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Blu-ray Review: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit on Universal Home Entertainment
Within the broader discourse, the name of M. Night Shyamalan is something like mud, a fate that would be too cruel even to befall countless Hollywood hack directors who, time and again, prove that they...
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Jerusalem Film Festival 2016: Julieta, Our Father, Certain Women, & More
“Sababa!” Thus did Quentin Tarantino, in the only Hebrew slang every tourist learns, anoint his lifetime achievement award with the most appropriate endearment of the Tarantino ethos: “Cool!” Hoisting...
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Review: Certain Women
Writer-director Kelly Reichardt returns to the American frontier with Certain Women, though the bleak, unforgiving plains featured in her 2011 western Meek’s Cutoff are now encrusted with Starbucks and...
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Cairo International Film Festival 2016: The Other Land, Clash, Mimosas, & More
From the window of an airplane, metropolitan Cairo seems to stretch into infinity, a truly ancient city that keeps adding onto itself, year after year. A handful of cities occupy a greater land area,...
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Review: Manhattan
For all its mighty stature, Manhattan appeared at a time in Woody Allen’s career when his public image was still somewhat unformed, still idling at the intersection between his early days as a stand-up...
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Blu-ray Review: Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women on the Criterion Collection
Writer-director Kelly Reichardt returns to the American frontier with Certain Women, though the bleak, unforgiving plains featured in her 2011 western Meek’s Cutoff are now encrusted with Starbucks and...
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Review: 1900 Obliterates the Barriers Between Story and History
A handful of iconic films are inseparable from a single, equally iconic review. Whether it was a pan, a rave, or somewhere in the middle, is immaterial: The piece of writing and the film are, by chance...
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Blu-ray Review: George Cukor’s Holiday on the Criterion Collection
George Cukor’s 1938 masterpiece Holiday seems to have emerged from a happy and completely natural accord between talent and circumstances. Peel back a few layers and, like many established classics of...
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Review: Spike Lee’s Clockers on KL Studio Classics Blu-ray
The Gowanus Houses, a public housing project in the heart of Boerum Hill, hasn’t changed much since Spike Lee filmed Clockers there a quarter century ago. In a borough of Brooklyn that’s been blasted...
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Blu-ray Review: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma on the Criterion Collection
From the start of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, the banal and sublime walk hand in hand. Sloshing water transforms a tile floor into a mirror, capturing the reflection of a plane soaring across the sky above....
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Blu-ray Review: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema on the Criterion Collection
Not long after the opening titles for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, the housemaid (Laura Betti) at an enormous, stately, and modern house in Milan is seen tending to fallen leaves, while a new guest...
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Review: Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman on Criterion Blu-ray
Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman is likely an unknown quantity even to movie buffs who are familiar with his venerated contemporaries, among them Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Ivan Passer, and Jiří Menzel....
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Blu-ray Review: John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven on the Criterion Collection
Led by their collective nose for revisionism, modern audiences are so quick to enumerate all of Leave Her to Heaven’s noir bona fides that they don’t recognize the crucial ways in which John M. Stahl’s...
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Review: Martin Scorsese’s Hugo on Limited Edition Arrow Video 4K UHD Blu-ray
Somewhere in the middle of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, the eponymous young character (Asa Butterfield) dreams of a catastrophe in which a steam train runs over him, careens through the Gare Montparnasse...
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4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Review: Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets on the Criterion...
When Martin Scorsese finally won the directing Oscar for 2006’s The Departed, he inspired a handful of film buffs to point out the supposed travesty implied by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and...
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Review: Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street on KL Studio Classics 4K UHD Blu-ray
Within the same broad outline as Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street strikes many notes to emphasize the emasculation of Christopher “Chris” Cross (Edgar G. Robinson): at a dinner in...
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Blu-ray Review: Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man on the Criterion Collection
Although he only made two fiction features, filmmaker Michael Roemer benefited greatly from an early rediscovery in the 1990s, thanks to the fortuitous unearthing of a film he made in 1969, The Plot...
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Review: Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon on the KL Studio Classics 4K UHD Blu-ray
Obviously it wasn’t by design, but the early-1950s renewal of the western genre, aided in large part by the success of Winchester ’73, which heralded a career second act for both its director, Anthony...
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Review: Raoul Walsh’s Western Noir ‘Pursued’ on KL Studio Classics Blu-ray
Nineteen forty-seven was a crucial year for Robert Mitchum’s rising star. The enduring popular classic, of course, is Jacques Tourneur’s seminal Out of the Past, and he headlined Edward Dmytryk’s...
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Review: Don Siegel’s ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ on KL Studio Classics...
It’s been almost 70 years since the first of four film adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers was released and in that time we’ve yet to meet a single one of these so-called...
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