Latest news with #Kiarostami
Geek Vibes Nation
11-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
The Criterion Collection Announces Plans To Revive Acclaimed Eclipse Line This Fall On Blu-Ray
The Criterion Collection has announced plans to revive its celebrated Eclipse line, a continuing series of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed films presented in simple, affordable box-set editions. The previously DVD-only Eclipse line has been on ice for several years, but it will return this November, and this time films will be upgraded to Blu-Ray. The label is going to be upgrading some of the most popular titles as well as producing brand-new sets, and they will be kicking off the series relaunch with a new release of Abbas Kiarostami's early films. This deep dive into the prolific and wide-ranging first two decades of the director's career will include playful shorts made for children, probing feature-length documentaries on education, and exquisite narrative masterpieces about adolescent longing and disappointment. Series editor Imogen Sara Smith had the following details to share about the relaunch: In the coming months, you can look forward to Eclipse sets of the six extraordinary features directed by Kinuyo Tanaka, Japan's first successful woman director; and five searingly radical documentaries from the husband-and-wife team of Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi. And we'll get you singing and dancing with Blu-ray upgrades of Carlos Saura's electrifying Flamenco Trilogy and Ernst Lubitsch's joyously risqué pre-Code musicals. Also in the pipeline are sets devoted to the early films of Ruben Östlund and the revolutionary cinema of Sara Gómez. With the relaunch of the Eclipse line, Criterion reaffirms its commitment to making the full richness of film history accessible with the reliable permanence of physical media. Each release will use the best available materials and feature an essay in which an expert shares historical context and insight about the films. The standard cinema canon has been shaped—and sometimes misshapen—by what films are available. In a vicious cycle, films that can't be seen are forgotten, and hence less likely to be restored. Preservation and access, on the other hand, form a virtuous cycle, spurring rediscovery and further efforts to ensure the survival of a fragile medium. Alongside the ever-expanding Criterion Channel, Eclipse is once again fostering this rediscovery, serving as an enduring home for deep cuts and hidden treasures. Are you excited for this revived line of physical media releases? Let us know in the comments or over on Twitter. Before we let you go, we have officially launched our merch store! Check out all of our amazing apparel when you click here and type in GVN15 at checkout for a 15% discount! Make sure to check out our podcasts each week including Geek Vibes Live, Top 10 with Tia, Wrestling Geeks Alliance and more! For major deals and money off on Amazon, make sure to use our affiliate link!
Sydney Morning Herald
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Eccentric movie too full of in-jokes to be truly universal
UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE ★★½ (G) 89 minutes Selected cinemas from May 22 The idea of cinema as a universal language originally took root in the era of silent film, when it was hoped that this newly invented art form would allow communication across cultures as never before, perhaps even helping to bring about world peace. Universal Language, the eccentric second feature by Canadian director Matthew Rankin, renews this dream after its own fashion, unfolding in the hypothetical country that would be brought into existence if Canada and Iran were superimposed on each other. But Rankin's title can also be understood ironically, since the upshot is a film that almost any viewer, regardless of background, is liable to find disconcerting and alien. Rankin's interest in Iran is not a passing fancy. Most of the film's action takes place on the snowy streets of Winnipeg, but the majority of the dialogue is in Persian, with the rest in French (the screenplay was written with two Iranian collaborators, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, who appear on camera). Special tribute is paid throughout to the most celebrated of all Iranian filmmakers, the late Abbas Kiarostami, whose hallmarks include long takes and extreme wide shots, the use of non-professional actors, including children, and outwardly trivial plots with multiple levels of meaning. One of several subplots here involves a couple of schoolgirls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) who happen upon a banknote frozen in ice – a premise reportedly taken from an anecdote told by Rankin's grandmother, but also an echo of the struggle to retrieve a banknote which falls down a drain at the climax of Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon, which Kiarostami scripted. Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House? is another touchstone, including in a subplot featuring Rankin himself as a government employee who returns home to Winnipeg in search of his mother.
The Age
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Eccentric movie too full of in-jokes to be truly universal
UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE ★★½ (G) 89 minutes Selected cinemas from May 22 The idea of cinema as a universal language originally took root in the era of silent film, when it was hoped that this newly invented art form would allow communication across cultures as never before, perhaps even helping to bring about world peace. Universal Language, the eccentric second feature by Canadian director Matthew Rankin, renews this dream after its own fashion, unfolding in the hypothetical country that would be brought into existence if Canada and Iran were superimposed on each other. But Rankin's title can also be understood ironically, since the upshot is a film that almost any viewer, regardless of background, is liable to find disconcerting and alien. Rankin's interest in Iran is not a passing fancy. Most of the film's action takes place on the snowy streets of Winnipeg, but the majority of the dialogue is in Persian, with the rest in French (the screenplay was written with two Iranian collaborators, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, who appear on camera). Special tribute is paid throughout to the most celebrated of all Iranian filmmakers, the late Abbas Kiarostami, whose hallmarks include long takes and extreme wide shots, the use of non-professional actors, including children, and outwardly trivial plots with multiple levels of meaning. One of several subplots here involves a couple of schoolgirls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) who happen upon a banknote frozen in ice – a premise reportedly taken from an anecdote told by Rankin's grandmother, but also an echo of the struggle to retrieve a banknote which falls down a drain at the climax of Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon, which Kiarostami scripted. Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House? is another touchstone, including in a subplot featuring Rankin himself as a government employee who returns home to Winnipeg in search of his mother.
Arab Times
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab Times
‘Universal Language' merges 2 worlds
It's not unusual for a city to double for another metropolis in movies. New Yorkers have long been able to spot when Toronto has been substituted for the Big Apple. Matthew Rankin, though, has gone more than a step, or maybe 85 steps, further. His 'Universal Language' takes place in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but the culture is entirely Iranian. Farsi is the spoken tongue. At Tim Hortons, tea is served from samovars. It's as if we've been knocked over the head and woken up in some snowy, Canadian version of an Abbas Kiarostami film. And in Rankin's surreal and enchantingly discombobulating film, that's more or less the case. No reason is ever stated for the strange, deadpan fusion of Winnipeg reality and Iranian New Wave cinema. But there's that title. If cinema is a universal language, it's never been more elastically employed, bridging worlds 6,000 miles apart for a singular kind of movie dream, like what Rankin might have spun in his head while drifting off to sleep on a Manitoba winter night while Kiarostami's 'Where Is the Friend's House?' played on TV. It's both an extremely exact homage to the films of Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and other Iranian masters, and a comic lament for how distant their movies might feel for a Winnipegian director. Rankin has joked that 'Universal Language' brings together the rich poetry of Iranian filmmaking and a Canadian cinema that emerged 'out of 50 years of discount furniture commercials.' The gags start immediately, with an opening title logo for 'A Presentation of the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People' - a twist on the Iranian institute that produced '70s classics, like Kiarostami's Koker trilogy. Like those films, Rankin's is framed with kids. In the first scene, a displeased French teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) chastises his young students for speaking Persian. One child, an aspiring comedian, is dressed as Groucho Marx. Another says a turkey stole his glasses. Another wants to be a Winnipeg tour guide. The teacher asks them all to read from their book. In unison they read: 'We are lost forever in this world.' 'Universal Language,' scripted by Rankin, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, lightly juggles a handful of characters we intermittently check in with. That includes an adult tour guide (Pirouz Nemati), whose attractions include the site of 'the Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958.' There are also two girls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) who find a banknote frozen in ice. A character named Matthew Rankin (played by Rankin) is traveling to Winnipeg by bus to visit his ailing mother after departing his bureaucratic job in Montreal. Oh, and there are turkeys. Lots and lots of turkeys. Rankin's film, his second following the also surreal 'Twentieth Century' (2019), is propelled less by narrative thrust than the abiding oddity of its basic construction, and the movie's slavish devotion to seeing it through without a wink. As the movie moves along in formally composed shots, something wistful takes shape about the possibilities of connection and of insurmountable distances. I've twice now seen 'Universal Language,' a prize-winner in Cannes' Directors Fortnight last year that was shortlisted for the best international Oscar, and I still barely believe it exists. Rankin's movie, in melding two worlds, risks taking place in neither, of letting its cinephile concept snuff out anything authentic. But while I'm not, at the moment, begging for a subsequent French New Wave movie set in Saskatchewan, I've not gone long without thinking about 'Universal Language.' I guess Rankin's movie dream has filtered into those of my own. 'Universal Language,' an Oscilloscope Laboratories. release, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In Farsi and French. Running time: 89 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four. ( By Jake Coyle - AP)
