The first West German film to address the futile waste of young lives in the final days of World War 2, Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge is given an impressive Blu-ray presentation by the Criterion Collection.
Twilight Time continues to release an interesting assortment of titles, often now with excellent commentaries and impressive supplemental material.
Horror, action, mindless violence and exploitation: summer viewing has involved a lot of switching off my brain and watching undemanding genre movies.
Video Nasties: Draconian Days, Jake West’s second documentary about Britain’s panic over the evils of home video is a fascinating examination of the political intentions of censorship and the resulting chaotic social impact of the state’s attempts to control personal taste.
Roman Polanski’s Macbeth stands as one of the finest adaptations of Shakespeare on film, a seamless blend of poetry and harsh realism in its depiction of a cruel medieval world and the futility of ambition.
Warners, once in the forefront of quality disk supplements, now more often releases bare bones titles even when the movies cry out for commentaries and documentaries to illuminate their importance.
I’ve mentioned the boutique label Twilight Time before; they continue to release an interestingly eclectic series of limited edition Blu-rays (3000 copies of each title), with their specialty being a focus on the films’ soundtracks (each title includes a separate music track), not so surprising since they’re available exclusively from Screen Archives Entertainment, a site […]
I’ve recently been catching up on some documentaries by favourite filmmakers which have been waiting on the shelf for a while, beginning with a trilogy about a horrific crime and an apparent miscarriage of justice. With the release of part three of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost Trilogy, I decided to refresh my […]
Considering the amount of effort and energy required to make a movie, it’s not surprising that a filmmaker can become obsessed with a project. Major directors sometimes get lost trying to complete a movie – think Werner Herzog determined to drag a full-sized steamship over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo, or Francis Ford Coppola growing mad […]
These days, the kind of movies that once were made quickly and cheaply for the drive-in circuit are given big budgets and A-list stars. It no longer seems strange that an actor of Liam Neeson’s stature is turning up in something like Taken 2, a formulaic action-revenge movie. But back in the heyday of drive-in […]