It’s remarkable that it’s still possible to discover a previously unknown yet major film from the silent era, but the BFI’s new release of Anthony Asquith’s first feature, Shooting Stars (1928) is a revelation; a fresh, self-aware film about filmmaking and the intersection of real and imaginary lives.
A round-up of recent disk-watching ranges from comedy to horror, mock-umentary to documentary, a poverty row classic and major discovery from the late silent period.
Despite perennial predictions of the demise of movies-on-disk, 2014 offered a rich and varied selection of new and old titles in often impressive editions from many different companies, though not necessarily from major distributors. The cream came from specialty labels like Criterion, the BFI, Arrow, Eureka/Masters of Cinema, Shout! Factory, Olive Films, Kino Lorber, Flicker Alley and Twilight Time.
Guest blogger Howard Curle continues his investigation of the silent Weimar feature Harbour Drift (1929) through a look at the film’s producer Willi Munzenberg and the film’s critical reception.
Guest blogger Howard Curle discovered a fascinating, previously unknown film and filmmaker at the 2014 San Francisco Silent Film Festival: Harbour Drift by Leo Mittler.
Criterion introduces the great Carl Theodor Dreyer to Blue-ray with their release of his remarkable chamber drama Master of the House (1925).
A survey of recent viewing covers approaches to realism, metaphor, horror and war in a range of films from the 1920s to the 2010s.
Falling behind again! Things have been hectic lately – working on a documentary which has turned out to be bigger than expected and is now way overdue, plus starting a new project with a tight deadline, I haven’t had a lot of time to write down notes on what I’ve been watching the past couple […]
For several years now, there have been dire predictions of the inevitable demise of movies on disk. In a world rapidly assigning more reality to the digital “cloud” than to actual physical objects, disks are supposedly quaintly old-fashioned. People, we are told, want instant access to everything on whatever device they happen to have closest […]
Continuing my survey of one month’s movie viewing: Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, 2012): As dumb as John Milius’ original about small town American kids fighting against vicious invaders. Milius had Nicaragua(!) taking over the States; here it’s North Korea backed by, for some reason, the Russians (aware of how much U.S. debt is held by […]