Horror remains one of the most durable of genres, with a constant stream of disk releases of new and classic movies.
Styles of Horror, part one
Tag: Blu-Ray
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Stanley Kramer’s struggle to be funny
Wanting to make a comedy to end all comedy, in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, serious-minded Stanley Kramer produced a bloated compendium of comedy styles which stubbornly refused to be funny.
Blu-ray Review: Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925)
Criterion follows up last year’s Safety Last! with a richly produced edition of Harold Lloyd’s biggest hit, The Freshman.
The Apprenticeship of Steven Soderbergh: King of the Hill (1993)
Criterion’s excellent edition of King of the Hill (1993) and The Underneath (1995) throws some interesting light of the development of Steven Soderbergh as a filmmaker.
Notes on Recent Viewing, part one
A survey of recent viewing covers approaches to realism, metaphor, horror and war in a range of films from the 1920s to the 2010s.
Ghosts of Television Past, part two
While some of the films and plays in the series of disks I wrote about last week, devoted to ghost and horror stories made for British television, reveal the budgetary and technical limitations of their time and medium (low budget sets, somewhat coarse and murky video recording), the BFI has lavished its attention on one […]
The Pathology of Power:
Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Elio Petri’s 1970 masterpiece Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion provides one of the most incisive dissections of the pathology of power ever committed to film.
Year End 2013
Looking back over 2013, the most significant titles in my disk viewing have been imported from England or released by Criterion.
Genre On Disk, part two
The concept of genre is endlessly malleable, permitting filmmakers to borrow, invent, mix and match narrative elements to create a seemingly inexhaustible array of stories which combine familiar elements in new, or not so new, ways.
Genre On Disk, part one
My genre viewing on disk over the past couple of months ranges from classics to crap, and I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed it all. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) From England, I’ve obtained impressive Blu-rays of three key movies from the period when “modern” horror was born: Hammer’s first two colour Gothic features, […]
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