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.
Indicator’s Blu-ray finally does justice to The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), Dr. Seuss’ nightmarish musical plunge into childhood anxieties.
Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016) is a jewel of the art and craft of filmmaking, an intensely emotional and ultimately heartbreaking study of character and landscape.
The 19th Century French writer Guy de Maupassant had a spare style and an acute understanding of social class and psychology, both characteristics which lend themselves well to cinematic adaptation. Criterion’s Blu-ray edition of Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country and the older Montparnasse DVD edition of Robert Wise’s Mademoiselle Fifi represent the best of de Maupassant on film.
Arrow Video’s spectacular Blu-ray of Rabid is a reminder of just how good and natural a filmmaker David Cronenberg is, while the director’s recent Maps to the Stars seems a less personal work.
We bring our whole personal history to every movie we see, even ones we’ve seen (many times) before; as we’re in a constant state of change, so the movies we watch seem to change with each viewing.
Two disks illustrate the spectrum of British genre production in the ’70s and ’80s: Pete Walker’s cinematic horror Frightmare and David Rudkin’s epic BBC fantasy Artemis 81.
The work of the great English cinematographer Oswald Morris, in both colour and black-and-white, added enormously to the films he worked on. He had a long and fruitful association with John Huston (his work on Moulin Rouge in 1952 pushed the boundaries of what Technicolor was supposed to be able to do), and also shot […]
While some of the films and plays in the series of disks I wrote about last week, devoted to ghost and horror stories made for British television, reveal the budgetary and technical limitations of their time and medium (low budget sets, somewhat coarse and murky video recording), the BFI has lavished its attention on one […]
While it’s quite common to like a movie despite its flaws, it’s also possible to appreciate a film in spite of its content. Griffith’s technical achievement can be admired even as we are appalled by the racist politics of Birth of a Nation; we can recognize the visual beauty of Riefenstahl’s use of camera and […]