Small, compact, and brimming with suspense, High Noon feels nothing like the other A westerns of the post-war period--epic movies like Red River, My Darling Clementine, and The Searchers. With its 85-minute runtime and looks-like-every-other-western sets, it feels more like the forgettable B oaters Hollywood was cranking out weekly in those days. But unlike those … Continue reading High Noon Blu-ray Review
Category: Blu-ray Review
Chimes at Midnight Blu-ray Review
Orson Welles boiled down five related Shakespeare plays, found the comic tragedy at their core, and created a masterpiece. Chimes at Midnight, also known as Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight, has been unavailable in anything like a complete version for decades. With the recent theatrical restoration, and Criterion's new Blu-ray based on that restoration, it's finally … Continue reading Chimes at Midnight Blu-ray Review
A+ List: The world ends with a bang, a whimper, and a lot of laughs in Criterion’s Blu-ray of Dr. Strangelove
Stanley Kubrick's only out-and-out comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, manages to terrify the audience, hold them in suspense, and trick them into rooting for people about to cause Armageddon, all the while generating side-splitting laughter. As the darkest of dark comedies, Dr. Strangelove earns its place … Continue reading A+ List: The world ends with a bang, a whimper, and a lot of laughs in Criterion’s Blu-ray of Dr. Strangelove
The New Buster Keaton Shorts Collection on Blu-ray
How can anyone describe the beauty, grace, and breathtaking hilarity of Buster Keaton in his silent film prime? An actor, an acrobat, and a brilliant filmmaker, he spent the 1920s making some of the funniest and technically sophisticated comedies ever preserved on film. Since I can't describe him, here's a highlight reel of some of … Continue reading The New Buster Keaton Shorts Collection on Blu-ray
Bicycle Thieves as great as ever on Blu-ray
If the point of cinema is to create empathy, both for the characters on the screen and for real people, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves is the greatest film ever made. It's about desperate poverty, and how the desperately poor feed on the desperately poor because they have no other options. I wrote about this … Continue reading Bicycle Thieves as great as ever on Blu-ray
Johnny Guitar Blu-ray review
This is my second Olive Films Women's History Month Blu-ray review. The first was Baby It's You. Nicolas Ray's Johnny Guitar, released in 1954, has to be the weirdest western made before Blazing Saddles. Stagy and talkie, it's filled with outrageous dialog and fanciful names (Johnny Guitar, the Dancin' Kid). The women behave like men … Continue reading Johnny Guitar Blu-ray review
Baby It’s You Blu-ray review
Three weeks ago, Olive Films sent out a press release linked to March as Women's History Month. The point was to highlight 24 "female-created or female-driven" films in the company's DVD and Blu-ray catalogue. Like Criterion and Kino, Olive licenses classic and obscure older films, often made by Hollywood studios, and releases them on disc. … Continue reading Baby It’s You Blu-ray review
Manchurian Candidate Criterion
Evil Chinese, worse Americans, innocent bystanders, brainwashing, assassination, and party politics collide in this surprisingly timely cold-war thriller from 1962. While the suspense grows, the story attacks both Communism and McCarthyism (a recent memory with lingering effects in the early 60s). it also contains the most evil mother in the history of movies. I reviewed … Continue reading Manchurian Candidate Criterion
Baseball, NYC, & Harold Lloyd: Speedy, the Blu-ray Review
Harold Lloyd's last silent comedy, Speedy, delivers the laughs and thrills that we expect from the comic genius. As an additional bonus, it provides substantial views of New York City in the roaring 20s--much of it shot on location. The pace is as fast as you'd expect from a movie called Speedy. But Lloyd's only … Continue reading Baseball, NYC, & Harold Lloyd: Speedy, the Blu-ray Review
Dont Look Back Blu-ray Review
You have to be a very hardcore Bob Dylan fan to really enjoy D.A. Pennebaker's groundbreaking documentary, Dont Look Back (yes, that's the correct spelling). Not only would you have to know and love his songs, but you would have to know something about Dylan as a person and a phenomenon, and about what was … Continue reading Dont Look Back Blu-ray Review
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