Very brief comments on several dozen disks viewed over the past few months.
Speed reviewing: 50 Capsule Comments
Tag: Science Fiction
You can’t go home again
Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 attempts to be a respectful follow-up to Ridley Scott’s ground-breaking original, but it ends up long, drab and ultimately unmemorable.
A mixed bag from Screen Archives
The discovery of a previously unknown documentary, Robert Kaylor’s Derby (1971), plus a Blu-ray edition of Stephanie Rothman’s Terminal Island (1973), a rough-and-ready exploitation B-movie, are of much greater interest than Jack Cardiff’s Holiday in Spain (1960), a bloated mainstream Cinerama showcase which dresses its travelogue in a tissue-thin “mystery” plot.
Pulp Epics
Big budgets don’t necessarily guarantee success in genre filmmaking; in fact, the bigger the budget the more likely a genre movie will be met with derision which is often undeserved.
Summer viewing: science fiction
Technical accuracy is not necessarily what makes science fiction satisfying; more important is storytelling, as illustrated by two older, and one recent, movies released on Blu-ray: Byron Haskin’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), Joseph Sargent’s Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016)..
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979): Criterion Blu-ray review
Criterion’s Blu-ray presents Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker in a stunning new restoration which does full justice to its rich imagery and subtle soundscape.
Viewing notes: May 2017
Two recent Japanese animated features – Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s Patema Inverted and Keiichi Hara’s Miss Hokusai – and Caltiki: The Immortal Monster, an early low-budget horror from Mario Bava, illustrate the range of styles and content available to fantastic film.
Random thoughts: May 2017
A collection of random thoughts about recent viewing and reading, including an ambivalent excursion into Netflix streaming.
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.
Tripping, shopping and the airborne multiplex
A recent trip to England produced stacks of new disks, some interesting books, and several in-flight movies.
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