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Collector’s box on the horizon: Severin assembles hours of video extras and text illumination for another group of films featuring favorite actor Christopher Lee. The roundup of titles bookends his career as a screen vampire, with one of Lee’s earliest vampire roles and also his last turn as Count Dracula. Looming large on the academic side of Severin’s research are experts and biographers Kat Ellinger, Barry Forshaw, Troy Howarth, Kim Newman, Nathaniel Thompson and Jonathan Rigby, who also contributes a hundred-page book.

The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Collection 2

Blu-ray

Uncle Was a Vampire, The Secret of the Red Orchid, Dark Places, Dracula and Son, Murder Story

Severin Films

1959-1989 / Color / 2:39 widescreen, 1:66 widescreen, 1:85 widescreen

Street Date July 26, 2022

Available from Severin Films / 134.95

Starring alphabetically: Marie Hélène Breillat, Catherine Breillat, Joan Collins, Robert Hardy, Adrian Hoven, Klaus Kinski, Sylva Koscina, Herbert Lom, Susanne Loret, Jean Marsh, Marisa Mell,...

Wash Westmoreland on the dynamic between Keira Knightley and Dominic West: "I had seen in [Joe Wright's] Pride & Prejudice how strongly she takes apart Mr. Darcy [Matthew Macfadyen]. I wanted to even take it further to get into the psycho-sexual hold that Willy had over Colette." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Wash Westmoreland's incisive Colette, co-written with Richard Glatzer and Rebecca Lenkiewicz (co-writer of Sebastián Lelio's Disobedience and Pawel Pawlikowski's Oscar-winner Ida) knows that its heroine, portrayed by Keira Knightley, will always be larger than what is on screen. Her husband Willy (Dominic West) forced her to write, she obeyed, masterful literature was born. The narrative is more entangled than that. Colette's parents in the countryside, Robert Pugh as her father Jules and Fiona Shaw as her mother Sido, are personalities in their own right, not just caricatures that help the plot along.

Wash Westmoreland on La Belle Époque...

Catherine Breillat on a "little dialogue" she had with Marie-Hélène Breillat and Maria Schneider in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris: "We found it ridiculous to say, but the beautiful choreography by Vittorio Storaro and the Louma, changed completely the sense of the scene." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Catherine Breillat upon reading the tributes for Bernardo Bertolucci by Saverio Costanzo, Richard Peña, Atom Egoyan, Don Rosenfeld, and Frédéric Boyer on Tuesday, sent the following to me this morning on the filmmaker, who directed Catherine and her sister Marie-Hélène Breillat in Last Tango In Paris and became a life-long friend. Bernardo Bertolucci died on Monday, November 26 in Rome at the age of 77.

Marie-Hélène Breillat and Catherine Breillat as dressmakers Monique and Mouchette in Last Tango In Paris

"I am also very pained by Bernardo Bertolucci's death. When I played for him this small character in Last Tango in Paris [dressmaker Mouchette], I...

Mubi's retrospective, Catherine Breillat, Auteur of Porn?, is showing April 4 - June 3, 2017 in Germany.Sex Is ComedyThroughout her career, Catherine Breillat has provided viewers with a long-form meta-cinema experience. While metacinema is as old as the medium itself, since her debut feature A Real Young Girl in 1976, Breillat has developed a distinct form of it: one that collapses ‘autobiographical’ material, various artistic sensibilities, and the process of filmmaking itself.Like dozens of other English words—such as ‘aesthetic’ or ‘abject’—the word ‘meta’ has been largely misused or misapplied with regard to the film and literary criticism. Regarding the consumption of fiction, the appropriate use of the term 'metafiction,' 'metafilm,' et cetera, has its basis in the Greek meta, which does not translate directly into English but can be understood as a preposition similar to the English word ‘about’ (‘having to do with,’ or ‘on the subject of’). Metafiction is therefore,...

‘La Cage aux Folles’ film: Edouard Molinaro international box office hit (photo: Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault in ‘La Cage aux Folles’) (See previous post: “‘La Cage aux Folles’ Director Edouard Molinaro Dead at 85.”) But Edouard Molinaro’s best-known effort — comedy or otherwise — remains La Cage aux Folles (approximate translation: "The Cage of the Queens"), which sold 5.4 million tickets when it came out in France in 1978. Perhaps because many saw it as a letdown when compared to Jean Poiret’s immensely popular 1973 play, Molinaro’s movie ended up nominated for a single César Award — for eventual Best Actor winner Michel Serrault. Somewhat surprisingly, in the next couple of years La Cage aux Folles would become a major hit in the United States and other countries. Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the U.S. in 1979, the film grossed $20.42 million at the North American box office — or about $65 million in 2013 dollars, a remarkable sum for a subtitled release.