Recent disks offer a range of horror movies displaying commercial and artier approaches to the genre from Vincent Price vehicles from American-International to Roger Vadim’s visually rich LeFanu adaptation …et mourir de plaisir and Bill Gunn’s key Black Cinema offering from 1973, Ganja & Hess.
Horror remains one of the most durable of genres, with a constant stream of disk releases of new and classic movies.
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.
Criterion follows up last year’s Safety Last! with a richly produced edition of Harold Lloyd’s biggest hit, The Freshman.
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.
A survey of recent viewing covers approaches to realism, metaphor, horror and war in a range of films from the 1920s to the 2010s.
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 […]
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.
Looking back over 2013, the most significant titles in my disk viewing have been imported from England or released by Criterion.
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.