John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky (2017) is a portrait of a man coming to terms with his own mortality, which is also a tribute to actor Harry Dean Stanton, on whose life much of the script was based. Generous and emotionally rich, the film surrounds Harry Dean with a flawless cast which forms a supportive community within which he comes to accept without fear or anger the idea of his own inevitable death.
Criterion have re-released Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful heist movie Le cercle rouge (1970) in a new dual-format 4K UHD/Blu-ray edition based on a 4K restoration by StudioCanal. Although there are no new extras (supplements adding up to almost two hours date back to the company’s original 2003 DVD release), the film looks better than ever, its narrative stripped to essentials as a meditation on professionalism, fate and the moral ambiguity of characters on both sides of the law.
As a filmmaker, Tobe Hooper’s creative interests were not always in sync with audiences and critics. His mixture of theatrical performance and constructed-in-studio settings are on full display in the generally disdained Stephen King adaptation The Mangler (1995), whose uneven dramatic execution undermines an often impressively menacing horror-fantasy about the bloody appetite of capitalism, an inhuman force which devours those doomed to serve it. Hooper’s Spontaneous Combustion (1990), on the other hand, is a half-baked mess which mostly lacks any visual interest to make up for its many narrative inadequacies.
Arrow’s big pre-Christmas sale brought a wide range of titles, some old, some new: Juan Simon Piquer’s Spanish slasher Pieces (1982), Chelsea Stardust’s horror comedy Satanic Panic (2019), Giancarlo Santi’s spaghetti western The Grand Duel (1972), Lee Min-jae’s horror comedy Zombie for Sale (2019), Jill Gevargizian’s psycho horror The Stylist (2020),Nico Mastorakis incoherent first feature Death Has Blue Eyes (1976), a Japanese double bill of sci-fi crime movies, Nobuo Adachi’s The Invisible Man Appears (1949) and Mitsuo Murayama’s The Invisible Man vs the Human Fly (1957), Riccardo Freda’s mix of melodrama and giallo Double Face (1969), Jacques Tourneur’s late film noir Nightfall (1956), and Giorgio Ferroni’s atmospheric Gothic horror Mill of the Stone Women (1960).
With their new Blu-ray release, Criterion add the Coen Brothers’ third feature, Miller’s Crossing (1990), to the Collection. One of the darkest, most sombre films in the Coen canon, this moody gangster story updates hardboiled noir as a complex meditation on male fragility and violence. Sumptuously shot by Barry Sonnenfeld, it features a superb cast of great character actors.
Filmmaker Gerry O’Hara tackled the difficult subject of marital violence in the mid-’70s, at a time when such things weren’t discussed in polite company. His use of exploitation tropes offended critics at the time for “trivializing” a serious subject which almost no one else was examining in popular media. Actually, O’Hara’s treatment is quite intelligent and well-crafted.
Recent disks from England include Franco Parolini’s late spaghetti western Sabata Trilogy (1969-71), the classic Ray Harryhausen Sinbad fantasies (1958-77), Carl Franklin’s revisionist neo-noir Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Tsui Hark’s influential martial arts fantasy Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), and David Greene’s tense submarine disaster movie Gray Lady Down (1978).
Severin’s All the Haunts Be Ours box set resurrects an interesting independent American feature from the early ’80s, Avery Crounse’s Eyes of Fire (1983) uses folk horror elements as a metaphor for colonialism and the violence inherent in Manifest Destiny.
Four of Dario Argento’s later movies reveal a filmmaker in decline – but they all get excellent Blu-ray releases with pristine transfers and lots of extras. This is a mixed blessing for fans of Argento’s great movies from the ’70s and ’80s, who can see the movies’ weaknesses, but nonetheless appreciate occasional flashes of visual and narrative invention.
Criterion give a stellar release to Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (The Celebration, 1998), the first feature completed under the Dogme 95 manifesto rules; a brilliant, emotionally raw exploration of masculine trauma, it retains all its power to shock and move a quarter century after its release and stands as perhaps the most lasting result of Dogme’s reaction to the complacency of bourgeois cinema.