I love a deal …

Richard O'Brien plays Dr. Cosmo McKinley on TV in Jim Sharman's Shock Treatment (1981)

I’m a sucker for sales and recently spent a lot on-line buying stacks of Blu-rays from Arrow Films and Severin at discount prices, adding a lot of titles to my backlog. In recent weeks, I’ve started making my way through the new Arrow titles, which include an assortment of genre offerings, some completely unknown, others old favourites.

Indicator Blu-rays, part two: America in the 1970s

Patsy's father (Vincent Gardenia) is suspicious of her new boyfriend in Jules Feiffer & Alan Arkin's Little Murders (1971)

Two Blu-ray releases from Indicator represent shifts occurring in American filmmaking at the end of the ’60s, with Don Siegel’s near-perfect heist movie Charley Varrick (1973) quietly trashing all the rules once imposed by the Production Code and Alan Arkin’s directorial debut with Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders (1971) offering an unsettling, blackly comic dissection of the violence at the heart of American society.

Twilight Crime

Public transportation as claustrophobic trap in Larry Peerce's The Incident (1967)

Twilight Time has recently released a strong selection of crime-related Blu-rays, ranging from Marilyn Monroe’s debut as a lead in Roy Ward Baker’s Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) to Sam Fuller’s powerful revenge noir Underworld USA (1961), from Larry Peerce’s urban nightmare The Incident (1967) to a pair of ’70s exercises in police realism, Richard Fleischer’s The New Centurions (1972) and Philip D’Antoni’s The Seven-Ups (1973).

Blasts from the past

Editing and Representation

Recent Brit disks, part two

Summer grab-bag, part four: (almost) all the rest

Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015): Criterion Blu-ray review

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