Hammer Films are, of course, best known for launching the modern era of horror with their late ’50s colour reworkings of the Universal classics from the ’30s, beginning with Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). These movies, colourful, somewhat perverse for the time, and more graphic than earlier films in the genre, inspired Roger […]
Criterion have released a gorgeous restoration of Ermanno Olmi’s 1978 masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs, supplementing this immersive epic of 19th Century peasant life with several epics which explore the origins of the project and Olmi’s methods of working with his remarkable non-professional cast.
I’ve recently been dipping into the ’60s and ’70s with two Criterion Blu-rays of major works by Orson Welles, a couple of Robert Altman’s signature titles, and a new J.G. Ballard adaptation from Ben Wheatley.
Recent viewing ranges from classic noir to mediocre ’80s thriller, from low budget horror to a documentary about one of the great craftsmen of fantasy film.
Recent viewing ranges from smart B-movie horror to magic realist-inflected neo-realism, with excellent disks from Blue Underground, Shout! Factory and Arrow Video.
Criterion releases a superb Blu-ray edition of Jan Troell’s 2-part epic about poor Swedish farmers looking for a new life in the US in the mid-19th Century.
Criterion offer a real discovery, Swedish director Jan Troell’s debut feature Here Is Your Life (1966), a richly evocative coming-of-age story based on Nobel Prize-winner Eyvind Johnson’s four-part autobiographical novel set in the second decade of the 20th Century.
Recent Blu-rays from Twilight Time are as eclectic as ever. A couple of mainstream Hollywood classics; an oddball excursion into pulp by one of the great Hollywood directors; and a devastating animated fable by a Japanese-American filmmaker based on a very English graphic novel.
Roman Polanski’s Macbeth stands as one of the finest adaptations of Shakespeare on film, a seamless blend of poetry and harsh realism in its depiction of a cruel medieval world and the futility of ambition.
Among other recent disks, Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England and Frank Perry’s The Swimmer use realistic performance and imagery to dig below material reality to strange symbolic and psychological depths, while the Estonian documentary Disco and Atomic War transforms the social and political facts of the Cold War into something strange and very funny.