Category: home video hovel
Having now seen Girlfriends, available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, it’s hard to imagine that Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach weren’t fans of Claudia Weill’s spirited and miraculous debut film when they wrote Frances Ha. Both concern a friendship...
As a television series, Tales from the Darkside never gained the more prestigious reputation of The Twilight Zone or even The Outer Limits. But for 90 syndicated episodes in the 1980s, often aired in the middle of the night, it...
Phil Goldstone’s The Sin of Nora Moran – recently released on Blu-ray in a beautiful 4K restoration – is a melodrama in every sense of the word. The film contains ridiculous plot twists, absurd coincidence, and sky-high emotionality. Some might...
Nikkatsu is Japan’s oldest movie studio. Founded in 1912, its mid-twentieth century golden age produced works from Seijun Suzuki and Shohei Imamura. But the most notorious chapter in its legacy came after that, in the 1970s and 80s, when the...
Byron Haskin’s 1953 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds is a movie perfectly suited to the kind of extensive, high definition restoration we’ve come to expect from the Criterion Collection. Time and familiarity have made...
1964’s Summer Olympics (or the Games of the XVIII Olympiad, officially) were the first to be held in a non-Western country, finally landing in Japan after the country’s two previously scheduled hosting opportunities were canceled due to World War II....
When discussing cinema, the term “exploitation” usually means something fun. Trashy and not exactly contributing to society’s moral fiber, sure, but fun. But Matthew Mallinson’s 1980 psuedo-documentary Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, out now in a limited edition Blu-ray...
Film Movement Classics’ new four movie set of comedies starring Alastair Sim, which they’ve dubbed “Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter,” does not present the films in chronological order (though the essay by Ronald Bergen in the accompanying booklet does address...
When you think of the dominant aesthetic of the Soviet Union, whether it be film, art from the Russian avant-garde and from socialist realists or even propaganda posters, you probably conjure up sharp lines, severe angles and figures in three-quarter...
Vsevolod Pudovkin was a contemporary of Sergei Eisenstein but, while the latter’s list of notable films continues well into the sound era, Pudovkin’s legacy consists almost entire of the three consecutive works he produced from 1926 to 1928, collected in...
