Recent Severin viewing

Alice Campos (Florinda Bolkan) searches for her own past in Luigi Bazzoni’s Le Orme (Footprints on the Moon [1975])

It’s taken me a while to work through some of the many Severin box sets that have been piling up over the past year – the folk horror set All the Haunts Be Ours, House of Psychotic Women and the latest set of Italian movies Violent Streets: The Umberto Lenzi/Tomas Milian Collection – along with some 4K special editions of movies by Dario Argento and Alex de la Iglesia.

Lars Von Trier’s Europe Trilogy (1984-1991): Criterion Blu-ray review

Fisher (Michael Elphick) confronts the violence inside himself in Lars von Trier's Element of Crime (1984)

Criterion start 2023 with an excellent three-disk set of Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy, the three aggressively confrontational movies with which he began his career by digging into the lingering traces of Fascism which plagued the continent in the second half of the 20th Century. Impressive new transfers are given context by commentaries and seven hours of documentaries and interviews with and about von Trier, his intentions and creative process.

Alex Cox’s Walker (1987): Criterion Blu-ray review

William Walker (Ed Harris) sees American expansionism as a mission from God in Alex Cox's Walker (1987)

Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Alex Cox’s masterpiece Walker (1987) revives this deconstruction of America’s self-mythologizing at a time when its themes are more pertinent than ever; imperial attacks on domestic and foreign societies driven by a toxic mixture of religious self-righteousness and unfettered capitalist greed have been on the rise for decades and Walker traces the roots back to the mid-19th Century doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

Clive Rees’ The Blockhouse (1973) and other recent Indicator releases

Father Roche (Donald Pleasence) confronts an ancient religion on a remote Greek island in Kostas Karagiannis’ The Devil’s Men (1976)

Recent releases from Indicator have seemed oddly random – from an unexceptional genre movie (Kostas Karagiorgis’ The Devil’s Men [1076]) to an arthouse war film (Clive Rees’ The Blockhouse [1973]), a ghost story that comes across like a television play (Kevin Billington’s Voices [1973]) to an interesting if unsuccessful literary adaptation (Anthony Friedmann’s Bartleby [1970]) and a revisionist detective story which plays with the tropes of the English country house mystery (Chris Petit’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman [1982]).

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation (2015):
Criterion Blu-ray review

Agu (Abraham Attah) hallucinates as he goes into battle in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation (2015)

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s novel Beasts of No Nation (2015), a problematic depiction of child soldiers in Africa gets an impressive release on Blu-ray from Criterion. Fukunaga’s skills as cinematographer and director of actors are on full display, but the film falters in its treatment of of some of the moral issues it raises.

Being human: two new Criterion releases

Erin "Tiny" Blackwell engages impishly with the camera in Martin Bell's documentary Streetwise (1984)

Two very different new releases from Criterion explore what it means to to maintain one’s humanity in the face of inhuman systems. Masaki Kobayashi’s overwhelming 9 1/2-hour epic The Human Condition (1959-61) follows a conscientious socialist into the brutal horrors of Japan’s occupation of Manchuria during the Second World War, while Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1984) and it’s sequel Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell (2016) document the lives of homeless kids on the streets of Seattle during the Reagan era and the aftereffects of that experience in later life.

Blasts from the past

Mario Bava and Italian genre film: Horror

D.A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: “Company” (1970):
Criterion Blu-ray review

The pleasure of not knowing

Miguel Llansó’s trash aesthetic

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