Reviews

Southbound is a multi-director horror anthology that explores the consequences of seemingly unforgivable actions by its principal characters.

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Death by Hanging is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it was released in 1968. New on Blu-ray from Criterion today, this absurdist satire from Nagisa Oshima shows a man executed by the government whose body refuses to die.

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Roger Eggers’ debut feature ‘The Witch’ is cold, morbid, oft switching moods between the terrible and the sanguine. ‘Tis able to both cause thought and fear, and thus may be even more a spectacle.

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Now that it’s out on Blu-ray, ‘Steve Jobs’ can be seen and appreciated by a wider audience for the engaging biopic that it is.

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The Coens’Hail, Caesar! disappoints us, Deadpool is a pleasant HARD R surprise, and Zoolander 2 is a deuce.

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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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Hail Caesar! stars Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johannsen, newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, personal favorite Ralph Fiennes and features small turns from Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Frances McDormand and a poorly dubbed Christopher Lambert who I could’ve sworn was dead. With that many stars one wonders how even the Coen Company could handle it. The answer: they don’t.

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Like a long marriage, 45 Years isn’t an easy journey by any means, yet it is one definitely worth taking.

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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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A few years ago, Tim Blake Nelson wrote and directed the dramedy ‘Leaves of Grass.’ That film was original, smart, funny and showed tremendous range for Nelson as a writer and director. I’m not sure what he was trying to accomplish with Anesthesia, but hopefully it’s only a minor step back.

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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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Were it anyone else but Charlie Kaufman holding the reins on this, things might not seem so generic and adrift, yet again, considering the level of novelty and creativity he has brought to previous offerings, Anomalisa feels decidedly thin, and only partially formed.

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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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The Revenant is one of the most ambitious films in recent memory and one of the best pictures of the year. Go see it. It’s worth your time and money.

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