A round-up of recent reviewing across multiple genres – western, black comedy, musical, animation, road movie.
Recent viewing: March-April 2018
Tag: Crime
Speed reviewing: 50 Capsule Comments
Very brief comments on several dozen disks viewed over the past few months.
Late summer viewing: more short takes
An eclectic assortment of recent viewing, including an obscure short feature from England, a couple of westerns old and new, and a pair of Elmore Leonard adaptations.
Desert noir and 3D from Twilight Time
Two recent Twilight Time Blu-ray releases – Roy Ward Baker’s Inferno (1953) and Don Siegel’s Edge of Eternity (1959) – place film noir narratives in bright desert landscapes, one in 3D, the other in panoramic widescreen.
The exploitation art of Frederick R. Friedel
Severin’s Blu-ray showcases the low budget art of independent filmmaker Frederick R. Friedel with excellent transfers of his two mid-’70s movies, Axe (aka Lisa, Lisa) and Kidnapped Coed (aka The Kidnap Lover).
Catching up with Twilight
Four Twilight Time releases showcase exceptional acting in a variety of styles: Spencer Tracy and Frederick March in Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind (1960); Jeff Bridges, John Heard and Lisa Eichhorn in Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981); Sean Penn and Christopher Walken in James Foley’s At Close Range (1986); and David Thewlis in Paul Greengrass’ Resurrected (1989).
The disappearance of real-world disk retail
With HMV Canada going bankrupt and closing down, a disk addict gets a couple of months of increasingly cheap deals, leading to some great and some not-so-wise purchases.
Seeing the world in black-and-white … again
Three more black-and-white movies in excellent Blu-ray editions – Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die!, Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow and John Baxter’s Love on the Dole – offer yet another reminder of the richness of monochrome film art.
Twilight Time round-up
Although it’s impossible to keep up with all the disks from Twilight Time, I’ve recently been binging on some of their newer releases.
Seeing the world in black-and-white … and shades of grey
The pleasures of black-and-white cinematography are on full display in Ken Hughes’ The Small World of Sammy Lee; shot on the streets of Soho and the East End by the great Wolfgang Suschitzky, this story of a small-time entertainer and compulsive gambler desperately trying to raise cash to pay off a gangster is a finely observed depiction of the seedier side of pre-Swinging London, shot through with bleak humour and the tentative possibility of redemption.
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