Criterion’s resurrection of Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse is a revelation; the noir-inflected movie serves as a critique of post-war despair and finds a way for its war-damaged hero to return to life.
More releases from Arrow range from the reality based and historical horror of Deranged and Mark of the Devil to the flawed black comedy of The ‘Burbs.
Recent Blu-rays from Twilight Time are as eclectic as ever. A couple of mainstream Hollywood classics; an oddball excursion into pulp by one of the great Hollywood directors; and a devastating animated fable by a Japanese-American filmmaker based on a very English graphic novel.
Criterion’s Blu-ray of Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom (1966) provides a spectacular transfer of this difficult, idiosyncratic samurai film. In the finest performance of his career, the versatile Tatsuya Nakadai provides one of the screen’s great depictions of madness.
Styles of movie horror have evolved, a process well-illustrated by comparing several new releases – John Erick Dowdle’s As Above, So Below and Mike Flanagan’s Oculus, for instance – with the seven features in the second Vincent Price Collection from Shout! Factory.
The Criterion Collection resurrects Monte Hellman’s two radical, innovative westerns from the mid-’60s, The Shooting and Ride In the Whirlwind, for a stunning Blu-ray double bill supported by a substantial set of special features.
The range of my recent viewing covers classic Italian and Eastern European films by Elio Petri and Karel Zeman as well as a pair of 1970s sci-fi/fantasy productions from the BBC, newly released on disk by the BFI.
A selection of recently viewed films ranges from revisionist horror to horror-comedy to experimental to Hitchcock imitation (or homage), all impressively presented on Blu-ray.
Roman Polanski’s Macbeth stands as one of the finest adaptations of Shakespeare on film, a seamless blend of poetry and harsh realism in its depiction of a cruel medieval world and the futility of ambition.
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train, although an American production, has a distinctly Russian tone in its mix of action and existential allegory.