Sometimes sharing a favourite movie doesn’t produce the reaction we expect; it can be puzzling, even a little painful to discover that a friend doesn’t always like the same things we do.
Two new BFI releases, Peter Hall’s Akenfield (1974) and Andrew Grieve’s On the Black Hill (1988), view the 20th Century through the relationships of people in rural Britain to the land, evoking physical hardship and timeless mystical connections.
Two excellent recent Blu-ray releases from the BFI illuminate the extremes of high and low art in British film of the early 1970s. Ken Russell’s version of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is exemplary literary adaptation, while Don Sharp’s Psychomania is … well, something else again!
I’ve recently been dipping into the ’60s and ’70s with two Criterion Blu-rays of major works by Orson Welles, a couple of Robert Altman’s signature titles, and a new J.G. Ballard adaptation from Ben Wheatley.
Twilight Time offer a thriller maligned on its initial release, a harsh western directed by an Englishman in Spain, and a sprawling Hollywood epic which was one of the last of the big ’60s roadshow productions.
Nazis and vampires have been popular subjects for exploitation for decades in a range of genres from the Gothic to epic SF and paranoid b-movie thriller.
Criterion’s release of a key but little-known feature by Jean Renoir, the conceptually and stylistically sophisticated La Chienne, is essential viewing.
Two recent disks present transgressive sexuality from very different perspectives: Christian Marquand’s Candy is a glossy big budget production packed with star power, while Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! is a scrappy underground epic.
Criterion releases Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) in a superb Blu-ray edition with plentiful special features to illuminate this bleak masterpiece about masculine insecurity and the roots of violence.
Twilight Time have released two very different movies on Blu-ray: Ralph Nelson’s religious parable Lilies of the Field, which won Sidney Poitier the first ever best actor Oscar for a Black star, and Richard Fleischer’s bleak 10 Rillington Place, the true story of British serial killer John Reginald Christie, which features Richard Attenborough’s finest performance.