Recent big-screen viewing

Young Alena (Natalie Jane) and Benny (Christian Meer) share a terrible secret in Sean Garrity's The Burning Season (2023)

I don’t get out to a theatre very often these days, so my choices of what to see are more judicious than they used to be, generally the work of directors I’m particularly interested in. The one dud is the latest superfluous entry in a franchise I’ve quite liked – Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes – but the rest have been satisfying to some degree: George Miller’s latest apocalyptic action epic, Furiosa; M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, which as usual I liked in contrast to the predictable critical derision: MaXXXine, the conclusion of Ti West’s trilogy starring Mia Goth: and the small Canadian drama The Burning Season by sometime Winnipegger Sean Garrity.

Italian murders and Ninja intrigue from Radiance

Souvenir "art" becomes an instrument of murder in Luigi Comencini’s The Sunday Woman (1975)

Recent Radiance releases include a pair of Italian police procedurals – Pietro Germi’s neorealist noit The Facts of Murder (1959) and Luigi Comencini’s satire on bourgeois hypocrisy The Sunday Woman (1975) – and some traditional and new wave martial arts from Japan with Yasuharu Hasebe’s pop-art Black Tight Killers (1966) and a set of the first three movies in Daiei’s Shinobi series of bleak Ninja movies, Satsuo Yamamoto’s Band of Assassins (1962) and Revenge (1963) and Kazuo Mori’s Ressurection (1963). And speaking of Ninjas, Neon Eagle have released a deluxe two-disk set of Godfrey Ho’s patch-job Ninja Terminator (1964) and the original Korean movie cannibalized by Ho, Kim Si-hyun’s The Univited Guest of the Star Ferry.

Sam Peckinpah’s swansong: The Osterman Weekend (1983)

Ali Tanner (Meg Foster) fights for her child in Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend (1983)

Imprint’s two-disk limited edition of Sam Peckinpah’s final film, The Osterman Weekend (1983), presents both the theatrical cut and the version Peckinpah initially handed to the producers – while there are numerous differences in the editing, neither version can make the murky story coherent. Some well-staged scenes and an interesting cast fail to breathe life into the Cold War paranoia and the filmmaker’s career ends with an air of disinterest and exhaustion.

Fall 2023 viewing, part two

Amnesiac Johnny McBride (Anthony Quinn) investigates his own past in Victor Saville’s The Long Wait (1954)

This week marks the thirteenth anniversary of the blog and there’s still no clear pattern to what I watch and write about! The first post went up on October 22, 2010. Hard to believe it’s been going this long, with almost 900 posts and over 3200 reviews so far. I don’t think I’ve ever stuck with anything this faithfully in my entire life! Thanks for reading!

Fall 2023 viewing, part one

Detective Luigi Mackeroni (Udo Samel) and his cross-dressing partner Babette (Leonard Lansink) face an unusual foe in Martin Walz's Killer Condom (1996)

As always, writing falls behind viewing and I’ve missed mentioning some disks that deserved at least a comment – so here are some quick notes on recent releases from Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and some smaller labels covering a wide range of genres from spaghetti westerns to East European animation, from low-budget sci-fi to documentary, from comedy to horror to exploitation.

Recent Asian releases from Eureka

Disillusioned Christians Shiro Amakusa (Kenji Sawada) and Hosokawa Gracia (Akiko Kana) return from the dead to seek revenge in Kenji Fukasaku's Samurai Reincarnation (1981)

Eureka, and their specialty label Masters of Cinema, continue to release a range of Asian films, from pulp action to classical tragedy. Among recent releases are a two-disk set of four sequels to Rickay Lau’s Mr. Vampire (1985), Cynthia Rothrock’s first lead role in Mang Hoi & Corey Yuen’s Lady Reporter (1989), and a pair of very different samurai epics: Tadashi Imai’s bleak dissection of the Bushido code in Revenge (1964) and Kenji Fukasaku’s mix of history and supernatural horror in Samurai Reincarnation (1981).

Blasts from the past

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021): Criterion Blu-ray review

Speed reviewing, Nov. 2019

Law, disorder and cynicism in the ’70s

Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967): Criterion Blu-ray review

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