Year End 2018

Boriska (Nikolay Burlyaev) oversees the firing of the bell in Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966) ...

Despite continuing rumblings about the demise of movies-on-disk, numerous companies continue to produce excellent editions on disk of a vast range of movies covering the entire history of cinema. Once again in 2018 there were far more releases than even an obsessive viewer could keep up with.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966):
Criterion Blu-ray review

Andrei (Anatoliy Solonitsyn) and Theophanes the Greek (Nikolay Sergeev) ponder the artist's place in the world in Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966)

Criterion’s new Blu-ray release of Andrei Tarkovsky’s second feature, Andrei Rublev (1966), not only features a superb restoration of the director’s preferred 183-minute cut, but also a (much weaker) transfer of the original 205-minute version and a comprehensive selection of new and archival supplements which cover the production and meaning of this, the greatest of all historical epics.

The cinematic art of Cristian Mungiu

Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) has chosen an austere, almost Medieval life, in Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (2912)

Two recent Criterion releases, Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012) and Graduation (2016), illustrate the richness of the Romanian New Wave; formally rich, morally complex, and dramatically powerful, they both look superb on Blu-ray and Criterion supplements them with substantial contextual material which reveal Mungiu to be one of the finest artists working in film today.

Blasts from the past

Fall 2024 viewing round-up, part two

Year End 2023

Year End 2012

William Castle’s horrors from Indicator

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