Talk about your lucky day!
Netflix Watch Instantly has just added Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (the first film of the War Trilogy Box Set) to their selection. Both of these films are being released today on DVD, with Paris, Texas also getting a blu-ray release. Look for our reviews of these releases soon, but for now, go watch the movies themselves!
You now have less of an excuse to watch these fantastic pieces of filmmaking.
Below you’ll find links to both their Netflix and Criterion pages.
Don’t forget to spread the good news!
Paris, Texas
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard. Paris, Texas follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski). From this simple setup, Wenders and Shepard produce a powerful statement on codes of masculinity and the myth of the American family, as well as an exquisite visual exploration of a vast, crumbling world of canyons and neon.
Rome Open City
This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the other films that would form this trilogy and starring some well-known actors—Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member—Rome Open City (Roma città aperta) is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II, with immediacy in every frame. Marking a watershed moment in Italian cinema, this galvanic work garnered awards around the globe and left the beginnings of a new film movement in its wake.
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