In his latest film, The Shrouds (2024), David Cronenberg has made his most personal work since The Brood (1979), transforming grief into a meditation of mortality which, while at times uncomfortably revelatory, is nonetheless shot through with a dark vein of humour.
After his radical influence on film comedy in the 1960s, with movies like A Hard Day’s Night (1964), The Knack … and How to Get It (1965) and How I Won the War (1967), Richard Lester remade himself as a skilful creator of mainstream entertainments in the 1970s, beginning with The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974). The mix of history, politics and violence is in constant tension with irreverent comedy and slapstick, while the large cast epitomizes the ’70s attraction to big-name ensembles. Criterion’s new two-disk set – available in both 4K UHD and Blu-ray – has been mastered from a gorgeous restoration by StudioCanal, supported by more than three hours of extras which detail the unconventional production.
Despite a career spanning from the 1930s to the mid-’80s, I hadn’t even heard of Tai Katô until a recent flurry of disk releases from Radiance in England and Film Movement in the States, yet he produced significant work in some of my favourite genres – particularly chambara and yakuza films, both of which are represented in these releases, with excellent editions of postwar crime stories (By a Man’s Face Shall You Know Him [1966] and Eighteen Years in Prison [1967]), police procedural noir (I, the Executioner [1968]), and period swordfighting (Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza [1966]).
Horror is a flexible genre, capable of using science fiction, history, adventure, action and terrible real-life events to touch on existential questions as well as provide escape with a frisson of pleasurable fear. Three recent releases span a broad range of the possibilities – Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), arguably his best film; Brian Clemens’ Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974), one of the best late films from Hammer Films; and Nick Kozakis’s Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism (2023), a bleak examination of the dangers of fundamentalist religious beliefs based on a tragic case which occurred in Australia in 1993.
Some recent Arrow releases provide an opportunity to revisit a few familiar movies and – perhaps – reevaluate them. Each of them presents some problems, but Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (2000), Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995) and Mike Hodges’ The Terminal Man (1974) were all worth another look.
Criterion have released an excellent two-disk edition of Claude Berri’s adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s epic tragedy of idealism brought down by greed and petty rivalries in early 20th Century rural Provence. New 4K restorations of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (both 1986) are visually ravishing, while the drama is embodied in superb performances from Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart and an excellent supporting cast.
Recent Arrow disks offer an alien invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Invasion [2007]), stylish horror (Rampo Noir [2005]), a classic western (Don Siegel’s The Shootist [1976]) and a note-perfect homage to ’70s low-budget exploitation (Francis Galluppi’s The Last Stop in Yuma County [2023]).
Two key films from the era of peak paranoia, the late-’60s and early ’70s, are given exemplary disk releases – Theordore J. Flicker’s darkly comic The President’s Analst (1967) on Blu-ray from Imprint and Francis Ford Coppola’s nightmarish The Conversation (1974) on 4K in a dual-format edition from StudioCanal.
In beginning the process of reducing the size of my movie collection, trading in disks at my favourite local store, I’ve paradoxically added some new collector editions of other movies thanks to the generous credit I’ve received.
My recent streaming seems to lean heavily into horror, with a few animated movies to lighten the tone.