England’s Arrow Video, while still largely focusing on genre titles, is rapidly becoming the equal of the BFI and Criterion in the quality of their releases, including extensive, informative supplements on many disks.
Excellent new region B Blu-rays of Richard Fleischer’s soap noir Violent Saturday, Franklin Schaffner’s The War Lord and Robert Altman’s revisionist take on classic detective stories, The Long Goodbye; plus The Land of Hope, a recent, quieter and more contemplative film by prolific Japanese director Sono Sion.
Peter Davis’ Oscar-winning 1973 documentary Hearts and Minds remains the single finest investigation of U.S. motivations and actions in Vietnam.
The latest Flipside release from the BFI, Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling, is like a cross between a gritty Ken Loach working class story and a Children’s Film Foundation fantasy of kid empowerment.
Georges Franju’s remake of Feuillade’s silent serial Judex is a mysterious dream of a movie which evokes the silent era through beautiful surfaces and ephemeral moods.
The consequences of one man’s decision in Steven Knight’s Locke outweigh the fate of the world in Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow.
Frank Pavich’s remarkable documentary allows the audience to see Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfilmed Dune as one of the greatest movies never made.
Warners, once in the forefront of quality disk supplements, now more often releases bare bones titles even when the movies cry out for commentaries and documentaries to illuminate their importance.
Among other recent disks, Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England and Frank Perry’s The Swimmer use realistic performance and imagery to dig below material reality to strange symbolic and psychological depths, while the Estonian documentary Disco and Atomic War transforms the social and political facts of the Cold War into something strange and very funny.
In recent years I’ve found myself watching – and liking – movies on disk which I initially had little interest in seeing when they first came out in theatres. Cases in point: the latest films by Ron Howard and the Coen Brothers.