Two excellent recent Blu-ray releases illuminate different strains of British fantasy. They Came to a City (1944), written by J.B. Priestley and directed by Basil Dearden is a Utopian political fable proposing a new Socialist society for post-war Britain, while Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit (1959) spins an epic tale of human evolution and our innate propensity for violence through the story of an ancient spaceship discovered buried beneath London.
Three very different features – Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), John Guillermin’s Town on Trial (1957) and Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960) – illuminate the varied pleasures offered by genre in the hands of seriously committed filmmakers.
Clive Barker’s distinctive prose style, while it creates vivid and highly visual stories, is difficult to transform into movies because the themes and meanings of the stories are strangely abstract. While Barker himself has been his own most successful adapter, there have been many attempts to capture his vision on film – some better than others. George Pavlou’s Rawhead Rex (1986) misses the mark, but Bernard Rose’s Candyman almost succeeds but is diverted by moving the story from Liverpool to Chicago.
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La vérité (1960) is less well-known than Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques, but it’s one of his finest features, a complex, emotionally wrenching work which gave Brigitte Bardot her greatest role. Criterion’s excellent new Blu-ray presents the film in a spectacular restoration, with substantial supplements.
A brief survey of recent viewing ranging from classics to contemporary, from class to cheese: thrillers, sci-fi and horror featuring black magic, killer robots, demons, evil stepdads and retro-’50s rock-n-roll biker gangs.
Two movies from the early 1970s illuminate class and race divides in New York City – Sidney Lumet’s Sean Connery starring caper film The Anderson Tapes (1971) and Gordon Parks Jr’s hugely influential Super Fly (1972), starring Ron O’Neal with a landmark score by Curtis Mayfield.
Criterion’s release of Elaine May’s one-of-a-kind Mikey and Nicky (1976) on Blu-ray calls attention to one of the most unjustly neglected movies of its era, a devastatingly raw dissection of masculinity, friendship and betrayal by a filmmaker who was too distinctively original to fit comfortably into the business of Hollywood.
Inspired by the international success of Dirty Harry and The French Connection in 1971, the Italian poliziotteschi quickly became a versatile genre reflecting the political paranoia and nihilism of the ’70s; three recently viewed movies show a range of approaches to the genre.
MVD Entertainment Group’s Blu-ray release of Ryan Schifrin’s ’80s horror homage Abominable (2005/2018) offers an exemplary treatment of a niche title, with excellent technical treatment and stacked with extras which honour the filmmaker’s respect for the genre.
Olive Films’ Signature edition of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) does full justice to this classic of 1950s sci-fi/horror with an excellent transfer and a rich collection of extras, which include two commentaries and a stack of featurettes about the film, director Siegel and producer Walter Wanger.
Kenneth George Godwin, Film Editor
I have been editing a wide range of film and video projects, both documentary and drama, for two-and-a-half decades. I started at the Winnipeg Film Group, cutting on Steenbeck 16mm flatbeds, adopted Avid in 1995, and have used FinalCut Pro quite extensively over the past ten years. Projects I have worked on have screened – and won awards – at festivals around the world.read more >>
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