Criterion release the definitive edition of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), the pinnacle of sophisticated wit from Hollywood’s Golden Age, in a two-disk set packed with extras.
More recent viewing, heavy on the sci-fi, fantasy and horror – the latter including an ambitious Netflix series and a grim documentary about violence in America.
My collecting obsession leads me to Arrow’s Ring Collection — Hideo Nakata’s hugely influential Ringu (1998), two divergent sequels, George Iida’s Spiral (1998) and Nakata’s own Ring 2 (1999), plus the prequel Ring 0: Birthday (2000). While the three follow-up movies can’t match the effectiveness of the original, Arrow present them all in excellent transfers, with a lot of supportive extras.
Horror, westerns science fiction, crime, magic, demons, vampires, zombies, witches, a one-legged detective, people trapped in a deadly house, a damsel in distress and a film editor driven mad by cheap exploitation movies …
Three movies from producer-director Stanley Kramer, spread across two decades, highlight his liberal sensibilities … and expose the limits of that liberalism in the face of a messy world.
A random selection of recent viewing, from Nazi propaganda to British Angry Young Men, from classic sci-fi to the 1960s revival of a French criminal mastermind as slapstick pastiche.
Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Ernst Lubitsch’s final completed feature, Cluny Brown (1946), presents this richly layered comic gem in a luminous 4K restoration. This underrated romantic comedy which skewers rigid British class attitudes on the eve of World War Two is one of Lubitsch’s masterpieces.
Produced by George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin, The Power (1968) is a low-key sci-fi thriller with a strong cast and a no-nonsense style, which was barely noticed when it was released in the same year as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.
Three Blu-rays from Twilight Time span the espionage genre from World War Two to the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, each mixing personal drama with larger political issues in their own distinct ways.
Although a very prolific director (of mostly television) from the 1950s to the ’90s, Paul Wendkos isn’t a well-known name today, though at his best he had a real flair for unsettling visuals which suited the burgeoning paranoia of the ’70s. That style is well showcased in The Brotherhood of the Bell (1970) and The Mephisto Waltz (1971).
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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