Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza epic

Bunta Sugawara as Shozo Hirono, the violent spirit of Japanese post-war economic recovery in Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity

Arrow releases yet another impressive limited edition box-set with their dual-format edition of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity, a key work in the transition of Japanese cinema from the “classical” post-war period to a more transgressive critique of the nation’s history and culture.

Random notes: two films and a book

Erwin Leder as the psychopathic killer K in Gerald Kargl's unsettling Angst (1983)

A variety of approaches to horror are on display in Guillermo Del Toro’s new film Crimson Peak; a book about Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining which gathers together articles, essays and interviews from the ’80s to the present; and a disturbing 1983 Austrian film based on a real-life multiple murder, Gerald Kargl and Zbigniew Rybczynski’s Angst.

Blasts from the past

Criterion Blu-ray review: Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928)

Criterion Blu-ray review:
Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

Haunting Television: The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012)

Criterion Blu-ray review:
Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934)

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