British black-and-white fantasies

Members of a British Army bomb disposal squad inspect the interior of the alien craft in Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit (1959)

Two excellent recent Blu-ray releases illuminate different strains of British fantasy. They Came to a City (1944), written by J.B. Priestley and directed by Basil Dearden is a Utopian political fable proposing a new Socialist society for post-war Britain, while Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit (1959) spins an epic tale of human evolution and our innate propensity for violence through the story of an ancient spaceship discovered buried beneath London.

Year End 2018

Boriska (Nikolay Burlyaev) oversees the firing of the bell in Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966) ...

Despite continuing rumblings about the demise of movies-on-disk, numerous companies continue to produce excellent editions on disk of a vast range of movies covering the entire history of cinema. Once again in 2018 there were far more releases than even an obsessive viewer could keep up with.

Blasts from the past

Abbas Kiarostami’s The Koker Trilogy (1987-94):
Criterion Blu-ray review

Summer viewing: all the rest

Criterion Blu-ray review: Hearts and Minds (1973)

Movies in Your Head

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