After his two great action comedies (Yojimbo and Sanjuro) and before his last black and white historical epic (Red Beard), Akira Kurosawa made one of the best crime thrillers of the 1960’s. Now Criterion brings a high-definition copy into your home. Toshiro Mifune (who else?) stars as a successful businessman who thinks he’s off the [...]
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Full disclosure: I’m reviewing a Blu-ray set that I don’t even have. Kino accidentally sent me the DVD set rather than the Blu-ray. In fairness, this may be my fault. When I emailed a request for a review copy, I neglected to specify what format. Luckily, the content of the two sets are identical, so [...]
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I’d be hard-pressed to think of another film that’s anything like Jean Cocteau’s post-war fantasy. It’s a fairytale, told with a charming and often naïve innocence, and contains absolutely no objectionable-for-children content. But its slow pace and quiet magic never panders to unsophisticated viewers. About 30 years ago I saw a very young audience sit [...]
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“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” All the men who served under him in Korea say so. Which is odd because the guy is a cold, self-righteous jerk. Maybe it has something to do with the way they seem to be on autopilot when [...]
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I’m not sure if Some Like It Hot really is, as the American Film Institute declared in 2000, the best American film comedy of all time. It certainly belongs in the top 10. There are comedies with a higher laugh-to-minute ratio, and others that have more to say about the human condition. But if I [...]
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When I think of the 1970s as a golden age of Hollywood-financed serious cinema, the first image to come into my mind is a lonely Robert De Niro walking the dark, mean streets of New York, slowly turning into a psychopath. Three young geniuses–writer Paul Schrader, director Martin Scorsese, and actor Robert De Niro–came together [...]
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When you first insert this disc, it takes a few seconds to load (as all Blu-rays do), then it goes directly to the opening menu–no ads, no trailers. I wish all major studio Blu-rays were like that. Now, on with my review: I enjoy a strange relationship with the biggest commercial hit of the 1950s. [...]
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Young Julien would rather stay with his mother in Paris than go to his provincial Catholic boarding school. But in the fall of 1944, he has no choice. Slowly, he begins to realize that there’s something odd about Jean, the new boy in his class–the one the monks who run the school seem to be [...]
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Kino has another Buster Keaton Blu-ray title on the way, and it’s a winner. Three years before he made The General, Keaton mined the antebellum South for comic gold in this almost gentle comedy inspired by the Hatfield/McCoy feud. Still adjusting to the long form of the feature film (this was only his second), Keaton [...]
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Yes, this is another Blu-ray review coming out of my my PC World Blu-ray boxed set gift guide. If you’ve read Peter Biskind’s excellent history of Hollywood in the 70s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, you know something about BBS, the small, short-lived production company that changed everything. [...]
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