Ryan’s Criterion Link Collection: Tuesday, November 11th 2014

Here are today’s Criterion Collection related links, to read while you wait in line at Barnes & Noble.

Official Criterion business

Michael Atkinson, on today’s new release from the Criterion Collection: Monte Hellman’s The Shooting & Ride In The Whirlwind: 

This modest double bill also almost got lost. After a splashless debut at the nine-year-old San Francisco International Film Festival and appearances at other festivals, no American distributor, in those free-flying days of speedy Corman trash and drive-in fodder and Ray Dennis Steckler, would take on Hellman’s Camusian deuce. Not even Corman could make money from them.

News

The fine folks at Cinema Guild nabbed the new restoration of Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale

Cinema Guild has closed a deal to serve as exclusive VOD distributor for Big World Pictures, kicking off with an HD restoration of Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale. Upcoming titles include an HD restoration of Rohmer’s A Tale Of Winter, also in a new HD restoration, Roberto Minervini’s Stop The Pounding Heart, Denis Côté’s Curling, Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross’ In Bloom and Martin Lund’s The Almost Man.

Reviews

Over at Blu-ray.com, Dr. Svet continues to pick apart the Complete Jacques Tati box set, this time focusing on Parade

I think that Parade works well only if one is already familiar with Jacques Tati’s legacy. Produced by Swedish Television, the film’s hybrid quality is quite unusual, but its atmosphere and charm are not. It offers one final glimpse at just about everything Tati loved and incorporated in his films with Monsieur Hulot.

Interesting

Peter Bradshaw thinks Billy Liar is over-rated.

I don’t love it. It’s a nice performance from Courtenay, but I’ve always felt that this insidiously depressing and defeatist film was massively over-rated. Looking back on the re-release in 2007, I see I gave it a tepid three-star notice, and looked askance on Billy’s “loyalty to unhappiness and failure”. Watching it again now, my discontent has escalated to a kind of rage.

For Trailers From Hell, Allan Arkush presents Red River

Howard Hawks’ first western was a huge hit and marked what John Wayne had feared might turn out to be his swan song, at the age of 41. He later said John Ford “never respected me as an actor until I made ‘Red River.’”