Slipping quietly into stores this week, from obscure distributor Viz Video, is Katsuhito Ishii’s wonderful The Taste of Tea, a must-see if you didn’t manage to catch this funny, moving and inventive film at Fantasia two years ago. Ishii was the man behind Kill Bill’s animated sequence, but this is something completely different, an incredibly creative live-action story of a Japanese family that is really unlike any other movie. Highly recommended.

Few short films of the post-silent era have had the same cultural impact as Chris Marker’s la Jetée. Clocking in at around half an hour, composed (almost) entirely of still images, it’s a brilliant, beautiful science fiction mini-epic about love and memory. It’s hard to experience this movie without being haunted by it, and wanting to see it again and again. It was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, and although that lavishly weird production has its merits, the distilled simplicity of the Marker original is really something very special. La Jetée is finally available on video in North America from the ever-admirable Criterion, who have packaged it on a disc with another Marker classic, the experimental documentary Sans soleil. Special features include Chris on Chris, which is a video piece on the man by director Chris Darke, a new interview with him and a clip from the video for David Bowie’s “Jump They Say,” inspired by la Jetée (what, they couldn’t afford the whole video?)

by MARK SLUTSKY