The visual master Mario Bava virtually invented the Italian genre called giallo, influencing generations of filmmakers who followed and built on his stylistic and thematic example. Arrow video has been releasing a series of impressive editions of Bava’s films on Blu-ray, offering alternative versions and a rich array of supplements to provide a critical and historical context for his work.
The visual master Mario Bava virtually invented the Italian horror film, influencing generations of filmmakers who followed and built on his stylistic and thematic example. Arrow video has been releasing a series of impressive editions of Bava’s films on Blu-ray, offering alternative versions and a rich array of supplements to provide a critical and historical context for his work.
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.
Arrow Video has quickly become one of my favourite sources for both genre and “art” films, with impressive editions of a wide range of titles; most recently I’ve been immersing myself in some of their horror releases.
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.
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.
Once again, I’ve fallen way behind in commenting on the movies I’ve been watching: ’60s political agitprop, mind-bending time travel, demonic possession, cheesy B monster movies, Cold War submarines and futuristic trains …
Because it’s pretty hard to lose money with a horror movie, it’s been possible for filmmakers to experiment and push boundaries. But it’s a fact which has also produced a lot of laziness in both conception and execution, or at best a rote repetition of overly familiar formulas.
Elio Petri’s 1970 masterpiece Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion provides one of the most incisive dissections of the pathology of power ever committed to film.
When approaching 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, Criterion’s new 5-disk DVD edition of the first three collaborations between the Italian filmmaker and the Hollywood star, it’s difficult not to feel a certain degree of trepidation. These three films, critical and commercial failures at the time of release, now stand as something like […]