Criterion upgrade their bare-bones edition of Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977) with an extras-packed Blu-ray restoration of this starkly beautiful war film which moves from visceral realism into religious allegory.
Indicator continue to release exemplary editions of a wide range of movies, from obscure genre titles to classics to exploitation and occasional failed experiments. Recent viewing ranges from Max Ophuls’ exquisite domestic noir The Reckless Moment (1949) to Blake Edwards’ taut thriller Experiment in Terror (1962) and Arthur Lubin’s surprisingly good Gothic romance Footsteps in the Fog (1955).
Kino Lorber’s prolific slate of releases is making a wide range of genre of genre titles available, some for the first time in decades – including some from the golden age of made-for-television movies like Paul Wendkos’ Fear No Evil (1968) and Jerry London’s Killdozer (1974)
By the end of his career Luis Bunuel had perfected a style both allusive and precise in its details, giving his work a unique charm fully on display in Criterion’s new Blu-ray set of the final three features: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
It’s that time of year again. How to decide what’s “best” out of the six-hundred-plus movies I watched in 2020? It’s an impossible task, so here’s a fairly random selection of things which may not be best, but certainly appealed to me and stuck in my memory.
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.
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 Arrow disks range from exploitation to art, horrors real and fictional, and existential explorations of politics and grief.
Eureka’s Masters of Cinema honour Japanese filmmaker Ishiro Honda with two new releases, one showcasing one of his most appealing kaiju eiga – Mothra (1961) – the other a two-disk set of a pair of lesser-known movies – The H-Man (1958) and Battle in Outer Space (1960).
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.