of these before, but so long ago I hardly remember them), I can easily say this is one of the...

Tis Better to Give: Noyce’s Adaptation Too Little Too Late in Ya Dystopic Cinema

In today’s onslaught of dystopic film franchises dominated by adaptations of young adult novels, the announcement that Philip Noyce would be resurrecting Lois Lowry’s Newberry Medal winning 1993 title The Giver seemed to make perfect sense. But in today’s cluttered market of similar scenarios, the powerful allegory that initially made Lowry’s text such a lasting achievement seems cheapened by the glossy, over baked screen version that seems more medicated than the anesthetized minds of its characters.

After some kind of unexplained happening that nearly resulted in the end of civilization, a band of elders of the surviving peoples have managed to erase all memory and start from scratch, creating a rather rigid yet positively inclined utopia. All citizens live in units, are assigned to jobs and families based on talents and needs,...

Of his seven feature length films, it’s hard to pinpoint which serves as the best entry into the visual poetry of Andrei Tarkovsky, arguably one of the cinema’s authorial titans of the past century. That said, his 1983 feature, Nostalghia, which was his first to be filmed outside the confines of the Soviet Union, may not be the wisest choice for the unprepared, but it’s certainly an unparalleled viewing experience. Though comprehending it’s somewhat impenetrable meaning feels akin to looking through a glass darkly, our earthly interpretations somehow seeming rudimentary when crafted into mere synopsis.

A Russian poet, Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky) has been living in Italy for the past two years, separated from wife and children back home as he researches the life of an 18th century Russian composer named Pavel Sosnovsky, a man that left Russia to live in Italy, only to return to his homeland and hang himself.

Amazon is having a massive sale on Criterion Collection titles, virtually all of them listed at 50% off and I have included more than 115 of the available titles directly below along with a selection of ten I consider must owns. Titles beyond my top ten include Amarcord, Christopher Nolan's Following, David Fincher's The Game, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and The Killing, Roman Polansk's Rosemary's Baby, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited and plenty of Terrence Malick. All the links lead directly to the Amazon website, so click on through with confidence. Small Note: By buying through the links below you help support RopeofSilicon.com as I get a small commission for the sales made through using these links. Thanks for reading and I appreciate your support. Top Ten Must Owns 8 1/2 (dir. Federico Fellini) 12 Angry Men (dir. Sidney Lumet) The 400 Blows (dir.

Amazon is having a massive sale on Criterion Collection titles, virtually all of them listed at 50% off and I have included more than 115 of the available titles directly below along with a selection of ten I consider must owns. Titles beyond my top ten include Amarcord, Christopher Nolan's Following, David Fincher's The Game, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and The Killing, Roman Polansk's Rosemary's Baby, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited and plenty of Terrence Malick. All the links lead directly to the Amazon website, so click on through with confidence. Small Note: By buying through the links below you help support RopeofSilicon.com as I get a small commission for the sales made through using these links. Thanks for reading and I appreciate your support. Top Ten Must Owns 8 1/2 (dir. Federico Fellini) 12 Angry Men (dir. Sidney Lumet) The 400 Blows (dir.

Ebertfest was a blast this year, with a memorable and moving program of 12 films, 2 short films, several panels, and many surprises spread out over 5 days at the Virginia Theatre (and Illini Union) in Champaign, Il. Join guests Steve Prokopy from AICN, Aaron Pinkston from Battleship Pretension, and Andrew Stengele from Ebertfest and Forced Perspective Entertainment as they break down the festival with TV Editor Kate Kulzick.

Opening thoughts

In the Family (16:28)

Days of Heaven (24:51)

Escape From Tomorrow (29:10)

Vincent: the Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh (and Tilda Swinton’s Dance Party) (39:09)

Bernie (44:50)

Julia (50:24)

Oslo, August 31st (57:57)

The Spectacular Now (1:02:45)

Blancanieves (1:16:21)

The Ballad of Narayama (1:16:58)

Not Yet Begun to Fight (1:21:02)

Kumaré (1:26:42)

Closing thoughts (1:37:08-end)...

The last day of Ebertfest was a thankfully calm and contemplative one. With only one screening at noon, there was plenty of time to sleep in and grab breakfast before heading back to the Virginia Theatre one more time. The day started with a video essay by Kevin Lee[/link] B. that was filmed at last year’s festival and paid tribute to Roger Ebert and his international impact. “Sight and Sound Poll: Roger Ebert’s Favorite Films” features younger critics and filmmakers from all over the world reading parts from Roger’s reviews of four of his favorite films, the four films to remain consistent between his first Sight and Sound poll list and his last. It’s a sweet essay and it was a nice way to kick off the final day of the festival.

Next up was the final film of the festival, Not Yet Begun to Fight,...

After a late day three (the Q&A didn’t get out until about midnight), many of the attendees to Ebertfest, myself included, were a bit on the sluggish side this morning. The first screening was set for 11am, which hardly seems early on paper, but for anyone catching up with friends at the festival or, in my case, writing up articles into the wee hours, 11am came a bit too soon. Honestly, many of us probably were not in a particularly good headspace to approach our first screening of the day, the silent, black and white film Blancanieves.

Fortunately, as can happen at Ebertfest, we were treated to a surprise when, rather than starting with the customary introduction to the first film, Chaz Ebert came on stage and announced that, inspired by Tilda Swinton, we were kicking things off with some dancing in the aisles. Barry White’s “My First,...

After the surprising thematic unity of day two of Ebertfest (the four films screened explored similar topics), with day three’s picks Roger Ebert seemed more interested in exploring contradictions. The day began with director Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st, a Norwegian film that follows a recovering drug addict, Anders, over the course of his day. Anders has two weeks left in his rehabilitation facility outside the city and is given a day’s leave so he can go to Oslo for a job interview. The film rides along peacefully with Anders over this day, allowing the audience to sit with him, trying to piece together a picture of this rather complicated man; who he is, who he was, and how he got where he is. It doesn’t seek to give answers, rather it embraces the reality that for many addicts, there isn’t one triggering factor or illuminating insight.

I've mentioned before how several years ago I created a list using Roger Ebert's Great Movies, Oscar Best Picture winners, IMDb's Top 250, etc. and began going through them doing my best to see as many of the films on these lists that I had not seen as I possibly could to up my film I.Q. Well, someone has gone through the exhaustive effort to take all of the films Roger Ebert wrote about in his three "Great Movies" books, all of which are compiled on his website and added them to a Letterbxd list and I've added that list below. I'm not positive every movie on his list is here, but by my count there are 363 different titles listed (more if you count the trilogies, the Up docs and Decalogue) and of those 363, I have personally seen 229 and have added an * next to those I've seen. Clearly I have some work to do,...

I've mentioned before how several years ago I created a list using Roger Ebert's Great Movies, Oscar Best Picture winners, IMDb's Top 250, etc. and began going through them doing my best to see as many of the films on these lists that I had not seen as I possibly could to up my film I.Q. Well, someone has gone through the exhaustive effort to take all of the films Roger Ebert wrote about in his three "Great Movies" books, all of which are compiled on his website and added them to a Letterbxd list and I've added that list below. I'm not positive every movie on his list is here, but by my count there are 362 different titles listed (more if you count the trilogies and Decalogue) and of those 362, I have personally seen 229 and have added an * next to those I've seen. Clearly I have some work to do,...

With nothing new in theaters worth getting excited about my head has been all over the (time) map of cinema. I picked this year somewhat arbitrarily to discuss.

Were you alive in 1983? Even if you weren't do you think of it fondly? To give you a little context for the year: Ronald Reagan was Potus and Nancy had just contributed "Just Say No" to the vernacular; M*A*S*H ended its lengthy run on television; Michael Jackson's "Thriller" was all anybody listened to; Cheers and Hill Street Blues were the Emmy champs.

Let's savor 1983's cinematic crop for a moment. Are these movies (and people) and things aging well? Is there much left to savor? 

Best Movies According To...

Oscar: The Big Chill, The Dresser, Tender Mercies, Terms of Endearment, and The Right Stuff were the best pictures nominees but they also loved Cross Creek, Fanny & Alexander, Educating Rita,...

Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1958 classic The Ballad of Narayama gets the Criterion treatment, an experimental film featuring the use of one of Japan’s signature cultural styles, Kabuki Theater, despite its cultural popularity still on the wane post-World War II. But with its exaggeration and extreme stylization, Kinoshita taps into the tragic, melancholy heart of this fable concerning abandonment of the elderly as a socially sanctioned tradition of necessity, as developed by poverty stricken ancestors.

Based on a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa, a subsequent adaptation from new wave Japanese auteur Shohei Imamura was released in 1983, a more horrific and grisly treatment of the source text. But Kinoshita’s kabuki opera, with its grand flourishes and over the top nature still manages to touch on the horrors of inhumane practices, made all the more powerful with a moving lead performance and the haunting score and narration, reminding us constantly of impending death...

The Ballad of Narayama (1958) is the first film of Japanese director Kinoshita Keisuke's season as part of the Melbourne Cinematheque program. Running from February 13-27, his retrospective of conservative post-war films highlights a Japan in crisis, but through expertly mixing different genres he voids an iconoclastic approach, instead favoring traditionalism in a modernist setting, despite what effects that has on the society. The Ballad of Narayama is essentially a parable of age. This sharp melodrama tells the story of a remote village in Japan's feudal period. With a drastic food shortage on their hands, a cruel but logical edict states that anyone who turns 70 is expected to be carried by a relative to the top of Mount Narayama to perish. The remarkable Tanaka Kinuyo...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

This month the Criterion Collection has an eclectic mix heading to Blu-ray and DVD, reminding us once again just how fun their mission to preserve the best and most important works of classic and contemporary cinema can be. In one corner you have the Japanese classics The Ballad of Narayama, by Director Shôhei Imamura, and Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff. In another you have the lauded, and 8 Academy Award-winning On the Waterfront by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Karl Malden. And finally, in the third corner we turn to France for two films separated by 50 years: Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, and 2011's The Kid with a Bike, a powerful drama by Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, with one of the best performances by a child actor in recent memory.

For details on all of these releases, keep reading.

Read more...

Peter Pan (Diamond Edition) Disney is releasing their classic animated adaptation of Peter Pan on Blu-ray this week and looking over the complete selection of titles hitting shelves today this really looks to be the best of the lot. Granted, Criterion has The Ballad of Narayama coming out and the next title does interest me, but overall this is just not a week to be buying movies.

 

House of Cards Trilogy: The Original UK Series Along with releasing the new miniseries "House of Cards" on Netflix Instant last Friday, Netflix also has the complete original BBC adaptation streaming online. So why would you spend money to buy the Blu-ray edtion? I really don't know, but it's coming out and I've heard it's great. So if you can find the time, maybe stroll on over to Netflix and add it to your queue as well or if you have deep pockets purchase it.

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Feb. 5, 2013

Price: DVD $19.95, Blu-ray $29.95

Studio: Criterion

Kinuyo Tanaka wishes happiness for her son in The Ballad of Narayama.

The 1958 film drama The Ballad of Narayama is a haunting, kabuki-inflected version of a Japanese folk legend directed by Keisuke Kinoshita (Twenty-four Eyes).

The tale is set in a remote mountain village, where food is scarce and tradition dictates that citizens who have reached their seventieth year must be carried to the summit of Mount Narayama and left there to die. The sacrificial elder at the center of the tale is Orin (Ugetsu’s Kinuyo Tanaka), a dignified and dutiful woman who spends her dwindling days securing the happiness of her loyal widowed son with a respectable new wife.

Filmed almost entirely on cunningly designed studio sets, in vivid color and widescreen, The Ballad of Narayama is a stylish and vividly formal work by the dynamic Knoshita, one...

14th Mumbai Film Festival (Mff) announced its complete lineup today in a press conference. Mff will be held from October 18th to 25th at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Ncpa) and Inox, Nariman Point, Liberty Cinemas, Marine Lines as the main festival venues and Cinemax, Andheri and Cinemax Sion as the satellite venues. Click here to watch trailers and highlights from the festival.

Here is the complete list of films to be screened during the festival (October 18-25)

International Competition for the First Feature Films of Directors

1. From Tuesday To Tuesday (De Martes A Martes)

Dir.: Gustavo Fernandez Triviño (Argentina / 2012 / Col. / 111′)

2. The Last Elvis (El Último Elvis)

Dir.: Armando Bo (Argentina / 2012 / Col. / 91′)

3. The Sapphires

Dir.: Wayne Blair (Australia / 2012 / Col. / 103′)

4. The Wall (Die Wand)

Dir.: Julian Pölsler (Austria-Germany / 2012 / Col. / 108′)

5. Teddy Bear (10 timer til Paradis)

Dir.: Mads Matthiesen (Denmark / 2012 / Col. / 93′)

6. Augustine

Dir.: Alice Winccour (France / 2012 / Col.

As we all know, “Palme d’Or” is French for Feather Button Hand of Gold Achievement. Or something. Google Translate wasn’t loading this morning. Regardless, it’s as prestigious as awards get, although it hilariously almost never lines up with the Oscars (for good reason). Past winners include Barton Fink, Taxi Driver, Mash, The Third Man, Black Orpheus, La Dolce Vita, The Wind That Shakes the Barley and nearly one hundred other films that should be on a rental queue somewhere. That list also includes Michael Haneke‘s The White Ribbon which took the price in 2009 and, as of yesterday, his latest film Love (Amour). That’s 2 wins for the director in 4 competition years. It ties him for Most Palmes d’Or Ever (no director has won more than two), where he joins Alf Sjoberg (Iris and the Lieutenant, Miss Julie); Francis Ford Coppola (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now); Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror, The Best Intentions...

Amour: director Michael Haneke, Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Louis Trintignant The Cannes Film Festival 2012‘s Palme d’Or winner? Well, though the two — critical raves, Palme d’Or — don’t always go hand in hand, the most widely acclaimed presentation at Cannes this year was Michael Haneke‘s tale of love and death, Amour / Love, starring veterans Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert. So, I’m betting on Amour. [See also Cannes 2012: Best Actor Predictions; Cannes 2012: Best Actress Predictions; several Amour review snippets; the French-language Amour trailer.] In case Amour does take home the Palme d’Or, that’ll be Michael Haneke’s second win in three years: Haneke’s The White Ribbon, about Germany’s Nazi generation (long before they became Nazis), received Cannes’ top prize in 2009. That would also be a record-breaking small gap between Palme d’Ors: Bille August had to wait four years (Pelle the Conqueror, 1988; The Best Intentions, 1992); Francis Ford Coppola five years (The Conversation, 1974; Apocalypse Now, 1979, tied with Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum...

Robert De Niro, Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock and Roberto Rossellini top the bill of the Cannes Classics wing devoted to restored prints of old classics

The starriest sidebar at Cannes was unveiled today, with the likes of Robert De Niro, Roman Polanski, Jerry Lewis, Alfred Hitchcock and Roberto Rossellini topping the bill. They've all got films scheduled in the Cannes Classics wing devoted to restored prints of old classics, and created in 2004 "as the relationship between contemporary cinema and its own memory was disrupted by the advent of the digital age".

Thirteen features, two shorts, a mini-concert and four documentaries – all world premieres – are on the bill, including the previously announced restored and extended print of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, which has been overseen by Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro, Elizabeth McGovern and Jennifer Connelly, who star in the film, will attend, alongside the Leone family.

Looks like no day this week is going to go by without a big announcement from Cannes. Today's is the lineup for Cannes Classics, a program created in 2004 "showcasing restored prints of classic films and masterpieces of film history." From May 16 through 27, the program will be featuring "13 feature films, two shorts, a mini-concert and four documentaries. All these films will be world premieres."

Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Running 245 minutes, this newly restored version with 25 minutes of additional scenes is based on Leone's original cut. "This restoration was requested by Martin Scorsese. The screening will be attended by Robert De Niro, Elizabeth McGovern, Jennifer Connelly, producer Arnon Milchan (which also has a small role in the film) and, of course, the Leone family."

Roman Polanski's Tess (1979). Polanski supervised the restoration and, with Nastassja Kinski, will attend the screening.

Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975). Newly restored in...

Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label recently put out Shôhei Imamura’s stunning The Ballad of Narayama on Blu-ray and they’re following up that with The Insect Woman on 20th February. As an extra bonus they’re also including the rare early film by Imamura, Nishi-ginza Station. We’ve been sent over disc details, synopsis, the cover art, you [...]...

"After a period in which versions of Austen hogged our screens, the Brontës have fought back," writes Boyd Tonkin in a piece for the Independent that begins, by the way, with a brief but rousing history of Charlotte's detestation of Jane Austen. "Released today, Andrea Arnold's savagely uncompromising Wuthering Heights joins a line of adaptations of Emily's only surviving novel that began in 1920 (a lost work by Av Bramble) and went on to include renderings from directors as varied as William Wyler — with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon still the ranking Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw to many fans — and Yoshishige Yoshida, Luis Buñuel and Jacques Rivette. Earlier this year, Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska as the uncowed governess and Michael Fassbender the sulphurous Mr Rochester, offered a rather smoother ride through another much-adapted book, albeit one that shares with Arnold — and the Brontës — a rapt attention...

A sequel to The Ballad of Narayama by Imamura's son Daisuke Tengan: the old women sent up the mountain to die instead plan a revenge attack on the village below.

In 1983, Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad Of Narayama saw a Japanese village’s long-held laws decree that its elders must die when they turn 70. This ensured there were enough resources for the up and coming generations to survive until it was their turn. The film was based on a novel by Schichiro Fukazawa and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Dendera is a sequel of sorts, based on a Yuya Sato book but...

Welcome back to the biggest edition of This Week In DVD yet! Twenty two titles are covered below, but this isn’t just a matter of quantity. All but one of the releases are worth watching, with a whopping seven of them being solid Buy recommendations. This week’s releases run the gamut from comic book blockbusters (Captain America) to docs on Pearl Jam and Peter Gabriel (Twenty and New Blood) to a controversial black comedy (A Serbian Film) to a Finnish family holiday film (Rare Exports) to a thrilling Hong Kong action flick (Fire of Conscience) to… well, you get the idea. As always, if you see something you like, click on the image to buy it. The Ballad of Narayama (UK) A small village in the Japanese mountains is the setting for this rumination on life, death and family that plays like the movie The Tree of Life should have been but with a narrative...

Dispatches are beginning to come in from this year's Vancouver International Film Festival, which opened on Thursday and runs through October 14. I'll be collecting notes and links here.

"I wasn't sure how much I was going to be able to take of Markus Schleinzer's Michael, at first, given that it begins as the Jeanne Dielman of Austrian kidnapper-pedophile movies," writes Jim Emerson. Fortunately, once the opening title appears on the screen it gets better…. Oddly, just before I came to Vancouver I watched the documentary, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, which detailed how the director labored to transfer the audiences ambivalent sympathies for the shower-slaughtered Marion Crane to the mother-hen-pecked son and motel manager Norman Bates, who finds himself in the position of having to clean up after his mother's mess. There's none of that in Michael — not a bit of audience-implicating suspense that he might slip up and get caught,...

Eureka! Entertainment announced their full slate of home video releases for 2011 on Tuesday, and I haven't had the time to update you guys yet, but here we go!  There are a ton of exciting titles on tap, as usual Masters of Cinema leads the way with two from Shohei Imamura, Ballad of Narayama and A Man Vanishes, there is also Sci-fi classic Silent Running, and the world DVD premiere (by two days) of Charles Laughton's long unavailable Universal horror, Island of Lost Souls.  The film has never been available on legitimate DVD and has recently been restored, so this is exciting news!  Also available for the first time on Blu-ray is Orson Welles classic noir, Touch of Evil.  Masters of Cinema is only one...

Nagoya TV Next has uploaded a trailer for Daisuke Tengan’s Dendera to their channel on YouTube.

Tengan is the eldest son of director Shohei Imamura, whose film The Ballad of Narayama won the Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. It told the story of a remote village which avoided the potential burden of caring for the elderly by banishing them to the top of a nearby mountain to die when they reached the age of 70.

Based on a 2009 novel by Yuya Sato, Dendera covers the same topic from a completely different angle. In the film, 50 elderly women who were abandoned and left to die on “Old Lady Mountain” manage to survive the harsh conditions by banding together and forming a village called “Dendera”. Some of them simply want to live out their final days in peace, while others want revenge against the villagers and family members that abandoned them.

At Cannes, there are two kinds of movies that take home the top jury prize, the droolingly coveted Palme d’Or. There are the films that deserve it, like Taxi Driver or The Ballad of Narayama or sex, lies, and videotape or 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. And there are the movies that achieve a notably facile, Euro-friendly brand of total heaviosity, and are therefore shoo-ins. You probably think that I’m just finding a snarky way to dismiss the Palme d’Or winners I haven’t agreed with. But I’d contend that the celebrated Cannes films in the total-heaviosity category,...

AnimEigo has released a massive DVD box set titled Japan at the War. The set compiles four previously released AnimEigo titles with the intent of providing a Japanese perspective on the Second World War. Kihachi Okamoto's Japan's Longest Day (1967) and Battle of Okinawa (1971) are featured as are Kosaku Yamashita's Father of the Kamikaze (1974) and Shohei Imamura's highly acclaimed Black Rain (1988). Detailed synopses (courtesy of AnimEigo) and full technical specs are featured below.

Japan's Longest Day

On August 15th, 1945, the Japanese people faced utter destruction.  Millions of soldiers and civilians were dead, the rest were starving, and their cities had been reduced to piles of rubble--two of them vaporized by atomic bombs. The government was deadlocked.  To break the impasse, the cabinet took the unprecedented step of asking the Emperor to decide the fate of the nation.  Toshiro Mifune leads an all-star cast in a powerful film about...