In recent years I’ve found myself watching – and liking – movies on disk which I initially had little interest in seeing when they first came out in theatres. Cases in point: the latest films by Ron Howard and the Coen Brothers.
Mikhail Kalatozov, whose career began in his mid-20s with a number of documentaries, made some of the most interesting films to come out of Soviet Russia. Like most major filmmakers under the communist regimes of the ’30s through the ’60s, he had a rocky relationship with the authorities who controlled filmmaking, at one point even […]
Criterion’s recent Blu-ray release of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) spurred me to watch the film again for the first time in almost a decade. I originally saw Solaris in London in 1975, my initial experience of Tarkovsky, and while I now recognize that it’s not his best work, I was enthralled. I’ve always liked films […]
