With the recent death of Brazilian filmmaker Nelson Pereira dos Santos, I’ve just re-watched his feature How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971), an ethnographic/historical/satirical depiction of the beginnings of European colonization of South America in the 16th Century.
Recent theatrical viewing has included some very dark comedies and fantasies, but the real horrors were supplied by the faceless corporate types who have transformed movie going into an unpleasant ordeal.
Like many filmmakers of his generation, Walter Hill began his career with strong, individualistic work, but somehow eventually drifted into aimlessness. His directorial debut, Hard Times (1975), still holds up, but his most recent film, The Assignment (2016), is transgressive but unfocused.
More eclectic recent viewing, from 1970s detective noir to an Italian anthology from the ’60s to Japanese horror and classic ’50s sci-fi.
A round-up of recent reviewing across multiple genres – western, black comedy, musical, animation, road movie.
A new digital restoration of King Hu’s epic period ghost story Legend of the Mountain (1979) from Masters of Cinema reveals this languid masterpiece in all its pictorial glory; a stunning dream of a movie.
On a recent evening, my friend Steve and I washed down a Death Wish triple bill with an excess of pizza and beer … I know it wasn’t healthy, but we had a good time.
Recent viewing includes a range of genre movies, from bloated big-budget international productions to scrappy low-budget independents, from large-scale fantasies to lo-fi science fiction, from horror remakes and sequels … all available on Blu-ray.
The ambitious and very expensive early sound-era musical King of Jazz, featuring Paul Whiteman and his band, gets a spectacular restoration which makes the most of the original two-strip Technicolor process on Criterion’s extras-packed Blu-ray.
A critical, but long-suppressed film from the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first play Baal (1970) gets an impressive release on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. This aggressively unsettling film is packaged with an excellent selection of contextual supplements.