Recent viewing ranges from classic noir to mediocre ’80s thriller, from low budget horror to a documentary about one of the great craftsmen of fantasy film.
Brief viewing notes, July 2016
Tag: Fantasy
Recent viewing, May-June 2016, part one
Recent viewing ranges from smart B-movie horror to magic realist-inflected neo-realism, with excellent disks from Blue Underground, Shout! Factory and Arrow Video.
Recent viewing: April & May 2016
Another eclectic selection from my recent viewing, from an old fondly remembered BBC sci-fi series to an unsettling French psychological thriller, from a nasty John Frankenheimer thriller to a pair of atypical Rossellini features striving to break out of the confines of neorealism.
Late winter viewing, part one
Kids and monsters, kids in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and a couple of cousins from Israel who tried to take over Hollywood in the ’80s: all help to take one’s mind off the tedious last days of winter.
More from Twilight Time
Twilight Time revive Gordon Douglas’ The Detective starring Frank Sinatra and Michael Winner’s Scorpio starring Burt Lancaster, a couple of largely forgotten movies from the late ’60s and early ’70s in editions which highlight their interest as time capsules of attitudes and filmmaking styles which have since all but disappeared; and revisit Mysterious Island, one of Ray Harryhausen’s better movies, with a new edition featuring some interesting supplements.
Binging on Twilight Time
Recent binging on Twilight Time Blu-rays ranges from politics to comedy to science fiction, absurd studio productions and idiosyncratic independents; from the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions to the overthrowing of a future society of privileged immortals to underhanded contemporary business wars, from dinosaurs deep inside the Earth to the destruction of an alien race on the moon.
Artsploitation Films and the boundaries of horror
Artsploitation Films is a distributor with a taste for offbeat horror as represented in two recent Blu-ray releases, the German Der Samurai and the French (though shot in English) Horsehead, both visually stylized and more interested in metaphor and atmosphere than crude shocks.
The pleasures of hand-made animation
Despite the dominance of computer animation these days, there are qualities in hand-made animation, whether drawn or stop-motion, which offer a richer, more aesthetically pleasing viewer experience, as evidenced by a random selection of new and classic releases.
Criterion Blu-ray review: Fellini Satyricon (1969)
Criterion’s Blu-ray edition of Fellini Satyricon should go a long way towards establishing this phantasmagoric adaptation of the ancient Roman novel as one of the director’s finest and most creatively significant films.
Year End 2014
Despite perennial predictions of the demise of movies-on-disk, 2014 offered a rich and varied selection of new and old titles in often impressive editions from many different companies, though not necessarily from major distributors. The cream came from specialty labels like Criterion, the BFI, Arrow, Eureka/Masters of Cinema, Shout! Factory, Olive Films, Kino Lorber, Flicker Alley and Twilight Time.
Search
Indexes
Monthly Archives
Recent Posts