Cary Joji Fukunaga’s adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s novel Beasts of No Nation (2015), a problematic depiction of child soldiers in Africa gets an impressive release on Blu-ray from Criterion. Fukunaga’s skills as cinematographer and director of actors are on full display, but the film falters in its treatment of of some of the moral issues it raises.
Three recent box sets from Arrow will satisfy a wide range of genre appetites with five thrillers from Italy in the ’70s, four spaghetti westerns from the ’60s, and Daiei’s 1966 trilogy of period fantasies featuring a statue which comes to life to punish various cruel warlords who oppress local peasants.
Criterion’s new Blu-ray of D.A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: “Company” (1970) is a fascinating glimpse of the intense physical and mental labour which goes into the process of artistic creation, closely observing the recording of the original cast performing the songs from Stephen Sondheim’s breakthough Broadway show Company in one long fourteen-hour session. Tense, exhausting and exhilarating, it depicts dedicated professionals doing their jobs under intense pressure to deliver under a near-impossible deadline.
I wrap up my recent Vinegar Syndrome binge with surfer dudes tackling zombies, deadly telepaths and a roving musician fighting his way across the desert to vie for the position of King in post-apocalyptic Lost Vegas … but this is not the end as I’ve already received the next batch of releases!
I continue my Vinegar Syndrome binge with an even more varied collection of movies across many genres, with monsters and Nazis, ghosts and a traditional vampire, cannibalism among shipwreck survivors, and a female vigilante facing down a vicious gang.
Wanting to see the new M. Night Shyamalan movie, I braced myself and went to a theatre for the first time in more than a year-and-a-half. The movie was effectively creepy, but the theatre was scarier – almost deserted, with a haunting air of the End Times about it. A staff person checked my vaccine status, but no one even bothered to look at my ticket and after the show I got an email from the theatre chain thanking me for going and pleading with me to come again soon.
Long-time friend Dave Barber, programmer of the Cinematheque and heart and soul of the Winnipeg Film Group died on Monday July 26 after six hard weeks in hospital, leaving behind a local and national film community which owed him an enormous debt for his unceasing work to get Canadian independent cinema seen by audiences across the country. For those close to him, the loss is more personal and painful; Dave’s decency and humour affected us all deeply and its absence now leaves a painful hole which will be impossible to fill.
I’ve recently been binging a lot of Vinegar Syndrome releases, including a box set of made-for-TV mysteries, an odd bit of exploitation-horror made in Florida by a French director, and one of the most brain-bendingly bad movies I’ve ever seen.
Criterion have just released Andrei Tarkovsky’s most personal Film, Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975), in an exemplary two-disk edition. The 2K restoration supplied by Mosfilm has been supplemented with four-and-a-half hours of new and archival documentaries, including a superb feature-length survey of Tarkovsky’s life and work made by his son, Andrei A. Tarkovsky, in 2019.
Director Bill Duke uses a mixture of film noir and blaxploitation tropes to explore the political complexities of being Black in the U.S. in Deep Cover (1992), his neon-tinted crime drama about an undercover cop (Laurence Fishburne) infiltrating the West Coast cocaine trade, now released in an extras-loaded 4K restoration by Criterion.