The Criterion Collection continues 2021 with a recently rediscovered classic, an established tenet of the conspiracy genre, a horribly underrepresented African filmmaker (evergreen), and two by Ramin Bahrani. Respectfully, those are: Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk; Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View; Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi; as well as Bahrani’s Chop Shop and Man Push Cart.
Check out the cover art and special features below, and see more on Criterion’s website.
New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director Joyce Chopra, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-rayConversation among Chopra, author Joyce Carol Oates, and actor Laura Dern from the 2020 New York Film Festival, moderated by TCM host Alicia MaloneNew interview with ChopraNew interview with production designer David WascoKPFK Pacifica Radio interview with Chopra from 1985Joyce at 34 (1972), Girls at 12 (1975), and Clorae and Albie (1976), three short films by ChopraAudio reading of the 1966 Life magazine article “The Pied Piper of Tucson,...
Check out the cover art and special features below, and see more on Criterion’s website.
New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director Joyce Chopra, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-rayConversation among Chopra, author Joyce Carol Oates, and actor Laura Dern from the 2020 New York Film Festival, moderated by TCM host Alicia MaloneNew interview with ChopraNew interview with production designer David WascoKPFK Pacifica Radio interview with Chopra from 1985Joyce at 34 (1972), Girls at 12 (1975), and Clorae and Albie (1976), three short films by ChopraAudio reading of the 1966 Life magazine article “The Pied Piper of Tucson,...
- 11/13/2020
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
"Synecdoche, New York" is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.
The mind is a concern in all his screenplays, but in "Synecdoche" (2008), his first film as a director, he makes it his subject, and what huge ambition that demonstrates. He's like a
novelist who wants to get it all into the first book in case he never publishes another.
The mind is a concern in all his screenplays, but in "Synecdoche" (2008), his first film as a director, he makes it his subject, and what huge ambition that demonstrates. He's like a
novelist who wants to get it all into the first book in case he never publishes another.
- 1/2/2010
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
I have feelings more than ideas. I am tired, but very happy. My 11th annual film festival has just wrapped at the Virginia Theater in my home town, and what I can say is, it worked. There is no such thing as the best year or the worst year. But there is such a thing as a festival where every single film seemed to connect strongly with the audience. Sitting in the back row, seeing these films another time, sensing the audience response, I thought: Yes, these films are more than good, and this audience is a gathering of people who feel that.
Let me tell you about the last afternoon, the screening of a newly restored 70mm print of "Baraka." The 1,600 seats of the main floor and balcony were very nearly filled. The movie exists of about 96 minutes of images, music and sound. Nothing else. No narration. No subtitles.
Let me tell you about the last afternoon, the screening of a newly restored 70mm print of "Baraka." The 1,600 seats of the main floor and balcony were very nearly filled. The movie exists of about 96 minutes of images, music and sound. Nothing else. No narration. No subtitles.
- 5/2/2009
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
Ramin Bahrani is the new great American director. After three films, each a master work, he has established himself as a gifted, confident filmmaker with ideas that involve who and where we are at this time. His films pay great attention to ordinary lives that are not so ordinary at all. His subjects so far have been immigrants working hard to make a living in America. His fourth film, now in preparation, will be a Western. His hero will be named Tom. Well, he couldn't very well be named Huckleberry.
The Old West, too, was a land of immigrants, many of them speaking no English. But Bahrani never refers to his characters as immigrants. They are new Americans, climbing the lower rungs of the economic ladder. There is the Pakistani in "Man Push Cart," who operates a coffee-and-bagel wagon in Manhattan. The Latino kid in "Chop Shop," surviving in a...
The Old West, too, was a land of immigrants, many of them speaking no English. But Bahrani never refers to his characters as immigrants. They are new Americans, climbing the lower rungs of the economic ladder. There is the Pakistani in "Man Push Cart," who operates a coffee-and-bagel wagon in Manhattan. The Latino kid in "Chop Shop," surviving in a...
- 3/25/2009
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
By Michael Atkinson
It's amazing to contemplate, but world cinema didn't really make serious feature films about children until after WWII; Vittorio De Sica's "Shoeshine" (1946) might've been the first. (You could stretch and consider Hal Roach's vivid and roughhewn "Our Gang" shorts as qualifying, and I wouldn't argue.) After the New Waves got rolling, of course, juveniles proliferated like rabbits on screen, but prior to that nearly the first half of cinema history had little or nothing to say about the bedeviled, often neglected, wide-eyed life of the pre-adult. Did cinema change with the war, or did we? Two new movies to DVD, Reha Erdem's "Times and Winds" (2006) and Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop" (2007), make their individual cases that little outside of the movie dynamic has changed at all, and that life as a 12-year-old in any corner of the globe is still subject to the grinding,...
It's amazing to contemplate, but world cinema didn't really make serious feature films about children until after WWII; Vittorio De Sica's "Shoeshine" (1946) might've been the first. (You could stretch and consider Hal Roach's vivid and roughhewn "Our Gang" shorts as qualifying, and I wouldn't argue.) After the New Waves got rolling, of course, juveniles proliferated like rabbits on screen, but prior to that nearly the first half of cinema history had little or nothing to say about the bedeviled, often neglected, wide-eyed life of the pre-adult. Did cinema change with the war, or did we? Two new movies to DVD, Reha Erdem's "Times and Winds" (2006) and Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop" (2007), make their individual cases that little outside of the movie dynamic has changed at all, and that life as a 12-year-old in any corner of the globe is still subject to the grinding,...
- 7/15/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
- Today we have the poster premiere for Ramin Bahrani's critically praised Chop Shop. To be released via Koch Lorber at the Film Forum on Wednesday February 27th, this is what I had to say about Bahrani's excellent follow up to his debut film Man Push Cart after its world premiere at Cannes...: "offers a boundary-pushing portrait and how-to-guide for survival in a cross-section portion of a city where many walks of life intersect. With the same sort of microcosmic vibrancy, original location specific settings and similar age bracket point of views found in recent American independent cinema examples of David Gordon Green’s George Washington and Peter Sollett’s Raising Victor Vargas, this Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight selection gets in the mindset, the daily beat of a world that is unfamiliar, tragic and oddly comforting all at once. For those who thought that the popcorn bio interpretation
- 2/5/2008
- IONCINEMA.com
AFI FestBig Beach
Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has followed up his well-received Man Push Cart with another penetrating portrait of life on the outskirts of New York.
Very much of the Ken Loach school of social realism, Chop Shop is revealed through the mature-beyond-his-years, unblinking eyes of a 12-year-old Latino street orphan who scrapes together an existence working and living at one of the dozens of auto-body repair shops lining the fringes of Queens.
Impressively carried by nonactor Alejandro Polanco, the film -- screening at the AFI Fest as well as at this year's Festival de Cannes and Toronto International Film Festival -- should serve to further Bahrani's reputation as a director with a promising future ahead of him.
Located in the shadow of Shea Stadium, the area known as the Iron Triangle is a 75-acre stretch of scrap yards and car-repair joints where customers don't ask about the origin of their required parts in return for deep discount pricing.
It's here that the enterprising Alejandro has managed to carve out a living, steering fresh arrivals to his boss' garage and running errands while hawking DVDs and candy bars on the side.
He also manages to secure a job working in a lunch wagon for his 16-year-old sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), sharing his cramped, unfinished room above the garage with her.
Much to Polanco's displeasure, Isamar is supplementing her income by turning tricks with truck drivers, but she ultimately buys into his dream of purchasing a rusted out roach coach and starting a business of their own.
Collaborating on the story with Nice, France-based writer Bahareh Azimi, Bahrani has etched a intriguing portrait of a fragment of society that would have otherwise gone unnoticed by the casual onlooker.
With young Polanco's fiercely determined, affecting performance leading the way, his fellow cast of nonprofessionals infuse this industrial wasteland with a surprising communal vitality, as Bahrani and his cinematographer Michael Simmonds (Jesus Camp) allow a welcome glimmer of hope to shine through that dusty, exhaust-ridden air.
Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has followed up his well-received Man Push Cart with another penetrating portrait of life on the outskirts of New York.
Very much of the Ken Loach school of social realism, Chop Shop is revealed through the mature-beyond-his-years, unblinking eyes of a 12-year-old Latino street orphan who scrapes together an existence working and living at one of the dozens of auto-body repair shops lining the fringes of Queens.
Impressively carried by nonactor Alejandro Polanco, the film -- screening at the AFI Fest as well as at this year's Festival de Cannes and Toronto International Film Festival -- should serve to further Bahrani's reputation as a director with a promising future ahead of him.
Located in the shadow of Shea Stadium, the area known as the Iron Triangle is a 75-acre stretch of scrap yards and car-repair joints where customers don't ask about the origin of their required parts in return for deep discount pricing.
It's here that the enterprising Alejandro has managed to carve out a living, steering fresh arrivals to his boss' garage and running errands while hawking DVDs and candy bars on the side.
He also manages to secure a job working in a lunch wagon for his 16-year-old sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), sharing his cramped, unfinished room above the garage with her.
Much to Polanco's displeasure, Isamar is supplementing her income by turning tricks with truck drivers, but she ultimately buys into his dream of purchasing a rusted out roach coach and starting a business of their own.
Collaborating on the story with Nice, France-based writer Bahareh Azimi, Bahrani has etched a intriguing portrait of a fragment of society that would have otherwise gone unnoticed by the casual onlooker.
With young Polanco's fiercely determined, affecting performance leading the way, his fellow cast of nonprofessionals infuse this industrial wasteland with a surprising communal vitality, as Bahrani and his cinematographer Michael Simmonds (Jesus Camp) allow a welcome glimmer of hope to shine through that dusty, exhaust-ridden air.
- 11/1/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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