ARROW ACADEMY
Time for our April announcements! First up…
NEW UK TITLES: Alice + Crimes and Misdemeanors + Shadows and Fog
Three more Woody Allen classics get the stand-alone treatment
Pre-order your copy of Alice:
Alice
Pre-order your copy of Crimes and Misdemeanors:
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Pre-order your copy of Shadows and Fog:
Shadows and Fog
Release Date: April 3rd 2017
Alice
A delightful return to the romantic-comedy territory that Woody Allen last explored in such classics as Annie Hall and Manhattan, Alice was also Oscar-nominated for Best Original Screenplay, but departs from the earlier films in its embrace of out-and-out fantasy to the point where it becomes a contemporary fairytale.
Alice Tate (Mia Farrow) is trapped in a loveless marriage to Doug (William Hurt), to the point where a chance encounter with handsome jazz musician Joe (Joe Mantegna) leaves her hopelessly conflicted. Seeking treatment for backache from a Chinese acupuncturist (Keye Luke), she confesses her feelings under hypnosis and comes away with some ancient herbs that possess mysterious and even supernatural powers. But will they solve Alice’s dilemmas, or merely make them even more complicated? And can she really throw away all Doug’s material wealth purely for love?
Gliding effortlessly from reality to daydream and from memory to magic, while exploring the intricate and unfathomable unity of human bonds, Alice was described by the New York Times as “hilarious and romantic, serious and exuberantly satiric”.
Crimes and Misdemeanors
“If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not” claims Alan Alda’s hilariously pompous TV producer, and one of the miracles of Woody Allen’s dark and Dostoevskian masterpiece is that it knows exactly how far to bend the comedy so that it doesn’t undermine the far more serious moral dilemmas at its core.
Two men wrestle with their consciences: idealistic documentary filmmaker Cliff Stern (Allen) is offered a lucrative fee to shoot a flattering profile of his loathsome but far more successful brother-in-law (Alda), while respected ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (an Oscar-nominated Martin Landau) is faced with exposure by his vengeful ex-mistress (Anjelica Huston), and has to choose between the spiritual advice of his rabbi (Sam Waterston) and more practical suggestions from his mobster brother (Jerry Orbach).
Described by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the watershed films of his career”, Crimes and Misdemeanors remains one of Woody Allen’s greatest films, not least for its scathingly clear-eyed view of how far people will to go to protect their apparent integrity, even at the price of losing the real thing.
Shadows and Fog
One of Woody Allen’s strangest films, this studio-bound fantasy turned his Kafkaesque one-act play Death (1975) into a full-blown homage to German Expressionist filmmakers like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst, brought to life by one of the starriest casts he ever assembled: Kathy Bates, John Cusack, Mia Farrow, Jodie Foster, Julie Kavner, Madonna, John Malkovich, Donald Pleasence and Lily Tomlin, plus Allen himself.
He plays the cowardly Kleinman, reluctantly recruited by a vigilante mob in search of a serial killer. When he finds himself involved with a troupe of circus performers whose sword-swallower Irmy (Farrow) and clown Paul (Malkovich) want to leave to start a family, Kleinman thinks that this is a welcome distraction – but the killer has other ideas...
Described by the New York Times as “a brazen, irrepressible original”, Shadows and Fog is the most visually and narratively unpredictable of Allen’s films. Carlo di Palma’s dazzling cinematography makes full use of the title elements, but it’s the richness of the multi-layered narrative, with its Shakespearean oscillation between burlesque comedy and poignant tragedy that really sticks in the mind.