A lean story with some unlikely poignancy, with director Daniel Barber squeezing the most suspense out of it possible. There’s not a lot of twists and turns; it’s just one sustained mood of dread and and ending that makes puts the entire thing into a wider, scarier perspective.
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Director Tetsuya Nakashima is hellbent to that end in The World of Kanako, his ultra-violent, ultra-stylized 2014 extreme revenge flick. It was released in America last fall by Drafthouse Films and comes to Blu-ray today.
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Gilda is out now in a fantastic-looking 2K restoration Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection that reveals what a anomaly the movie truly was.
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In the documentary ‘I Am Thor,’ out now on Blu-ray, “nice guy” Canadian bodybuilder-turned-stripper-turned-heavy-metal-rock-star John Mikl Thor decides one day in the mid-1990s to try to regain a sliver of the fame he had in the crazy, sexed-up 1970s.
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There is so much to be learned from Criterion’s new Blu-ray of Bitter Rice, even today. It is a perfect surprise, proving how important and how much fun it is to discover older movies with fresh eyes.
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Experimenter is one of the best and most overlooked films of the year, and definitely worth catching up with as soon as possible.
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With the new Blu-ray release of Anderson’s 2012 standout Moonrise Kingdom, The Criterion Collection has now issued all but one of his movies with a deluxe treatment that celebrates that universe.
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A review of Brian De Palma’s controversial 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill, recently released in a restored uncut version for The Criterion Collection on Blu-ray.
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Freed from the constraints of the mystery genre and having a detective/investigator as a main character, Jules Dassin’s 1950 film Night and the City is downward-spiral noir in its purest form.
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My Beautiful Laundrette, out now in a new, restored 2K digital transfer on Criterion Blu-ray, takes place in a specific setting and with such specific characters that, even though the place and time feels very unfamiliar, is rendered relatable with an expressionistic tone by a humanistic director who coached some true, raw performances — including one from then up-and-comer Daniel Day-Lewis.
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The 1927 Ernest Hemingway short story The Killers was adapted to film twice in a span of less than 20 years, producing two fantastic films which share some of the same themes, but in every other respect couldn’t be farther apart. The fact that The Criterion Collection has updated their previously issued double-movie DVD and has just released it on Blu-ray is real cause for celebration.
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While this might be least-known of director Jack Hill’s efforts, even within the pantheon of work he did for Corman’s New World Pictures, it’s definitely worth a closer look.
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On the surface, this 1970 movie from Czech New Wave auteur Jaromil Jireš seems like a softcore porn Alice in Wonderland but without quite enough nudity to qualify.
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The Bridge is one of the best anti-war movies I’ve ever seen. Certainly its about the futility of war, but it goes farther than that.
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Vinegar Syndrome’s DVD release of the 1969 Nazisploitation/sexploitation flick The Cut-Throats — limited to 1,500 copies — is a very basic one. It has a 2k restoration, along with the original trailer, and that’s about it.
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