ARMY OF SHADOWS: When Bob Dylan and The Band's 1967 The Basement Tapes finally saw official release almost ten years after the fact, critic Robert Christgau noted, "We needn't bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have been the best album of 1967 too." Something similar could be said about director Jean-Pierre Melville's shattering drama of the French Resistance, made in 1969 and given short shrift by the radicalized French press of the time and no U.S. release at all. In 2006, Rialto Pictures gave it U.S. distribution and introduced an instant classic.
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