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Man's Castle.“When you’re dead, you get a hunk of earth. When you’re alive, all you’ve got is that hunk of blue.” This is how Bill (Spencer Tracy), the restless hero of Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (1933), explains his insistence on sleeping under the open sky. Borzage’s films always cast their eyes heavenward with exalted sincerity; they offer no sop to modern irony or cynicism. No one should watch them who is not prepared to be enraptured.The essence of Borzage’s romanticism resides in the enchanted spaces his lovers create together: sometimes a semi-permanent home, like the Parisian garret in 7th Heaven (1927), at other times a fleeting idyll of shared fantasy, like the abandoned plantation mansion where the outcast couple in Moonrise (1948) waltz amid the shadows and cobwebs. These magical playhouses are spaces of care and refuge as much as dreamy eroticism; in Man’s Castle,...

New Foreign

“Parasite” is an often-brutal examination of wealth inequality, and yet its Best Picture win still counts as one of the few universally uplifting moments that 2020 had to offer. This Blu-ray release from The Criterion Collection arrives fully-loaded with extras, including director Bong Joon Ho’s black-and-white rendering of the film — anything but an afterthought, it’s a version that he and cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong had in mind all along — commentaries, interviews, and a new essay from onetime TheWrap film critic Inkoo Kang.

Also available: Cameroonian college students get pulled into the dark web to pull a “Scam République” (IndiePix); anime saga “Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna” (Shout/Toei) celebrates the franchise’s 20th anniversary; “Three Comrades” (IndiePix) go out to unwind on a Friday night and wind up on an unexpected spree.

Chilean stop-motion feature “The Wolf House” (KimStim) uses unsettling visuals to spin a fable about the...

Robert Redford: 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Way We Were' tonight on Turner Classic Movies Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month Robert Redford returns this evening with three more films: two Sydney Pollack-directed efforts, Out of Africa and The Way We Were, and Jack Clayton's film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby. (See TCM's Robert Redford film schedule below. See also: "On TCM: Robert Redford Movies.") 'The Great Gatsby': Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby Released by Paramount Pictures, the 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby had prestige oozing from just about every cinematic pore. The film was based on what some consider the greatest American novel ever written. Francis Ford Coppola, whose directing credits included the blockbuster The Godfather, and who, that same year, was responsible for both The Godfather Part II and The Conversation, penned the adaptation. Multiple Tony winner David Merrick (Becket,...

Robert Redford: 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Way We Were' tonight on Turner Classic Movies Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month Robert Redford returns this evening with three more films: two Sydney Pollack-directed efforts, Out of Africa and The Way We Were, and Jack Clayton's film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby. (See TCM's Robert Redford film schedule below. See also: "On TCM: Robert Redford Movies.") 'Out of Africa' Out of Africa (1985) is an unusual Robert Redford star vehicle in that the film's actual lead isn't Redford, but Meryl Streep -- at the time seen as sort of a Bette Davis-Alec Guinness mix: like Davis, Streep received a whole bunch of Academy Award nominations within the span of a few years: from 1978-1985, she was shortlisted for no less than six movies.* Like Guinness, Streep could transform...

The Late George Apley

"If I am remembered at all, it will be as the swine who rewrote Scott Fitzgerald," said Joseph L. Mankiewicz on numerous occasions, and though he does rate a mention in any Fitzgerald bio for his work revising Fitzgerald's screenplay of Three Comrades, he is also getting a sidebar retrospective, The Essential Iconoclast, at the New York Film Festival. Apart from including his several acknowledged classics, this also shines a light on some of the less celebrated movies in the distinguished Hollywood auteur's body of work.

In particular, The Late George Apley (1947) and Escape (1948) are seldom-screened dramas with suave English leading men, Ronald Colman and Mankiewicz favorite Rex Harrison, both supported by the delightful Peggy Cummins.

The Late George Apley supplements the emotion with a good portion of the wit Mankiewicz was so famous for. I spoke briefly on the telephone to co-star Cummins, best known...

The Great Gatsby might be one of the season’s most anticipated Hollywood movies, but F. Scott Fitzgerald’s infamous sojourn to Hollywood was a cruel tragedy that humbled one of the century’s great pens. As Some Like it Hot Director Billy Wilder once said, describing the frustration and futility that Fitzgerald encountered in California, “He made me think of a great sculptor who was hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the f—ing pipes.”

Entertainment Weekly has a feature in its current issue, “The True Hollywood Story of F. Scott Fitzgerald” by Clark Collis,...

Like Night of the Hunter, Tod Browning’s Freaks or Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers, The Road to Yesterday can be ranked among the UFOs of cinema. It’s place in the heart of Cecil B. DeMille’s work proves to be in itself very distinctive. We know that, during his entire life, DeMille had virtually only one producer—Paramount (the former Famous Players Lasky)—just like Minnelli was MGM’s man and Corman American International’s. Sixty-three of his films (out of seventy) were produced at Paramount. And, oddly enough, it is among the seven outsiders, situated within a brief period from 1925 to 1931, that his best activity is to be found (I’m thinking of Madam Satan, The Godless Girl, and The Road to Yesterday)–his most audacious undertakings. To top it off, for this uncontested king of the box office, his best films were his biggest commercial failures.

I was recently alerted to the fact that Frank Borzage's 1937 masterpiece Big City is finally available on DVD in the Us, thanks to Warner Archive's Luis Rainer Collection. As such, I've pulled from Notebook's Archive of the Unpublished an unfinished piece I worked on some time ago on this terrific film, gleaned, as you will see from the images, from Turner Classic Movies in France (ignore the subtitles—the images were chosen for the images, not the words on them). It's not particularly finished or even unified and it's more description than anything else, but I hope it inspires you to see this film.

A fan of director Frank Borzage has to be a bit of a patient crate-digger, finding his films as they pop up in rare retrospectives (7th Heaven, not-so-rare on the Old Film Circuit, but the rest are sporadic) or unexpectedly on Turner Classic Movies, which...

Rachid Bouchareb offers a gripping insight into the Algerian independence struggle through the lives of three brothers

The still highly controversial colonial war that France fought in Algeria from the mid-1950s until the granting of independence in 1962 has only been patchily reflected in the cinema. It figures significantly in the background in films as different as Alain Resnais' Muriel and Michael Haneke's Hidden, and in 1966 there was Lost Command, a Hollywood version of Jean Lartéguy's French bestseller The Centurions about a battalion of Indo-China veterans reassembling for another bitter colonial conflict in Algeria. The only truly memorable movie is the Marxist The Battle of Algiers (1966), set in the early days of the revolution, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and initiated by Yacef Saadi, a leader of the Fln (National Liberation Front). Banned in France for several years and regarded as one of the greatest political movies ever made,...