Quiet, contemplative character-based science fiction movies feel like a refreshing oasis in a desert of big, loud, empty franchise blockbusters. James Gray’s Ad Astra (2019), Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Ad Astra (2018), Sion Sono’s The Whispering Star (2015) and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008) provide satisfaction on many levels.
Recently viewed Blu-rays from Severin films include a range of Italian horrors featuring zombies, necrophilia and Lovecraftian gods, a revisionist vampire tale from the golden age of Ozploitation, and an unsettling experimental adaptation of a Lovecraft story from Sweden.
2016 was an impressive year for movies on disk, with a wide variety of new and classic releases, prestige productions and exploitation, and some interesting rediscoveries … too many to pick just a handful of “bests”.
Criterion releases a superb Blu-ray edition of Jan Troell’s 2-part epic about poor Swedish farmers looking for a new life in the US in the mid-19th Century.
The series of ten Martin Beck novels written by Swedish husband and wife Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall between 1965 and 1975 are not entirely conventional mysteries. They are police procedurals which focus on the tedious sifting of facts and clues which may or may not lead anywhere, in which accident and coincidence often abruptly […]