Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground (2022) is as dense and illuminating as the band’s music, providing a kaleidoscopic account of the creative explosion in music, art and film in New York in the 1960s out of which the band emerged for a brief, transformative moment of cultural change.
Two recent BFI Flipside releases unearth an odd assortment of movies from the fringes – the standalone feature The Appointment (Lindsey C. Vickers, 1981) and volume 2 of the Short Sharp Shocks anthology series which includes the allegorical horror of Ian F.H. Lloyd’s The Face of Darkness (1976), a mix of crime and ghosts in John Gillings Escape from Broadmoor (1948), horror as feminist thesis in The Mark of Lilith (1986), the proto-music video Jack the Ripper with Screaming Lord Sutch (1963), a couple of unsettling PSAs and other ephemera.
Criterion’s new Blu-ray release of Joseph Losey’s chilling allegory of identity disintegrating under the pressure of anti-Semitism in Occupied France features a new 4K transfer from the original negative and includes three-and-a-half hours of supplements about the production and the real history in which the story is grounded.
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.
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.
Criterion’s new Blu-ray revives Gordon Parks’ semi-autobiographical film The Learning Tree (1969), significant as the first movie produced by a Hollywood studio directed by a Black filmmaker. In this coming-of-age story set in a small Kansas town in the 1920s, the typical problems faced by a boy leaving childhood are complicated by the deeply embedded racist attitudes which surround him.
Arrow’s recent two-disk Blu-ray set showcases Chad Crawford Kinkle’s distinctive approach to folk horror in his subtle and disturbing features Jug Face (2013) and Dementer (2019), both of which centre on women whose lives are overshadowed by dark religious forces.
The Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society (1993), an aggressively stylish debut made when the twins were just twenty, is a nihilistically violent depiction of life in Watts in which kids grow up surrounded by violence and learn that there are few other ways to deal conflict. Criterion’s new Blu-ray, mastered from a 4K restoration, is vividly colourful, with a collection of excellent new and archival supplements,
Vinegar Syndrome’s October package included a stylish but frustrating Uruguayan giallo, a catalogue title about a high school girl’s romance with a T-Rex and a box set of three Italian movies from the early ’70s featuring performances from Camille Keaton.
Arrow releases the uncanny horror-fantasy The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968), showcasing this mix of Japanese folktale and western fairytale directed by Noriaki Yuasa between episodes in Daiei’s Gamera series in a Blu-ray edition featuring a moody transfer and illuminating extras.