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John Ford’s rediscovered 1927 “Upstream” will have its American re-premiere at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles Wednesday night, so I’ve set aside this space for reactions from those lucky enough to be in attendance. Masterpiece, minor footnote, or (most likely), something in between? Please share your thoughts.

Some end-of-the-summer cleaning up here, as I backtrack a bit for reviews of Kino’s slightly disappointing Blu-ray edition of Albert Lewin’s hallucinatory “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” (1951), and a quick look at “Yellowstone Kelly,” one of the three nifty little westerns that Gordon Douglas made with the Warner Bros. TV western star Clint Walker. It’s recently been released in a restored edition from the Warner Archive Collection; the very fine “Gold of the Seven Saints,” with its highly Hawksian Leigh Brackett screeplay, slipped out earlier this year. The New York Times link is here.

A reminder to folks in the Los Angeles area that “Upstream,” the long-believed-lost 1927 John Ford feature that turned up in the New Zealand Film Archive, will receive its American re-premiere on Wednesday, Sept. 1, at 7:30 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater, at 8949 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills. Admission is a modest $5, and tickets can be ordered online here. I know a few of our regulars will be in attendance, so I’ll put up a new topic on Wednesday, ready to receive what I hope will be a flood of first impressions. Wish I could be there!

Terrible news from Japan: the anime director Satoshi Kon, one of that medium’s true artists, has died at the age of 47, reportedly from cancer. He was a brilliant filmmaker — “Perfect Blue,” “Millennium Actress,” “Tokyo Godfathers,” “Paranoia Agent,” “Paprika” — with decades of work ahead of him. He leaves behind an unfinished feature, “The Dream Machine,” , which he described as a road movie for robots (that’s a still above). Here’s an early obit from Simon Abrams in the New York Press, and here’s the last interview I did with him for the New York Times, from May, 2007.

Criterion’s new box set of three silent films by Josef von Sternberg — “Underworld” (1927), “The Last Command” (1928) and “The Docks of New York” (1928) — is self-evidently one of the most important releases of the year, with magnificent renderings of three important films culminating in the transcendent masterpiece that is “Docks.” The print quality of the latter is breathtaking — it has certainly never looked better on home video, and probably hasn’t looked this good since it opened theatrically in its full nitrate glory. The only conceivable complaint: why weren’t these released in Blu-ray? My hopelessly inadequate attempt to evoke their sublimity is here, on the New York Times website.

A five-film box set from Sony pays homage to Kim Novak, Columbia Pictures’ last great star and one of the last to be manufactured — with some resistance from Ms. Novak — by the studio system at the height of its industrial efficiency.

The three most familiar titles — Joshua Logan’s “Picnic” (1955), Richard Quine’s “Bell, Book and Candle” (1958) and George Sidney’s “Pal Joey” (1957) — have been remastered, though a blotchiness remains in both “Picnic” and “Candle” that suggests the original negatives may have been in particularly bad condition.

The one surprise is Sidney’s “Jeanne Eagels,” a misguided 1957 attempt to cast Novak in a Susan Hayward-style showbiz breakdown story, which doesn’t rise to the morbidly romantic heights of the Sidney-Novak “Eddie Duchin Story” but does develop some intriguing parallels with Novak’s own career. In typical Novak fashion, her Eagels becomes more closed-off and self-consciously theatrical just as she is supposed to be revealing her inner vulnerability. For cinephiles, the film’s highlight is an extended cameo by Frank Borzage, playing himself (with great warmth and presence) in an otherwise condescending sequence in which Eagels makes a silent movie. (Presumably, Borzage was drafted by the screenwriter Sonya Levien, who wrote a number of Borzage’s pre-code Fox films, including the great “Lucky Star.”)

My New York Times review is here.

The American home video industry remains unaccountably resistant to directors — I mean, Ma and Pa Kettle have a box set, while Douglas Sirk gets bupkus? — but once in a while something slips through the cracks, like the William Wellman set that Warners released last year under the cover of a “Forbidden Hollywood” pre-Code collection. Now, far more significantly, someone at Warners has smuggled out all four of Raoul Walsh’s imposing World War II propaganda films with Errol Flynn (plus, if only for the sake of contrast, Lewis Milestone’s conventionally preachy “Edge of Darkness”) in a beautifully mastered set they’re calling “Errol Flynn Adventures.” The films evolve in tone from boyish adventure (“Desperate Journey,” 1942) to a blunt, almost anti-heroic realism (“Objective, Burma!”, 1945) as the war deepens, all centered around the development of the Flynn character from a typical devil-may-care Walsh protagonist to a responsible, introspective leader. It’s a magnificent collection of movies which, augmented by “They Died with Their Boots On” (1941) and “Gentleman Jim” (1942), Walsh’s other two wartime Flynn films, and “Background to Danger,” a 1943 George Raft spy thriller recently released through the Warner Archive Collection in a nicely remastered edition, that amounts to one of the richest runs of creativity in Walsh’s sterling career. (I’m afraid we’ll have to wait a while for its nearest rival, a “Walsh at Fox” box that would cover “What Price Glory” through “The Bowery.”) My New York Times review is here.

In some other good news, James MacDowell writes to inform us of the revival of “Movie,” one of the most distinguished names in film criticism, as a web-based journal that’s being organized as joint project among the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford. The editorial board includes veterans of the original publication — among them Charles Barr, V.F. Perkins and Michael Walker — as well as some more recently minted British scholars, and the pieces in the first issue (online here) are refreshingly free of post-modernist cant, reflecting instead the “Movie” tradition of close-reading and ethical engagement. MacDowell’s own piece on the notion of “quirkiness” in contemporary American independent film strikes me as exactly what’s been missing in so much current scholarly criticism: it’s deeply and seriously engaged with the films in question, drawing meaning from them rather than imposing a pre-ordained ideological stance.

Here’s wishing the new “Movie” a long and happy future.

Sacha Guitry’s films seem to me so immediately and immensely enjoyable that I’ve never understood why he isn’t better known outside France. His freedom of tone and guiltless embrace of theatricality make his work look more audacious and deeply cinematic all the time, and his lasting influence –particularly on Alain Resnais, whose work from “Melo” to “Wild Grass” is unthinkable without Guitry’s example — is unmistakable.

Criterion has now released four of Guitry’s classics — “The Story of a Cheat,” “The Pearls of the Crown,” “Desire,” and “Quadrille,” all made during his amazing burst of creativity between 1935 and 1939 — on their no-frills Eclipse label under the title “Presenting Sacha Guitry,” which should help to focus some long overdue attention on this major filmmaker. (My New York Times review is here.)

The Eclipse set seems to be a bare-bones adaptation of the excellent, eight-film collection, “Sacha Guitry, L’Age d’or,” that Gaumont released in 2007, and one can only hope that Criterion will eventually get around to releasing the other four titles in that box, all of them major works: “Le Nouveau testament, “Faisons un reve,” “Mon pere avait raison,” and “Remontons les Champs-Elysees.” The Gaumont set, which includes a generous selection of (unsubtitled) supplements, remains available here, and the French studio has also released one of the masterpieces of Guitry’s very different postwar period, “La Poison” with Michel Simon, in Blu-ray (available here.)

Paramount’s corporate parent, Viacom, seems to have lost all interest in issuing older titles from the Paramount catalog, but happily an independent distributor, Olive Films, has begun licensing titles from that rich and neglected library. The first batch of five is out this week, and it consists (inevitably) of three more-or-less noirs — Lewis Allen’s “Appointment with Danger” (1949/51), Rudolph Mate’s “Union Station” (1950) and William Dieterle’s “Dark City” (1950) — as well as a wildly Freudian science fiction film produced in Franco’s Spain by the versatile Philip Yordan, “Crack in the World” (directed by Andrew Marton, 1965) and Burt Kennedy’s female revenge western “Hannie Caulder” (1971), with Raquel Welch wearing Clint Eastwood’s poncho. Quick reviews and general encouragement here, in my New York Times column.

The noir boom continues — at least, the studios have found one way to market old movies — with a pair of lush sets from Sony (five titles) and Warners (eight). For the most part these are mid to late period titles, moving from the baroque stylization of Anthony Mann’s 1947 “Desperate” to the stripped-down stylistics and opaque characterizations of Irving Lerner’s 1959 “City of Fear.” The streamlined noir of the 50s finds its most consistently interesting practitioner in Phil Karlson, represented here by two of his best films, “The Brothers Rico” (in the Columbia box) and the semi-documentary “The Phenix City Story” (in the Warners set).

As usual, it’s debatable whether some of these films are noir at all, as opposed to police procedurals (Richard Fleischer’s tight little “Armored Car Robbery”) or juvenile delinquent dramas (Don Siegel’s “Crime in the Streets,” with an early John Cassavetes performance and a very Playhouse 90 script by Reginald Rose). It may have gotten in on a pass, but there is probably more to say about Gerald Mayer’s “Dial 1119,” a topical drama from Dore Schary’s deflated MGM about an escaped mental patient (Marshall Thompson) who holds half a dozen hostages in a back-lot bar through 75 minutes of more or less real time. Unfortunately, the film isn’t very well directed, but it does suggest that by 1950 people were already concerned about the baleful influence of live television on breaking news stories (and makes “Ace in the Hole” look a bit less innovative in the process).

My New York Times review is here.

Warner Home Video has started doing some remastering on the Archive Collection (and charging a tidy premium for it — the list for the remastered titles is $24.95, as opposed to $19.95 for the untouched titles). The highlight of the first batch of three is unquestionably Samuel Fuller’s 1959 “Verboten!”, reputedly the last film produced by RKO (the studio closed before the film could be released, so it went out initially through Columbia); the other two are Mervyn LeRoy’s tight and tawdry newspaper drama “Five Star Final” (1931), with Edward G. Robinson as a conscience stricken city editor, and William Conrad’s “Two on a Guillotine” (1965), a turgid horror film that suggests William Castle on Quaaludes and stars the terminally bland Connie Stevens and Dean Jones.

“Verboten!”, with its extensive documentary and didactic material attached to a love story between an American GI (James Best) and a German Fraulein (Susan Cummings) at the end of World War II, finds many echoes in the recent work of Jean-Luc Godard: an audaciously open form, heavy use of archive footage, boldly stated contradictions and a thematic focus on the Holocaust. Here’s hoping that Warners remasters Fuller’s other great RKO film, the 1957 “Run of the Arrow” — a masterpiece in its own right and one of the most pronounced influences (yes, even more than “Ferngully”) on James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

My New York Times column is here.