Some comments about the past year’s DVD and Blu-ray releases.
Year End 2017
Author: Kenneth George Godwin
Preliminary Notes on Twin Peaks 2017
By turns funny and frightening, gripping and frustrating, David Lynch’s revival of Twin Peaks is a prodigiously inventive television epic.
Agnes Varda’s passion for life
In Visages Villages (2017), the 88-year old Agnes Varda, collaborating with photographer JR, continues to explore the lives of “ordinary” people while examining with fascination the process of her own aging.
Speed reviewing: 50 Capsule Comments
Very brief comments on several dozen disks viewed over the past few months.
Barbet Schroeder’s General Idi Amin Dada (1974): Criterion Blu-ray review
Criterion releases a new Blu-ray edition of Barbet Schroeder’s fascinating and problematic documentary about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, featuring a vibrant transfer from the original 16mm reversal stock.
Hometown Talent
Takes From the Winnipeg Film Group, a new documentary by Dave Barber and Kevin Nikkel tries to rein in the long and unruly history of the legendary film co-op.
Ghosts Good and Bad
Two Italian classics – Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby … Kill! (1966) and Pupi Avati’s Zeder (1983) – and an imaginative new movie – David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017) – offer differing thematic takes on survival after death.
Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky (1977): Criterion Blu-ray review
Terry Gilliam began to forge an identity separate from Monty Python with a film which seems superficially Pythonesque, but on closer look is a darker, richer and more dangerous view of an absurd world. Criterion’s new Blu-ray of Jabberwocky draws out every detail of a richly imagined Medieval world of blood, filth and horror viewed through Gilliam’s comic lens.
You can’t go home again
Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 attempts to be a respectful follow-up to Ridley Scott’s ground-breaking original, but it ends up long, drab and ultimately unmemorable.
Further down Memory Lane
Digging into the detritus of a lifetime unearths some interesting memories of a movie career which didn’t quite happen.
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