Two recent box sets – Arrow’s J-Horror Rising and Severin’s All the Haunts Be Ours Vol. 2 – provide a dizzying range of horror and fantasy movies from multiple cultures and cinematic traditions. Each set includes a range of extras which illuminate not only the cultural differences but also similarities in theme and emotional impact displayed by these movies.
Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language (2024) is a delightfully witty comedy of intertwined cultures, a blend of Winnipeg and Tehran, sparking surprising moments of recognition which affirm a shared humanity. Formally inventive, its layered comedy gathers a deepening emotional resonance as its non-linear narrative gradually brings a disparate collection of characters together in a surprisingly moving final act. One of the finest films ever made in Winnipeg.
Four new limited edition releases from Second Sight gave me a reason to revisit and to some degree re-evaluate movies I was quite familiar with. While my opinions may not have changed radically, each set did give me a new appreciation for the filmmakers’ work, most particularly in the case of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s influential The Blair Witch Project (1999). The care and attention the company lavish on genre films – here, in addition to Blair Witch, the Ginger Snaps Trilogy (2000-04), Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020) and Ti West’s The Sacrament (2013) – is exemplary.
Two recent limited editions from Second Sight approach horror from very different angles – classic Hammer Gothic in Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), and contemporary Right-wing violence in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015).
Criterion’s new release presents a stunning restoration of Jean Eustache’s intimate epic The Mother and the Whore (1973), a bleak epitaph for the failed promise of social change which climaxed and crashed with the May 1968 uprising in Paris: a few years later, the film’s characters are adrift and trying to rebuild a sense of themselves in a society which has rejected them and their dreams.
It’s that time of year again – have to look back and think about whether the time I’ve spent watching movies has been worthwhile. Here, I glance back at eleven disk releases which stood out for me.
Following the international success of La dolce vita (1960), Federico Fellini faced a crisis of confidence fuelled by the expectations of producers, critics and audiences waiting to see what he would do next; plunging into that uncertainty he transformed creative paralysis into the defining film of his career, an exuberant, prodigiously inventive fantasia which reinvented him as an artist. Throwing off the last traces of Italian Neorealism, in 8½ he embraced the messy chaos of life which became his enduring theme in all the films which followed. Criterion’s 4K restoration once more makes the film fresh and vital.
Part eight of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers my introduction to the great Greek filmmaker Theodoros Angelopoulos, who addresses the fraught political history of 20th Century Greece in four thematically rich and visually stunning features made between 1972 and 1980.
Yet more notes on recent viewing, featuring horror – both high and low end – some documentaries and action movies, gritty realism and slick fantasy … eclectic and somewhat random.
In this, the longest section of my notes from the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival, I cover the English-language films from Britain, Australia and the U.S., which include documentaries, mainstream movies, films about sexuality and toxic chauvinism, class conflict and ennui.