cinemadaily | Criterion, Denver, and the Decade

A scene from Max Ophuls’ "Lola Montès," out on the Criterion Collection in February.

Some exciting news from Criterion: Max Ophuls’ lavish biopic “Lola Montès” and Leo McCarey’s 30s tearjerker “Make Way for Tomorrow” will join the collection in February. Also on tap for the Criterion treatment are two recent films: Steve McQueen’s “Hunger” and Götz Spielmann’s “Revanche.” More from The Playlist.

Out this week from Criterion is the 1969 skiing drama, “Downhill Racer,” starring Robert Redford. “If the movie often feels like a vaguely interesting bit of 1970s television (complete with paranoid lens zooms, trumpet blares and a pair of blurry kissing scenes), that makes perfect sense,” writes Time Out Chicago’s Joshua Rothkopf. “The director is Michael Ritchie, a TV hired gun attempting his feature debut. He’d go on to helm the immortal ‘The Bad News Bears,’ but this bone-dry material (shaped into a terse script by novelist James Salter) requires a stronger artistic sensibility to lift it out of its awkward monotony.”

More on the reissue from Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty and Christopher Long at DVD Town. Watch the trailer for “Downhill Racer” on YouTube.

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Meanwhile, the Denver Film Festival is underway. Over at Cinematical, Elisabeth Rappe runs down this year’s offerings and sees “Troll 2” and lives to tell about it, calling the legendarily bad horror flick “a fever dream that no one can ever quite believe exists outside of their own mind.” The Denver Post has recommendations for what attendees should check out today. The festival is also posting podcasts of interviews with filmmakers whose work it is screening. Finally, best-of-the-decade lists are beginning to trickle in and David Hudson at the Auteurs Notebook is staying on top of them, including A.O. Scott’s lists of “movies of influence” and “movies of quality” in the New York Times Magazine. Login to recommend this article » posted on November 16, 2009 |Share Login to Leave a Comment »