Category: home video hovel
Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about watching old genre movies is seeing all the different variations that the filmmakers can come up with. When a genre is popular, every possible story iteration is entertained until there is eventually no gas...
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...
What’s most shocking about watching H.K. Breslauer’s The City Without Jews (out now on Blu-ray from Flicker Alley) as seen today, on the other side of the murder of six million European Jews, is how much of the film plays–quite...
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....
Authenticity is basically impossibly to achieve in art; I mean, artifice is inherent to the whole thing, right? It’s also damned near impossible to prove; how am I ever know whether a movie that takes place in late-1960s Appalachia is...
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...
