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.
Recent viewing, May-June 2016, part one
Tag: Historical Film
Criterion Blu-ray review: Jan Troell’s The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972)
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 Blu-ray review: Here Is Your Life (1966)
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.
Twilight Time again …
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.
Criterion Blu-ray review: Polanski’s Macbeth (1971)
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.
Recent Viewing: April and May, part three
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.
Year End 2013
Looking back over 2013, the most significant titles in my disk viewing have been imported from England or released by Criterion.
Death Hunt (1981): entertainment vs. history
While Death Hunt is an enjoyable outdoor adventure, it plays fast & loose with history, transforming northern Canada into a facsimile of the American west
Compulsive Viewing: A Personal Pathology Part 2
Continuing my survey of one month’s movie viewing: Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, 2012): As dumb as John Milius’ original about small town American kids fighting against vicious invaders. Milius had Nicaragua(!) taking over the States; here it’s North Korea backed by, for some reason, the Russians (aware of how much U.S. debt is held by […]
Miklós Jancsó and the abuses of power
Miklós Jancsó is one of the key figures of Hungarian cinema, but my first encounter with his work didn’t go well. In fact, when I saw the first two parts of his unfinished Vitam et Sanguinam trilogy at the 1981 Hong Kong International Film Festival, I so disliked them that I made no subsequent efforts […]
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