Category: home video hovel
After the success of Boogie Nights and Magnolia during the 1990s, director Paul Thomas Anderson went into the early 2000s with an unlikely collaborator, Adam Sandler. Anderson hasn’t been shy about his love for the “Sandman” and his films, especially...
Director Stephen Frears has an interesting career to say the least. He firmly sits at the crossroads of auteur filmmaker and journeyman director. While he’s made a number outstanding films in his time, like High Fidelity, Dangerous Liaisons, Philomena, and...
In Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, the protagonist – an artist – steps through a mirror, takes a surreal trip through a hotel where he witnesses unreal sights, and shoots himself but does not die. Fellini, in a sense,...
Here’s something different. I usually review releases from the Criterion Collection, especially over the last two years or so. I rarely write about other boutique home video distribution companies, like Shout! Factory, Kino Lorber, Oscilloscope Laboratories, and Radiance Films. It’s...
Sure, the biopic is a very popular genre with films like Oppenheimer, Man on the Moon, and A Complete Unknown, but the autobiography (even a fictionalized one) is a sub-genre that comes very few and far between with films like...
Every now and then the Criterion Collection selects oddball and pulpy B-movies — like House, The Blob, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Blast of Silence, and Carnival of Souls— that seemingly don’t fit their mission statement of “publishing important classic and...
In an era of pure id, Howard Hawks’s Scarface still manages to feel especially elemental. Its lust for violence, for sex, for power, for victory is embedded in every frame. It is representative of the degradation the Production Code felt...
Ever since the Criterion Collection started to release movies from Joel and Ethan Coen with their first film Blood Simple on DVD and Blu-ray in 2016, it was only a matter of time before the home video distribution company released...
From All That Jazz to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the musical genre has been sparsely represented throughout the Criterion Collection. There are just nearly 30 titles (including the subject of this review) out of the more than 1,700 entries...
In her introductory remarks to a recent screening of Todd Haynes’ 1991 film Poison, producer Christine Vachon joked about how often people will declare the death of independent cinema, noting the too-common refrain that the glory days just wrapped up...
