Tag: Blu-ray Review
Criterion Collection: Gray’s Anatomy | Blu-ray Review
After a lifetime's worth of straight stage work, and several decades of fine tuning his own signature craft, Spalding Gray's final long form monologue...
Post Tenebras Lux | Blu-ray Review
Reportedly, Post Tenebras Lux was met with a hail of boos by critics and audience members alike upon its premiere at the 2012 Cannes...
Museum Hours | Blu-ray Review
Museums are odd places. People gawk, taking in the history and culture on offer, ruminating in silence. People talk, or, more often than not,...
Criterion Collection: City Lights | Blu-ray Review
The biggest surprise about this month’s release of Charles Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) is that it wasn’t already a part of Criterion’s prestigious collection....
Criterion Collection: Tokyo Story | Blu-ray Review
Yasujirô Ozu’s Tokyo Story from 1953, now available in a superbly packaged Blu-ray edition from Criterion, is a film that subtly captures the dynamics...
Russian Ark | Blu-ray Review
Believed by Alexander Sokurov to be the only location in the world to truly represent both the history and culture of humanity, the Hermitage...
Kon-Tiki | Blu-ray Review
An Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, the old-school high-seas adventure epic that reintroduces the inspiring historical feat of Thor Heyerdahl from...
Criterion Collection: Seconds | Blu-ray Review
Selected for the Main Comp at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds is a grim, nightmarish thriller that embodies many distinctive...
Criterion Collection: The Life of Oharu | Blu-ray Review
After remastering Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff earlier this year for Blu-ray, Criterion unleashes another of the auteur’s trio of early 50’s Venice prize winners...
Stoker | Blu-ray Review
Receiving a rather chilly, subdued reaction after its premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Park Chan-wook’s English language debut, Stoker arrives on Blu-ray...
In the Family | Blu-ray Review
Not long after an initially unheralded premiere in 2011, the Independent Spirit Award nominated debut from Patrick Wang, In the Family, suddenly started getting...
Criterion Collection: Wild Strawberries | Blu-ray Review
Produced fifty-six years ago, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries remains a venerable warhorse in the hallowed halls of Arthouse. But unlike this reviewer, who shares...
Criterion Collection: Marketa Lazarova | Blu-ray Review
You’ll be hard pressed to make a more exciting discovery than Criterion’s digital transfer of Frantisek Vlacil’s 1967 Czech classic, Marketa Lazarova. Voted the...
Criterion Collection: Jubal | Blu-ray Review
Following the release of over a dozen films and just a year before the release of his pinnacle endeavor, Delmar Daves utilized his love...
Criterion Collection: Life is Sweet | Blu-ray Review
1990’s Life is Sweet is generally considered - when it’s considered at all - one of the lesser lights in writer/director Mike Leigh’s constellation...
The Central Park Five | Blu-ray Review
After years of acclaimed documentary mini-series, Ken Burns returns to the feature film with his daughter Sarah Burns and fellow colleague David McMahon, who...
Criterion Collection: Monsieur Verdoux | Blu-ray Review
People tend to forget that Charlie Chaplin was more than The Tramp, his iconic mute character of physical peculiarity. Seven years after his baffoonic...
Criterion Collection: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp | Blu-ray Review
Before the legendary British filmmaking duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger lensed the classics The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus or A Matter of...
Killing Them Softly | Blu-ray Review
Director Andrew Dominik is obviously upset about the current political climate in the US. His latest, Killing Them Softly, unsubtly comments on the empty...
Holy Motors | Blu-ray Review
No other film threw convention to the wind while exploring such rich and textured territory like Leos Carax's exquisite, divisively referential patchwork of cinema...
Criterion Collection: The Ballad of Narayama | Blu-ray Review
Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1958 classic The Ballad of Narayama gets the Criterion treatment, an experimental film featuring the use of one of Japan’s signature cultural...
Criterion Collection: The Kid with a Bike | Blu-ray Review
There’s an extraordinary moment in Rosetta, the Dardenne Brothers’ Palme d’Or winning slice of grungy life from 1999. About 22 minutes in, Emilie Dequenne’s...
Criterion Collection: Pina | Blu-ray Review
Wim Wenders' long imagined a Pina Bausch documentary with Bausch herself, a dear friend of the director, personally collaborating on the project. It was...
Keep the Lights On | Blu-ray Review
With his latest, director Ira Sachs provides further proof of his narrative proficiency while delving into the most personal aspects of his previous long...
I Am Not A Hipster | Blu-ray Review
Following up his award winning short, Short Term 12, writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton returned to Sundance the following year with another personal reflection, this...
Liberal Arts | Blu-ray Review
In Josh Radnor's charming sophomore feature, Liberal Arts, the actor/director/writer recognizes that many adult males in their mid-thirties glide through their lives half awake,...
Sleepwalk With Me | Blu-ray Review
Marking a potentially monumental pivot point in his already eclectic career, stand-up comedian turned actor/director/producer/screenwriter Mike Birbiglia has taken his personal tale of failed...
Criterion Collection: The Qatsi Trilogy | Blu-ray Review
The Qatsi Trilogy is a collection of films made by Godfrey Reggio between 1983 and 2002. Each film offers an extraordinary and unforgettable cinematic...
Criterion Collection: Purple Noon | Blu-ray Review
Remade forty years later as The Talented Mr. Ripley, René Clément’s Purple Noon from 1960 was the first attempt to bring amorphic rogue Tom...
Manufactured Landscapes | Blu-ray Review
Edward Burtynsky has for decades been lensing large scale photographs that document the often devastating visual impact of humans on our environment en masse....
Criterion Collection: Trilogy of Life Blu-Ray
His life tragically and brutally cut short by a still unknown assassin, Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last completed project, known as the Trilogy...
Abraham Lincoln | Blu-ray Review
Capitalizing on the latest biopic of the sixteenth United States President with this month’s release of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Kino releases a mastered HD...
Die Nibelungen | Blu-ray Review
This month, one of Fritz Lang’s first epic masterpieces, Die Nibelungen gets a lush Blu-ray treatment from Kino, and it has to be one...
Patton | Blu-ray Review
When you are the only General ever feared by the Nazis in World War II you can expect to have an equally epic story...
Natural Selection | Blu-ray Review
Natural Selection, Robbie Pickering's raw exploration of bible belt secrecy, proves to be an impressive debut for the Texas born director. Taking home a...
Take This Waltz | Blu-ray Review
Despite a reasonably active acting career, Sarah Polley has put together quite an elegant little list of writing/directing credits for her already lengthy resume....
Criterion Collection: Rosemary’s Baby | Blu-ray review
Just in time for Halloween, Criterion has remastered what’s long been culturally considered one of the most notable pieces of horror film making in...
Fear and Desire | Blu-ray Review
You will find little to no argument among cinephiles that Stanley Kubrick was one of the best filmmakers there ever was, but before he...
Criterion Collection: The Forgiveness of Blood | Blu-ray Review
Joshua Marston, the director of the 2004 Oscar nominated Maria Full of Grace finally returns with his next feature length narrative, the Silver Berlin...
We Need To Talk About Kevin | Blu-ray Review
Lynne Ramsay likes to trudge through the dark depths of the human spirit, and after a nine year period without a film in the...
Criterion Collection: La Haine | Blu-ray Review
In 1995, Mathieu Kassovitz's exceptional debut, La Haine, was a shocking realization of the unjust ghettoizing of immigrants taking place in France, and the...
Criterion Collection: David Lean Directs Noel Coward | Blu-ray Review
Before directing some of the greatest epic films ever made, David Lean’s directorial career began in the 1940’s, when he collaborated with playwright Noel...
Criterion Collection: Letter Never Sent | Blu-ray Review
Bergman and Nykvist, Bertolucci and Storaro, Welles and Toland; the history of cinema is replete with great partnerships between directors and cinematographers. Through potent...
Criterion Collection: Three Outlaw Samurai | Blu-ray Review
Three Outlaw Samurai, newly available on a gorgeous blu-ray disc from Criterion, is a rousing action adventure from 1964. Directed by Hideo Gosha, a...
