As the 2023 holiday season approaches and the post-Thanksgiving sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday hit, now is the perfect time to figure out what gifts to get the movie lover in your life. The Paste movies team is here to make life easier with our 2023 Holiday Gift Guide, highlighting the best potential presents ranging from exhaustive box sets of action movies to books on Beatles films to Werner Herzog’s new memoir. Heck, we’ve even thrown in a few subscriptions too — we’re hooked on magazines and streamers here too.
Here are the best gifts for movie lovers, 2023:
Shaw Brothers Classics: Volumes 1 – 4
Shout Factory’s massive collections of action movies from the legendary Hong Kong production company Shaw Brothers Studio cannot be oversold. Each volume (their fourth released this year) offers a dozen discs composing almost 20 hours of kung fu goodness, featuring films like 1968’s Killer Dart that have flown under the radar in America for far too long. Filled with audio commentaries that offer context for even the most obscure title, there’s no better way to immerse yourself in a classic genre — and experience the sheer dominance of the Shaw Bros. If you want to become an expert on the era, sate your unending thirst for martial arts madness, or simply log a few movies on Letterboxd that’ll be the envy of your peers, you cannot go wrong with one of these beautiful box sets.–Jacob Oller
Tokyo Pop – Kino Lorber Blu-Ray
How easily is it to balance blossoming romance with the anarchic souls of punk, heavy metal and rock ‘n roll? Where does the space exist for these dueling components to harmonize? Apparently, Tokyo; Fran Rubel Kuzui’s 1988 musical romantic comedy Tokyo Pop puts these unlike things together with such breezy tenderness that she makes the central challenge of making attitude, hallmarks of these related but separate music genres, just a moment in time. Characters curl their lips and thrash on stage in one scene but pour out their hearts to each other the next, without contradiction in tone. The percentage of cinema lost to institutional carelessness and time is hard to measure, so the preservation of Tokyo Pop comes as a miracle, because even small, unassuming independent films about a bleach-blonde American singer and a shaggy Japanese rock-obsessive deserve saving. In this particular case, the restoration functions as an in memoriam, too; Carrie Hamilton, who played the American, died in 2002 at age 38, with a short list of credits to her name, the Fame TV series and Tokyo Pop among them. Hamilton’s Wendy starts the movie in NYC, where she’s passed over for singing parts by her lousy rock band frontman boyfriend in favor of another woman, and immediately cuts ties and runs to Tokyo, where a friend’s standing invitation is supposed to provide accommodations. But shortly after landing, she finds out that her friend moved out of the country, leaving Wendy to fend for herself in a hostel decorated as a shrine to Mickey Mouse, one of many American imprints on Japanese culture Kuzui makes note of throughout the film. A Dunkin’ Donuts here, a KFC there, and vibrant rockabilly activity seemingly all over the damn place, which is how she meets Hiro (Yutaka Tadokoro). Hiro’s a charming scoundrel. On their first encounter, he tries to bed her in a love hotel on a dare by his bandmates and pals, which goes about as well as an instance of mixed messages and miscommunications abetted by language barriers can go; Wendy bites his head off and sleeps in the tub, with Hiro left to cram himself on the couch. Tokyo isn’t small, but Wendy and Hiro’s chosen subculture is; inevitably but not improbably, they bump into each other again, with a happier outcome. They become friends. They become an item, too, as well as partners in rock ‘n roll, because Hiro and his buddies know that having a towering blonde gaijin on vocals can only be good for their career. What Tokyo Pop never allows is overcooked drama where the couple has to decide if they’re really in love, or if they’re just trying to hit it big. The film is genuine. It devoutly avoids putting on airs. The combination of free-spiritedness, musical fellowship, bemused culture comedy, and kindred hearts is seamless, paced with the sense that Kuzui has somewhere to be and a clear path to get there; Tokyo Pop moves briskly, a quality enhanced by the liveliness baked into Hamilton and Tadokoro’s chemistry. But the breeziness carries bittersweetness, too, the kind that weighs the heart down without smothering the high of falling in love in the first place. It’s a remarkable effect. We should all be thankful to feel it in our own lives, much less in theaters.–Andy Crump
Close to Vermeer – Kino Lorber Blu-Ray
While Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch baroque master who painted some 30-odd works during his career, is generally considered an enigmatic figure in the art world, curators and experts have nonetheless dedicated their entire careers to evaluating his comparatively limited oeuvre. Thus, Gregor Weber, a highly-regarded expert on the artist, considers the “crown jewel” of his career to be overseeing the largest and most encompassing Vermeer exhibit ever at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The planning and execution of this Vermeer retrospective is the focus of Suzanne Raes’s documentary Close to Vermeer, which unfurls into an engrossing 79-minute exploration of the experts, museums and debates that continue to engage with the artist and his legacy. Just a year away from retirement, Weber embarks on a quest to acquire as many Vermeer paintings as possible for the swiftly-approaching exhibit. Despite being a Dutch artistic icon, many of Vermeer’s works – including recognizable artworks The Milkmaid and The Art of Painting – are currently (and perhaps forever destined to be) part of permanent collections at foreign museums. As such, he and several Rijksmuseum colleagues, including fellow Vermeer historian Pieter Roelofs, attempt to secure loans of those paintings. They travel to The Frick and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Germany’s Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum and even the neighboring Dutch Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. When able to secure pieces for the exhibit, researcher and conservator Anna Krekeler puts them under her microscope and relishes in the details of Vermeer’s brushwork up-close. Though much of the doc’s beauty clearly stems from the gorgeous details inherent to the 17th century artist’s motifs, the overall momentum of the film is driven by art-world politics that typically don’t filter down into public consciousness. For example, a standoff of sorts develops when American researchers decide to disavow a work long considered to be an authentic Vermeer due to the predominance of a green hue in a subject’s flesh tone. Weber contests this finding – but is it due to genuine scholarly disagreement, or because he’s down to the wire in terms of making decisions for the Rijksmuseum exhibit? Pleasant and contemplative, Close to Vermeer chronicles an exhibit of a master that both civilians and historians know startlingly little about, considering the profound impact he’s had on the craft of painting.–Natalia Keogan
Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film
It might seem excessive that author/journalist Steve Matteo wrote 300 pages about The Beatles’ five movies (A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine and Let It Be), but when it comes to The Beatles, everything is more complex, more layered, and more impactful than it might seem upon first glance. As the band reaffirms its place atop our culture with Peter Jackson’s Get Back doc series (not to mention a new song?) still rattling around in the heads of those looking for intimate understandings of the Fab Four, Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film combines the musicians and cinema in another way, peering behind the big screen to contextualize their place in cinema — and how cinema was changed by their efforts. Filled with facts, figures, dates and all the other minutiae you’d expect from a music journo weaving this story, Act Naturally is part cultural history, part Richard Lester love letter, part Beatles career overview. The latter is most surprising, but in Matteo’s telling, it becomes more and more clear how the path of the band intersected with the evolution of modern cinema — which could mean everything from the sweeping changes of the teensploitation movies to the tiny details of George Harrison first picking up a sitar on the set of Help!–Jacob Oller
MUBI Membership
Streaming services are creatively upended by their need to drum up viewership in the post-syndication era, churning out half-hearted sequels and remakes that no one called for. (Anyone remember He’s All That?) The movies on MUBI stand out because the service is willing to platform quality films from across the globe. While Netflix contains unlimited potential for memes in its haphazard film categorization (listing Babadook under “LGBTQ+ Films” may have been a galaxy-brain analysis but it was more likely a mistake) MUBI crafts lists that feel thrillingly handmade. MUBI’s functionality celebrates filmmaking—how near impossible it is to make a movie and how miraculous it is when something is good; how every on-screen offering is caught in the tangled web of cinematic intertextuality, reliant on everything that came before. Find the best movies currently on MUBI here, and see what could become available to you for a couple bucks a month (and even cheaper if you’re a student).–Anna McKibben
The Criterion Collection‘s Pasolini 101 Set
To celebrate the 101st birthday of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Criterion Collection has released a box set of nine films from the late visionary. Called Pasolini 101, the set not only commemorates the birthday of this provocateur of Italian cinema but also serves as a rich introduction to the life and work of the rebellious artist. The collection, much like Pasolini’s films, is at once reverential and hagiographic yet human, materialist and pedagogical. It lovingly treats his art with great care, making sure each film is as clear as the intention behind them, but also loaded with features that teach us more about the man and his times. The set and the cinema within it continually cycle between sacred and profane, offering glimpses of the sublime and modeling a way of seeing the world grounded in human economic realities. Watching these movies reveals Pasolini as a man of folklore and myth. In his early films, he trains his camera on the faces and stories of everyday people, witnessing their lives in all their complex and tragic glories. This “lumpenproletariat,” as he refers to them, using his training in Classical Marxism, are those most exploited by capitalism—those who cannot (and sometimes will not) overcome the systems necessary to realize themselves as an oppressed class. In modern society, these are vagabonds, loiterers, homeless and career criminals. But in Pasolini’s world, these folks practice proud ancient ways of being that are at odds with capitalism’s regimented demands. “My career is Italian history,” Pasolini explains in an included interview. By the 1960s, he had to change his subject matter because Italy had changed. As modernization slowly decimated the folk, the world became “the bourgeoisie and everyone else,” as he says. Thus, Pasolini shifted his subject matter to the middle classes and industry owners. His later films are ribald and sometimes violent assaults on capitalist ideology, the hoarding of resources, and the moral hypocrisies of those in power. Rather than skewering them through the surreal, as his contemporary Luis Buñuel might, Pasolini’s critique comes via folkloric modes. He uses myths, fables, parables and allegories to critique society on a cosmic scale.—B.L. Panther
Werner Herzog’s Memoir: Every Man for Himself and God Against All
Werner Herzog recently turned 81 years old. It’s an impressive feat, turning 81, for a man whose life story is a litany of the many times he’s almost died. And being 81, born in the middle of World War II, 1942, in Munich, the legendary German director writes of his childhood in his new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, as one of “extreme poverty.” Later, he rails against “the so-called culture of complaint” like one’s fed-up grandfather. He reflects on a memory “burned into [his] brain” of when, very small, he and his brother, “whimpering with hunger,” pulled at their mother’s dress until she responded with “a face full of anger and despair” and told her boys she would cut the meat from her own chest to feed them if she could. But she couldn’t. He files this memory in a chapter titled “Mythical Figures,” describing his formative hunger as a state of being that, in his experience, is functionally alien to later generations. Hunger forged in him a primordial drive, an enduring mettle required to thrive in this world. “A good part of my character to this day is determined by sheer discipline,” he states firmly. And he remembers when he first became aware of just how little his family had. “At that moment, we learned not to wail.” Not like these millennials nowadays. Hunger and pennilessness are Herzog’s close companions throughout his life. They aren’t themes of Every Man for Himself and God Against All so much as tentpoles of his reality. They fill Herzog’s cup when nothing else will, sustain him and deliver him through undreamable situations. Every Man for Himself and God Against All isn’t a cynical book, struck with relating the brutal indignity of sacrificing one’s all for the demands of art, but it’s a visceral one, ripe with passages devastating for their candor and for the beauty of their coincidence. Living is dangerous and revelatory and overwhelming as Herzog remembers his life, as if everything he tells us he’s witnessed first-hand with such clarity is too unbelievable to be confined to the life of one man. Many of Every Man for Himself and God Against All’s most arresting passages are collected from Herzog’s many diaries written over the 60-some years he’s been making films, punctuated with as many lovely observations as traumatic visions, but always awash in the empathy and—maybe even better for a filmmaker—fearlessness that’s rooted in his soul. If there’s anything Herzog is concerned about, it’s that we’re losing irreplaceable images. Maybe it’s an unacceptable sentiment from a guy who praises Jon Favreau’s expensive dearth of practical sets and effects, but Every Man for Himself and God Against All is a testament to the physicality of his filmmaking. To seeing for oneself. It’s often moving because of that. “My films were always films on foot. I don’t mean it metaphorically either,” he states after countless stories of walking. We are shrinking the wonder of the world the more we refuse to walk it. At 81, and with this memoir, Herzog continues to push out, to push against, that constriction. “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.”—Dom Sinacola
Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever
As a Chicago film critic, I’ve sat in the chair where Roger Ebert would make calls to his editor, straight from a warm skyscraper’s screening room. I’ve seen the legacy of Gene Siskel firsthand at the Art Institute’s Film Center. When we all get together to watch movies for reviews, there are two larger-than-life ghosts sitting in the back of the theater — and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Matt Singer’s book about the two newspaper critics who changed how the world saw film criticism isn’t just a definitive work about the pair, but an affecting book about our profession and all the strange relationships that come along with it. Yes, we’ve got professional rivalries that can be antagonistic, but underneath all that is a rare bond that comes from a shared, lifelong dedication. We can be pissy, snide, petty, and bullheaded. We can also commiserate like few colleagues can. Come for the deep dive into Ebert and Siskel, stay for the insight into how they impacted the current state of criticism (even if it’s depressing).–Jacob Oller
Fangoria Subscription
There are very few things I look forward to each quarter more than my new issue of Fangoria. From one magazine editor to another (even if Paste’s print days are gone for now), the work Phil Nobile Jr. has done at the head of the new Fango is essential, not only to old-school horrorhounds, but to new genre converts. The magazine’s effects-laden, impressive photos and immersive interviews are supplemented by excellent essays contextualizing modern horror and looking back on how the goop and gore has changed with the times. It doesn’t hurt that some of the same writers you read here at Paste are also penning insightful work in these pages. It’s not easy to please everyone — from the longtime subscribers who’re thirsty for the nastiest FX that magazine racks will let them put on the cover, to up-and-coming youngsters dipping a toe into the behind-the-scenes of moviemaking — but Fangoria puts in the hard work and it pays off, four times a year.–Jacob Oller
Masaaki Yuasa Set
Shout Factory’s five-film Masaaki Yuasa set brings anime fans up to speed on the filmmaker, coming hot on the heels of his latest work, the swan-song rock opera Inu-Oh. “A Yuasa film doesn’t look like any one thing, let alone something defined by a singular art style,” wrote our Autumn Wright. “It’s in movement and choreography, the lines all in dance, that he comes through.” Watching from his breakout cult hit Mind Game through The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl; Lu Over The Wall; and Ride Your Wave (not to mention a pair of short films included in the set), Yuasa’s unique, morphing, vibrant animation clarifies into a style both created by and striving to stand apart from anime traditions. On an even more personal note, this collection also includes an interview conducted with the filmmaker “at a Los Angeles speakeasy, where he discusses his inspirations, favorite type of restaurants, perfect vacation, dancing, and more.” Fittingly eccentric!–Jacob Oller