Plissken on Parade: Escape from New York (1981) Comes to Blu-ray
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[…]
Category: Movies
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“Hundreds of Thousands of Hours of Moments”: On Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake (2015)
In a recent interview, the English filmmaker Adam Curtis described finding “hidden levels in the BBC archive” where a vast collection of extraneous footage has been accumulating over the last[…]
Dreams and Visions: Ingmar Bergman’s Kvinnodröm (Dreams) (1955)
A self-confessed conjurer, Bergman’s films are tricky in every sense. What makes these movies so difficult is what makes life itself difficult – the overwhelming desire to know the unknowable,[…]
Rosetta: Learning to See
Now she is finally able to “see” him back, to acknowledge the impact of her actions on another who cares for her, to accept their mutual obligations, and to entertain[…]
Directors · Drama · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Peace Out and Fuck You: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice
That Anderson chose to adhere so closely to the novel indicates a lack of desire to transform or elevate the work, and, regardless of whether or not this was motivated[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground
Dread Mechanics: The Sublime Terror of Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002)
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 Never Felt So Much Like Christmas in All My Life”: Why You Should Make a Date with The Man Who Came to Dinner
Sometimes, the personal angle offers the clearest view. Now and then, the authorial “we” must be abandoned in favour of a more open-handed, first-person approach. Therefore, I’ll begin by saying[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Directors · Reviews
Radio Raheem Is a Broken Record: Lessons from Do the Right Thing on Its 25th Anniversary
“Do the Right Thing ends the morning after Radio Raheem’s death, but we have enough details to know how the rest of the narrative will play out. Radio Raheem was[…]
Hearts of Darkness, Lights of Madness: Herzog: The Collection (16-Film Blu-ray Collection)
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[…]
A Pessimist’s Puzzle, or The Ambiguity of Ida
A respectable and due measure of column inches has been devoted to Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest film, Ida, but as the director himself has intimated, much of it has concentrated on[…]
American Dreamers: Badlands’ Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis
“Certainly Kit’s story, like that of Charles Starkweather and indeed, that of Warshow’s gangsters, will end in his solitary demise, precisely because his actions have set him apart from others.[…]
Spectacular Belief: On Mark Pellington’s I Melt with You (2011)
“The notion that four nineteen-year-olds pledge to kill themselves if they, in essence, grow up, and then having grown up discover that adult life is nothing but misery and so[…]
Actors & Personalities · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Blu-ray Review: Recent Silent Film Releases from Flicker Alley
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[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Festivals & Awards
Red Carpets and Radicals: The Shadow of Reality at the Fifth Odessa International Film Festival (July 11-19, 2014)
The Fifth Odessa International Film Festival was destined to be unlike its previous editions. Only two months previously, Odessa suffered an unprecedented peak in civil violence with the death of[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Reviews
Introducing Kashmir: On Haider, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Riff on Hamlet
“Something is rotten in the state of Kashmir” – Improvising Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has taken rather long for a feature film set in Kashmir to get critical acclaim for its[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
We Are Not Who We Are: Human Sacrifice, Philosophical Horror, and (Maybe) the End of the World
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part,[…]
Directors · Festivals & Awards
Like You Know It All: The Power of Godard and Breillat at the 63rd Melbourne International Film Festival (July 31-August 17, 2014)
“As directors such as Godard, Herzog, and Wenders take on 3D, we sense that for this generation of the avant-garde, the goal is no longer to test the audience’s reliance[…]
Too Much Johnson: Recovering Orson Welles’s Dream of Early Cinema
Orson Welles’s Too Much Johnson is a youthful tribute to low comedy and reflects of his obsession with bygone times, cultural mores & means of expression.
Directors · Documentaries · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Big Worms and Big Fish: Jodorowsky, Dune, and Jodorowsky’s Dune
“Jodorowsky capitalizes on the cachet of exclusivity, the wonderful feeling of being one of the elite few who “get it,” and, in treating it like a source of esoteric wisdom,[…]
“Goodbye, John”: On John Cassavetes’ Swan Song, Love Streams (1984)
Note: Criterion has just released (August 12, 2014) Love Streams in a dual-format DVD/Blu-ray edition. See end of this article for details on extras. * * * “Every picture should[…]
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