Anselm 3D (Blu-Ray 3D w/Blu-Ray 2D/Sideshow/Janus Contemporaries)/Perfect Days 4K (4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray w/Blu-Ray/Neon/both Criterion 2023)

4K Ultra HD Picture: A 3D Picture: A- 1080p 2D Blu-Ray Picture: A Sound: B+/A Extras: C/B+ Film: B/A+

Hyperprolific German filmmaker Wim Wenders released two films in 2023: Perfect Days, his first narrative feature since 2017's Submergence, and Anselm, his first documentary since 2018's Pope Francis: A Man of His Word and his first 3D doc since Pina in 2011. The timing is likely a quirky coincidence. Perfect Days was shot in Tokyo in 16 days and grew out of a different project meant to promote a network of bespoke public toilets. Anselm's 3D was a different production process and required being seen in a theater, not via a streaming service, so it had the pandemic and the slow grind return to ''normal'' to contend with. Whatever the case, if you're a Wenders fan, as I am, it was a feast after years of famine.

I count seeing both films theatrically as highlights of 2023. But watching them at home, via Criterion's main-line 4K presentation of Perfect Days and it's comparatively bare-bones Janus Contemporaries release of Anselm, confirms, in the case of the former, its masterpiece status and reveals, in the latter, the limitations of Wenders' 3D documentaries.

Let's start with Anselm, a 93-minute impressionistic portrait of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. I confess to not being familiar with Kiefer's work prior to watching the film, but the documentary left me craving an in-real-life audience with his hulking, monumental, slabby-splashy-slashy tactile canvases, sculptures, and installations. And that's entirely due to Wenders' choice to shoot the film in 3D.

His prior foray into 3D filmmaking, Pina, was an exhilarating exploration of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, the next best thing to - or maybe even better than - seeing one of her shows live. Wenders captured bodies in motion unlike anyone before him, turning the cinema into not so much a performance hall as a transporter room, beaming us into locations where Bausch's company perform her work.

But dancers are one thing, a natural for 3D. Painting is something else. What will the technology do for a flat, static artwork? A lot, when the art is like Kiefer's.

The film opens on human-scale sculptures of white dresses, with long trains and various other elements, placed in forests and greenhouses. The camera swoops through the trees, circles them, treats them the way we would if seeing them in a gallery. There's a similar spatial dynamism to the paintings, which are gigantic. Kiefer's south-of-France studio/atelier is an airplane hangar-like warehouse-slash-compound so large that he bicycles through it, as if it were a small neighborhood unto itself. And these paintings, which tower over him and his assistants, are moved through the space on large rollers, such is their height, length, and weight. They're caked in globs of paint that Kiefer ladles out of vats and slathers on with what looks like a painter's machete. He works on them using a cherry picker. For other works he attaches dry grasses and sets them ablaze with a flamethrower, or he melts metal ingots down to a liquid and splashes it onto canvases.

Kiefer's work is physical and monumental, and the 3D brings us into his spaces and up to and around the art in ways that give it depth, obviously, but also, crucially, context. Unless we see the ant-sized Kiefer pushing a giant canvas around, it's tough to orient ourselves to what we're seeing. This is one film, like Pina, where the 3D is absolutely vital.

Wenders gives us sketches of Kiefer's life growing up in postwar Germany through recreations, as well as snatches of contemporary commentary engaging with or, more commonly, criticizing his decision to use his art to confront Nazi atrocity and complicity, reclaim symbols and thinkers co-opted by the Nazis, and otherwise push German art into a healthier conversation with its homeland and the world. Kiefer, his demeanor and persona stereotypically Teutonic, called this a ''protest against forgetting,'' and in one interview said, ''You can't just paint a landscape when tanks have driven through it.''

This required-by-documentary-law territory is interesting in its way, but the main attraction is the art and the act of making it. And that becomes very apparent when you watch Anselm in a 2D presentation. Suddenly, this very alive and very physical film becomes static and flat. Camera moves designed to create the illusion of immersion become superfluous and distracting; editing choices and footage overlaid to create dynamic effects become frustrating, overloaded, and affectless. We still get the engagement with the art, but it's diminished by magnitudes without 3D. And the film becomes a slog, a mostly dialogue-free trip into Kiefer's world that needs more than close ups of thick paint and portentous music scoring drone shots to be engaging.

If you can see Anselm in 3D, do it. It's an amazing experience. But if 2D is your only option, temper your expectations. The Janus Contemporaries Blu-Ray disc does its best - it looks great, and the sound design is solid though it struggles sometimes when voices and score overlap; the ''Meet the Filmmakers'' interview with Wenders, the only extra, is fine but hardly revelatory - but its 3D Blu-Ray disc is the draw. Unfortunately, most of the filmgoing world has moved away from 3D, and it never caught on as an in-home experience. So good luck finding a way to play it, with so few systems out there left to do so. Still, it's commendable the disc exists at all, and that Janus included Anselm in its Contemporaries line. It's a much better fate than what greets most documentaries in this streaming-first, oblivion-later age.

And so we come to Perfect Days. I saw the film on September 27, 2023, in a closet-sized theater at IFC Center in New York. I'm writing this on September 2, 2024, and I can say, without hyperbole, that there has not been one day that has gone by since that first screening when I haven't thought about this film. It's an exquisite, perfect cinematic jewel. It's quiet, unassuming, efficient, and incisive, tapping into a mood and mindset that not only reflects its immediate post-pandemic moment but the deeper existential struggle of our device-dominated epoch. And as became immediately clear when watching Criterion's nearly flawless 4K disc, it's a film that, like all great art, will grow and unfurl new dimensions as it - and we - age. It's 124 minutes long, but I could watch it for 124 hours and still want more.

The plot is barebones. Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is a middle-aged janitor who cleans the fancy, architecturally vibrant public toilets around Tokyo. He lives in a spare apartment, sleeps on a mattress pad that he folds up with his comforter and pillow each morning, and is surrounded domestically only by a shelf of books, a collection of cassettes, and saplings he's cultivating in the only other room. He takes photos using a 35mm Olympus from the '80s. He's a creature of habit - the days he works, he rises to the sound of a woman sweeping outside; when he's off, he rises to the sun - and the drama of the film arises when the routine is disrupted. His young coworker pestering for money. The arrival of his runaway niece and, later, his estranged sister. The dying ex-husband of the woman who runs a favorite bar. And once through these complications, Hirayama is at peace with his decisions, choices, and materialistically spartan yet very full life. Hirayama doesn't reject the 21st century; rather, he rejects the hustle and devices that make us anxiety-riddled creatures of consumption. His is a world built intentionally, with structure and boundaries, that works for him. ''Next time is next time,'' he says. ''Now is now.''

From the outside, this might not seem like anything, run-of-the-mill midlife crisis stuff. That couldn't be further from the truth. (We do get hints of Hirayama's background, but Wenders wisely never gives us a total explanation. What we do get is only that which is necessary. And it's enough.) Like Ozu, Wenders constructs a subversively mundane film that exists in its interiors. Everything is expressed through Hirayama's eyes, affect, demeanor, and bearing. The way he nods in respect to a temple, a tree, a homeless man. The way he ritualistically cleans the toilets, using special gadgets and tools. The looks he gives the bumbling old men at the public bath or the guy who runs a food stand. The surprise he expresses when his coworker's girlfriend pecks him on the cheek in thanks for introducing her to Patti Smith. We're given very little by way of dialogue, to the point that when someone does speak it feels like a clumsy intrusion. At least at first. As the film goes on, the conversations become fuller, deeper, more consequential.

There's this concept of the vibe movie; a film that succeeds less on its narrative or execution and more because of how it feels to watch it. Christopher Nolan's Tenet has been described as a vibe movie, mostly, I think, to give people permission to like it without understanding its plot. Perfect Days is also a vibe movie, but in a different way. It's very easy to understand what's happening here. And it's very easy to want to crawl into its world and live in it for a while, to claim some of Hirayama's rejection of material and always-on digital cultures. It's a calm, even gentle film that arrived at a time when both qualities are treated antagonistically by most other filmmakers. The scenario is workaday, not superheroic. The stakes are intimate, not intergalactic. The characters are recognizable and relatable, not archetypical and escapist. The closest analog I can point to is David Lynch's The Straight Story, a picaresque domestic story with no ulterior motives or agendas other than connecting us with people and communities that allow us to see ourselves in the lives and commonality of others.

That spirit certainly has greater resonance now. Thanks to an economic, political, and technological imperative to keep us segregated, alone, angry, and fearful, we're perpetually primed to demonize everyone and everything that doesn't comport with our worldview and values. Perfect Days is a rejection of all of it. It celebrates civility and nature, elevates people and work too often dismissed or ignored, and champions fulfillment through contentment with simplicity. The film's sensibility is perfectly timed for a post-pandemic world grappling with all manner of socioeconomic challenges. But what guarantees its persistence into the decades is its deep humanism. Hirayama is the kind of character who has lived some life, and by walking in his shoes for a couple hours we can slow down, simplify whatever we're grappling with, and, like the man himself, emerge into a new dawn, if not with clarity then at least pointed in the right direction.

When Perfect Days was initially released, I remember hoping it would get a Criterion release. Otherwise, chances were good it wouldn't be available in any physical form. That Criterion brought it to home video on 4K feels like a gift - especially because I'm confident that it looks and sounds better here than it did in that shoebox-sized screening at IFC Center.

Fitting its narrative, this is a quiet film visually and aurally, so there's not much to really challenge either element. But there are moments in Hirayama's apartment that absolutely soar on this disc: The shot at the start of the film where half the 1:33 X 1 block style (aka Academy Aperture or narrow vision) screen is flooded with orange from an overhead bulb while the other half glows purple from his plants' grow light. The moment later on when Hirayama is laying in bed in darkness except for a ghostly hue of purple. The night scenes, especially the one where he plays shadow tag with the dying ex-husband. All of it is impeccable. As is the 5.1 lossless surround DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) soundtrack, which, again, isn't doing much work, but everything is perfect.

Extras-wise, along with the requisite booklet essay, we get interviews with Wenders, Yakusho, and Koji Yanai, founder of the Tokyo Toilet Project, which is responsible for all the actually cool public restrooms Hirayama cleans in the film; a trailer; and the 8-minute short some body comes into the light, a performance piece by dancer Min Tanaka who plays the homeless man in the film.

The interviews are fine; Wenders' acts as a kind of compressed commentary track. And I would have liked to have had more about the Tokyo Toilet Project, a civic program that almost died on the shoals of the pandemic and has become a central draw for the city, thanks in no small part to Perfect Days. But the short is fantastic, a tight black-and-white expressionistic document of a performance captured for the film; ultimately, only 20 seconds was used in a dream sequence. Smart move by Wenders, who approved the disc, allowing Criterion to include it. The short adds a special dimension to the experience of Perfect Days - which, if it isn't clear by now, absolutely deserves a place in your collection.

The 1080p 1.50 X 1 MVC-encoded 3-D - Full Resolution digital High Definition image on Anselm 3D is more like the shape of an IMAX film, with so many older photochemically shot 70mm films issued in 3D in theaters and during the Blu-ray 3D period that sadly only lasted so long. It looks as good as it can, but like all other films originally made in 3D on film or in 4K and up (or 6K like this one), too bad a 4K/3D format never happened. Still, more impressive than expected and the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix is pretty good for a documentary that is not flashy, but no match for how good Perfect Days is in clarity, even if both are laid back.

- Dante A. Ciampaglia (+ Nicholas Sheffo on the 3D tech playback)