DVD & Blu-ray · Essays · Societal Trends
When you turn a political object into a collectible, you’re no longer confronting it – you’re displaying it. You’re posing with the thing that once asked you to change. *[…]
Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Melodrama · Silents
When what you write about is what you see/What do you write about when it’s dark? ~ Charles Wright “You’ll have to kill me to get rid of me.” Criterion’s[…]
Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Westerns
Action scenes are what a summer audience wants, but in Pat Garrett the shootouts become episodic and lack the ratcheting up of tension, followed by its release at the climactic[…]
Comedy · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals · Production History
ALLAN ARKUSH: Get Crazy never actually got a real release, you know. It was in theaters for a month. . . . A month? I’m sorry, a week, in some[…]
Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · German Cinema
Its release on Blu-ray is in some ways a belated victory for the film, whose unsuccessful release in the United States eighty-five years ago was a disappointment to Trenker and[…]
Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Women in Film
The relative obscurity of van Brakel’s works gives these decades-old films a sort of newness. Indeed, there’s a genuineness in the films that seems foreign, even exotic, in our streaming[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“What do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” – Henry James, from the preface of his novel The Tragic[…]
Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959); The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960); Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961); The Loneliness of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
What we see in Brooks and Beery on the screen is a mixup of the actors’ hardwired personalities and those contrived for their roles, but this is the sort of[…]
Comedy · Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
From his very beginnings as a filmmaker, Griffith understood the efficacy of location shooting. Putting actors into real landscapes and streets not only went to authenticating the narrative but had[…]
Counterculture · Documentaries · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals
“BOB: Well, you always know who you are. I just don’t know who I’m gonna become.” – Sam Shepard. True Dylan: A One-Act Play as It Really Happened One Afternoon in[…]
Books · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray
What’s remarkable, in both book and film, is how the metafictional elements do not detract from our emotional investment in the straightforward fiction. Where Fowles’ interjected commentary and authorial intrusions form[…]
The House of Mystery (Volkoff, 1921-23), Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Restored Works (Vertov, 1924-1934), Joan the Woman (DeMille, 1916), and The Marriage Circle (Lubitsch,[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Essays · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
He was the spectator at his own drama, like a person at a play he doesn’t understand. – Victor Hugo1 “On the other hand, I don’t want to do Petronius[…]
So even if you aren’t nostalgic for the heady sense of danger and decadence, do yourself a favor and crash the pod down into Carpenter country – an alternate reality[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground
Decasia is a “horror film” in which the horror it presents as the corruption imposed by time on what people create is also an unavoidable part of the world we[…]
I decided to review this massive collection as some kind of masochistic indulgence, and truly it’s been a long, soul-warping, awe-inspiring yet deeply troubling, at times maddeningly boring, 25+ hours[…]
Actors & Personalities · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, W. C. Fields, Ben Turpin – the gang’s all here. Flicker Alley, a home video company founded in 2007, is not solely dedicated[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Reviews · Silents
For many of us, cinema long ago replaced religion, but why not combine the two by celebrating Easter with a reading of Gordon Thomas’s study of King of Kings, part “un” of[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Reviews · Silents
“Erik, like Darth Vader, is much more interesting with as little backstory as possible.” — Mike Gebert, Nitrateville, site administrator1 When fairy tales, literature, and the movies hand us a[…]
