Tag: Foreign Film Blu Ray Review
Criterion Collection: Beyond the Hills | Blu-ray Review
For his third film, and his follow-up to his 2007 Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu, titan of...
Criterion Collection: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters | Blu-ray Review
With unprecedented providence! Criterion re-releases Paul Schrader’s 1985 masterpiece Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters the same month the neglected auteur’s equally superb First...
Tuesday Blus: You Can Make It If You Try with Claude Berri’s The Two of Us
Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with a theatrical re-release of its restoration in late 2017, The Cohen Media Group resurrects the winning debut of Claude...
Criterion Collection: Moonrise | Blu-ray Review
For a two-time Academy Award winning director, Frank Borzage remains one of the most neglected studio auteurs of Hollywood’s childhood, one of the few...
Tuesday Blus: Caught Dead in Red Rings of Fear
Fans of Massimo Dallamano’s seminal and seedy 1972 giallo What Have You Done to Solange? will likely be attracted to the newly available transfer...
Criterion Collection: The Color of Pomegranates | Blu-ray Review
It’s difficult to approach Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates without the permeation of the troubled history of both its reception and...
Tuesday Blus: Come Up w/Fleas for Donaldson’s Sleeping Dog (1977)
Director Roger Donaldson is one of those mainstream minded filmmakers whose body of work quickly and quietly dispelled his Australian origins. His glossy Hollywood...
Tuesday Blus: Get into Sacha Guitry with Four Films 1936-1938
Oft compared to British playwright Noel Coward (most likely because he’s the closest composite in the English-speaking hyper-articulate realm), France’s Sacha Guitry rose to...
Tuesday Blus: Cold Cults in Soavi and Argento’s The Sect
In a sense, one could point to the 1991 film The Sect as the link between Jamie Lee Curtis and giallo master Dario Argento,...
Criterion Collection: Women in Love (1969) | Blu-ray Review
Although it’s a rather libelous label often originated or thrust upon outré or idiosyncratic French directors, Britain’s Ken Russell is perhaps the epitome of...
Tuesday Blus: Flowers of Taipei in Hsiao-hsien’s Daughter of the Nile (1987)
Although he’s most widely regarded for a cluster of films from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, it was the 1980s which remain...
Criterion Collection: Baal (1970) | Blu-ray Review
A missing cornerstone of Brechtian and New German Wave cinema is at last recuperated with the resurrection of Baal, a 1970 German television...
Criterion Collection: Tom Jones | Blu-ray Review
It’s difficult to imagine how an adaptation of Henry Fielding’s celebrated eight-hundred page-plus 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling would be...
Criterion Collection: The Hero (1966) | Blu-ray Review
Although the title may put contemporary audiences in mind of Brett Haley’s 2017 Sam Elliott homage (which, coincidentally, shares many similar themes and motifs),...
Tuesday Blus: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno & Delmer Daves’ The Hanging Tree
This week’s edition of Tuesday Blus includes the following titles:
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (2009)
Film Review: ★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc Review: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
After Dante Alighieri but before Dario Argento and...
Criterion Collection: Kameradschaft | Blu-ray Review
A progressive call to unity between the historically at odds French and German cultures, G.W. Pabst’s 1931 classic Comradeship (Kameradschaft) which concerns a team...
Criterion Collection: Westfront 1918 | Blu-ray Review
Criterion taps into the first wave of sound films from iconic German director G.W. Pabst which solidified the auteur’s reputation (and successful crossover from...
Tuesday Blus: Intermezzo, Blade Runner: 2049 & Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
This week’s edition of Tuesday Blus includes the following titles:
Intermezzo (1939)
Film Review: ★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc Review: ★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
It’s a tale as old as time, more vintage than...
Tuesday Blus: Stanley Kramer’s Not as a Stranger & Andy Muschetti’s It
This week’s edition of Tuesday Blus includes the following titles: Not as a Stranger (1955) – Kino Lorber, The Taking of Beverly Hills (1991)...
Criterion Collection: Jabberwocky (1977) | Blu-ray Review
It was rather a rough start for Terry Gilliam’s solo directorial career. While 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which Gilliam co-directed with...
Tuesday Blus: Max Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman, Nolan’s Dunkirk & Bigelow’s Detroit
This week’s edition of Tuesday Blus includes the following titles: Dunkirk (2017) - Warner Bros., Detroit (2017) - Twentieth Century Fox, Letter from an...
The Voice of the Moon | Blu-ray Review
“I love remembering more than living. What’s the difference anyway?” murmurs the internal dialogue of Ivo, a patient recently released from a mental hospital...
The Mercenary (1968) | Blu-ray Review
Despite his prolific contributions to the succession of the spaghetti western, time has tended to obscure the reputation of director Sergio Corbucci from all but...
The Villainess | Blu-ray Review
South Korea’s Jung Byung-gil promises all the makings of a cult filmmaker with his second narrative feature, The Villainess. Premiering in the Midnight program at the...
The Midwife | DVD Review
What seemed like a novel idea, pairing two of French cinema’s contemporary icons from opposing schools of expression (the dramatically inclined Catherine Deneuve and...
Criterion Collection: Barry Lyndon (1975) | Blu-ray Review
Within the omnipresent and overpowering narration guiding Barry Lyndon, a passage on the title character’s wife describes her as “not very much more important...
Criterion Collection: Personal Shopper | Blu-ray Review
One of French auteur Olivier Assayas’ most divisive films to date (it drew jeers at its premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, but...
Criterion Collection: The Lure | Blu-ray Review
Agnieszka Smoczynska’s idiosyncratic directorial debut The Lure has cult classic written all over it. A fairy tale about two siren sisters in 1980’s Warsaw...
Maurice (1987) | Blu-ray Review
“England has always been disinclined to accept human nature,” states a congenial Ben Kingsley, playing a minor role as a doctor in the Merchant-Ivory...
The Flesh (1991) | Blu-ray Review
Marco Ferreri remains one of the unsung provocateurs from Italy’s golden age of contemporary auteurs, an idiosyncratic conveyor of carnal desires and consuming passions...
Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972) | Blu-ray Review
Arrow Video resurrects one of Italian horror maestro Luci Fulci’s (the Godfather of Gore) best but most obscure titles, the enigmatically titled Don’t Torture...
Criterion Collection: The Piano Teacher | Blu-ray Review
Rare are the performers who can surpass the sadistic tendencies of an oligarchically inclined auteur, but there exists no finer example of this than...
Criterion Collection: Rebecca | Blu-ray Review
“Last night I dreamt of Manderley again,” opens the famous 1938 novel Rebecca by esteemed mystery writer Daphne Du Maurier, astutely mimicked in Alfred...
A Woman’s Life | Blu-ray Review
Winning the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, and snagging two Cesar nominations (for actress Judith Chemla and costume designer Madeline Fontaine),...
Kill Baby, Kill | Blu-ray Review
The influential reach of Italian giallo master Mario Bava is far and wide, and a retrospective earlier this year at The Quad helped re-introduce...
Criterion Collection: La poison (1951) | Blu-ray Review
Groucho Marx once drolly remarked, “Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?” Such is the state of the...
The Love of a Woman | Blu-ray Review
Director Jean Gremillon belongs to a select group of WWII era auteurs who were highly revered during their prolific periods (which included the duress...
After the Storm | Blu-ray Review
One of this year’s overlooked gems, Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After the Storm received a solemn theatrical release in March of 2017 courtesy of...
Criterion Collection: L’Argent | Blu-ray Review
In more ways than one, L’Argent, the stunning final film of Robert Bresson, (anointed ‘patron saint of cinema’), plays like an eerie prequel to...
The Criterion Collection: Ugetsu | Blu-ray Review
A cornerstone of Japanese cinema, Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 masterpiece Ugetsu at last receives an updated transfer from the Criterion collection. In the middle of...
The Criterion Collection: The Marseille Trilogy | Blu-ray Review
Marcel Pagnol’s famed Marseille Trilogy receives a loving placement in the Criterion Collection after its theatrical US restoration release in early 2017 courtesy of...
Frantz | Blu-ray Review
France’s Francois Ozon scored one of his most critically acclaimed ventures in years with 2016’s Frantz, which was the auteur’s third time competing in...
Ex Machina | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Review
A surprise box office hit in the first quarter of 2015 following a SXSW premiere, Alex Garland’s directorial debut Ex Machina (A24's first ever win)...
Criterion Collection: Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2 | Blu-ray Review
In 2007, Martin Scorsese founded the World Cinema Project, a nonprofit organization committed to restoring neglected and marginalized cinema from countries where major restorations...
Criterion Collection: Dheepan | Blu-ray Review
Almost exactly two years after he won the Palme d’Or for Dheepan at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, Jacques Audiard finagles his way into...
Criterion Collection: Good Morning | Blu-ray Review
Criterion re-releases one of its early additions to the collection for the first time on Blu-ray, Yasujiro Ozu’s poignant late period comedy, Good Morning...
Right Now, Wrong Then | Blu-ray Review
Recently formed distribution label Grasshopper Film has already managed to build a formidable reputation by saving a number of auteur driven art-house titles from...
The Assassin (1961) | Blu-ray Review
Remembered best for his genre infused social issue/ills films through the 1960s and 1970s, Elio Petri significant filmography has recently begun to be recuperated...
Things to Come | Blu-ray Review
Although the thunderous awards campaign for Isabelle Huppert’s performance in Elle somewhat obscured the rightful acclaim which should have equally been bestowed upon her...
Three Brothers (1981) | Blu-ray Review
One of Italy’s most celebrated auteurs, Francesco Rosi was a force to be reckoned with in the 1960s and 1970s. Taking home the Golden...
