Network’s The British Film collection unearths two interesting titles from the ’60s, Michael Winner’s excellent West 11 and Christopher Morahan’s strange anti-comedy All Neat In Black Stockings, in decent quality DVD editions.
Britain’s Network are releasing a lot of previously hard to find movies on disk. Two new Blu-rays, Peter Yates’ Robbery and Val Guest’s 80,000 Suspects, resurrect a couple of interesting titles from the ’60s.
Although I saw fewer movies in theatres than ever, this year offered a rich array of films on disk, belying continuing prophecies of the medium’s demise in the face of on-line streaming.
Arrow Video has become my favourite source for high quality releases of both serious films and exploitation titles. Their special editions rank with the best offered by prestige companies like Criterion and Masters of Cinema.
Two distinguished British actors passed away in June after long and varied careers in film and television: the imposing Christopher Lee and the debonair Patrick Macnee, both at age 93.
Two recent Blu-ray releases highlight very different attitudes to the crime thriller in the ’70s: Robert Culp’s Hickey and Boggs and Douglas Hickox’s Brannigan.
Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) should help to establish this masterpiece as the equal of Reed’s more famous The Third Man.
Surprisingly, the underrated British director Val Guest has recently been represented by a flurry of Blu-ray releases, two of which highlight some of his finest work while the third makes available one of his lesser known minor films of the ’50s.
Despite perennial predictions of the demise of movies-on-disk, 2014 offered a rich and varied selection of new and old titles in often impressive editions from many different companies, though not necessarily from major distributors. The cream came from specialty labels like Criterion, the BFI, Arrow, Eureka/Masters of Cinema, Shout! Factory, Olive Films, Kino Lorber, Flicker Alley and Twilight Time.
Val Guest instills story and characters with gripping realism in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, one of the greatest of all British science fiction movies, now released in an excellent Blu-ray edition by the BFI.