Missing (Costa-Gavras)
Le Doulos (Melville)
Le Deuxieme Souffle (Melville)

and Eclipse 13 Mizoguchi including Sisters of the Gion, Osaka Elegy, Street of Shame and Women of the Night.


More Melville is great and though I'm ambivalent about Mizoguchi it's good to have more available. Missing is a headscratcher since it's hard for me to imagine anybody taking it seriously but there ya are.

I just watched MISSING a few months ago, and was deeply moved by Costa-Gavras' direction and Jack Lemmon's performance. I thought the DVD looked just fine, but I imagine Criterion will assemble some extras that detail the real live incident upon which MISSING is based. For some reason, I had never gotten around to watching MISSING before, but it hasn't dated, and its messages are certainly as timely as ever.

Interesting. I haven't seen it and am only vaguely familiar with Costa-Gavras, but I've rarely seen MISSING spoken of with anything other than respect, and my impression is it's nothing if not serious. Any general, reasonably spoiler-free reasons you could quickly sketch for your not taking it seriously? Just curious.

Exciting news about LE DOULOS, which I've been looking forward to seeing again for a good 15 years. It's the only "Melville" Melville film I've seen (SILENCE OF THE SEA and LEON MORIN, PRETRE seem cut from a different cloth entirely, and LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES is more Cocteau, sorry) I'm not mostly ambivalent about, and it's got Paul Misraki's snazziest score.

Should have kept my opinions out of a news item post but yes Missing is indeed a serious film but in my definitely minority opinion it was heavy-handed, unimaginatively made and politically dubious (since the story--in the film, not real life--is based on an idea of American exceptionalism). But maybe my reaction to the news is more that I thought the film had faded into obscurity and didn't realize there was enough support for it to have a Criterion release (then again seems to me a fair number of Criterion releases don't deserve to be "Criterion releases").

Perhaps MISSING (which holds up fairly well) heralds additional Criterion Costa Gavras releases, like Z, which has only been on LD, and THE SLEEPING CAR MURDER.

Actually, Z was released by Fox Lorber on DVD and is currently out of print. While I have it in my collection, a Criterion Collection edition would be a most welcome.

Hey, if HOPSCOTCH (which I kinda enjoyed) can get a Criterion release, then just about anything can. I mean, who cares about HOPSCOTCH? :huh:

Marty, crack open a Zima because we actually agree on something. MISSING is an elegant expose/thriller about an ugly American secret. I watched it recently for work (I have no memory of what that work was) and thought it held up exceptionally well. 1981 may be the last year for stripped down but still artful cinema, before the onslaught of hyperdrive cinema (some of it very good, a lot of it not) of 1982 and beyond. And there are a lot of fine Mexican actors in the film, too, including ALUCARDA herself.

I don't see four horsemen flying past my window yet...

I recently bought the Russian R0 NTSC version of LA DEUXIEMME SOUFFLE, which has an anamorphic (so-so) transfer.

It's the Guariento factor all over again. :D

Buy an inferior version of a title, et voila, Criterion will announce the immiment release of the same title - with a boatload of extras - anon. :lol:

Dude, give it up - we totally know it's you. :ph43r:

I had to mull that one over for a second.

Funny stuff, JEFFREY! :)

I hate my all-caps thing - it looked ok on the old board. If there's a way to change it, I can't figure it out.

Those caps should be mine! MINE!

NOOOOOO! MINE!

Well, that's another case all together.

. . . a Costa-Gavras that seems to have been pretty much forgotten is STATE OF SIEGE (1973), with a great central performance by Yves Montand as a CIA agent in Uruguay who is held captive by leftist guerrillas - very controversial in its day (might still be) this one came out at a time when it could play for weeks and weeks at a local cinema; probably the perfect film for Criterion to bring back into the world . . .

It has been a while since I watched Z but it was part of the Wellspring's Masterworks Edition DVDs, as was RAN, and was one of the few Fox Lorber/Wellspring discs, IMO, that received a decent transfer.

Monsters at Play noted that Z's transfer "compares well with some of Criterion's treatments of similar landmark films." It's 16x9, though I don't know if it's progressively scanned or a PAL to NTSC transfer, and I remember it looking particularly impressive.

http://www.dvd-basen.dk/uk/home.php3?searc...&land=%25&ok=go