Life and Death in the films of George A. Romero

Peter (Ken Foree) has no patience for stupidity in George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978)

With the release of Second Sight’s massive edition of George A. Romero’s genre-defining Dawn of the Dead – all three cuts restored in 4K, plus commentaries and a supplementary disk with almost seven hours of new and archival documentaries and featurettes, and no less than three CDs of music including the complete Goblin soundtrack and hours of library tracks – the late, great director is given his due. Arrow’s 2017 three-disk set of early features, Between Night and Dawn, illuminates how he got there.

Seeking cinematic truth: two new Criterion Blu-rays

Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) has a rare moment of uncomplicated pleasure in Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967)

Two new releases from the Criterion Collection showcase very different approaches to filmmaking. Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) and William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes (1968/2005), although both made during the turbulent late ’60s, display radically different styles and attitudes towards exploring authenticity in the cinematic representation of reality.

Recent Eureka/Masters of Cinema releases

Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) and the preserved body of the woman he loved in Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934)

Two recent two-disk sets released by Eureka in England provide two very different forms of popular entertainment. Two Films by John Woo contains a pair of top-notch martial arts movies from the first stage of Woo’s career, before he hit it big with the gangster films of the mid-’80s, while the three movies in their Bela Lugosi/Edgar Allen Poe set present some of the most deliriously perverse horrors of the pre-Code era. While the crown jewel is Edgar Ulmer’s expressionist masterpiece The Black Cat, the set’s revelation is the Easter egg inclusion of a “virtual director’s cut” of Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, which follows Tim Lucas’ suggestions, based on internal evidence, or what the film might have been before studio tampering made it a disjointed mess.

Kaiju mania

... and giant space bugs in Gamera: Attack of Legion (1996)

Like a monumental battle between formidable rival kaiju, Criterion and Arrow have released competitive Blu-ray sets devoted to Japanese monster movies. Criterion’s Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films 1954-1975 and Arrow’s Gamera: The Complete Collection offer eight disks of monster mayhem in packages too big to fit on my shelves. Binging more than two-dozen of these movies dragged my brain blissfully back to childhood.

Blasts from the past

Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976): Criterion Blu-ray review

George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park (1975)

Fall 2024 viewing round-up, part one

Lynch in print

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