Tag: Foreign Film Blu Ray Review
The Red Turtle | Blu-ray Review
A quietly perceptive and rather matter-of-fact metaphor on embracing instead of rejecting one’s destiny, Dutch filmmaker Michael Dudok de Wit’s narrative feature The Red...
The Pied Piper | Blu-ray Review
A forgotten oddity from the early 1970s is Jacques Demy’s English language mounting of The Pied Piper, a rather bleak but mostly unequivocal version...
The Salesman | Blu-ray Review
Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman was his second film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film (following 2012’s A Separation),...
Criterion Collection: Tampopo | Blu-ray Review
Perhaps the first and most apt film deserving of the categorization known as ‘food porn,’ Juzo Itami’s hit sophomore film Tampopo receives a lush...
Anatahan (1953) | Blu-ray Review
In one of the distributor’s most exciting unveilings of 2017, Kino Lorber re-released Josef Von Sternberg’s obscure final film Anatahan (1953) in early February....
Property is No Longer a Theft | Blu-ray Review
Elio Petri remains one of the unsung auteurs of Italian cinema, a master of the grotesque and bizarre, who’s morbid narratives were often more...
Criterion Collection: Blow-Up | Blu-ray Review
Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni ended the 1960s, his most consequential and revered cinematic period, with a legendary bang. Following his quartet of brooding treatments...
Elle | Blu-ray Review
Isabelle Huppert scored some of the best notices of her prolific career with Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. The Dutch auteur’s French language debut, which premiered...
Criterion Collection: Canoa: a Shameful Memory | Blu-ray Review
Described as “one of Mexico’s most highly regarded works of political cinema,” Criterion resurrects the highly charged 1976 documentary, Canoa: A Shameful Memory, from...
War on Everyone | Blu-ray Review
Following his 2011 debut The Guard and his moody 2014 sophomore feature Calvary, British filmmaker John Michael McDonaugh hits a false note with his first...
Evolution | Blu-ray Review
One of the best but most overlooked theatrical releases of 2016 was Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s sophomore film Evolution, a creepy coming-of-age body horror film about...
Criterion Collection: 45 Years | Blu-ray Review
Taking home Best Actor and Actress awards out of its premiere at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival for leads Tom Courtenay and Charlotte...
Police (1985) | Blu-ray Review
In the fall of 2016, Cohen Media Group staged a phenomenal retrospective of five masterpieces by Maurice Pialat, including his 1987 Palme d’Or winning...
The Sicilian Clan (1969) | Blu-ray Review
At the height of his tough guy persona, French superstar Alain Delon was in top form through the 1960s and 70s, headlining a number...
We Are the Flesh | Blu-ray Review
After premiering at the 2016 Rotterdam Film Festival, Arrow Films purchased Emiliano Rocha Minter’s salacious directorial debut, We Are the Flesh, which is bound...
Come What May (2015) | Blu-ray Review
Beneath its swells of emotion and somewhat bitter but diminished remonstrance on the horrors of war, French director Christian Carion’s fourth film, Come What...
Criterion Collection: Black Girl | Blu-ray Review
To speak of African cinema, one must begin with a discussion of Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese auteur credited as the father of African film....
Train to Busan | Blu-ray Review
South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho scored a box office hit with his live action narrative debut Train to Busan, a zombie action film which...
Criterion Collection: Fox and His Friends | Blu-ray Review
To revisit Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends in 2017, some forty years after its 1975 release, is to realize how unnervingly astute...
Mia Madre | Blu-ray Review
Family members dealing with an impending absence is at the crux of Nanni Moretti’s latest film, Mia Madre, which competed at the 2015 Cannes...
Criterion Collection: The Exterminating Angel | Blu-ray Review
It might be difficult to fathom in contemporary cultural climates (although with varying degrees of ideological permissiveness) just how incendiary a cinematic figure Spanish...
Gran Bollito | Blu-ray Review
Arguably one of the most neglected auteurs who has undeservedly fallen into obscurity is Mauro Bolognini, a director who worked throughout the 1950s and...
Howards End | Blu-ray Review
“Are they likely people?” says one female relative to another in the opening segments of James Ivory’s Howards End, the 1992 adaptation of British...
Criterion Collection: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams | Blu-ray Review
Arguably the most revered and influential filmmaker to come out of the Japanese New Wave, Akira Kurosawa’s vast filmography spanned six decades, beginning with...
Criterion Collection: Lone Wolf & Cub | Blu-ray Review
Criterion tackles the short-lived but prolific Lone Wolf & Cub series, a collection of six titles made between 1972 and 1973 about a traveling...
Criteron Collection: Pan’s Labyrinth | Blu-ray Review
A decade has passed since Guillermo Del Toro unleashed his glorious period piece Pan’s Labyrinth, a dark, magical fable set in 1944 Spain, in...
Criterion Collection: The Executioner | Blu-ray Review
Aided by significant cultural and social subtexts, Luis Garcia Berlanga’s seminal 1963 film The Executioner is a black comedy delivering all the gallows’ humor...
Eye of the Needle | Blu-ray Review
For a writer as renowned as Ken Follett, it’s hard to believe there’s been only one actual cinematic adaptation of his works to date....
Criterion Collection: Dekalog | Blu-ray Review
Since the inception of cinema, there are few filmmakers who have successfully achieved a simultaneous mixture of formidable narrative scope and cinematographic prowess. But...
The Pit | Blu-ray Review
The little known horror obscurity The Pit gets resuscitated for appreciation, a 1981 oddity falling under the subgenre Canuxploitation (an exploitation movement like any...
Criterion Collection: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum | Blu-ray Review
Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1939 title The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, championed by some as the Japanese auteur’s masterwork (arguably, he had several), arrived shortly...
Tale of Tales | Blu-ray Review
Italian auteur Matteo Garrone makes his English language debut with 2015’s Tale of Tales, a droll, visually captivating adaptation of classic fairytales from 17th...
Two Newly Restored Films by Philippe de Broca | Blu-ray Review
After restoring and releasing director Philippe de Broca’s classic Jean-Paul Belmondo capers That Man from Rio (1964) and its first sequel Up To His...
Criterion Collection: The Immortal Story | Blu-ray Review
In retrospect, The Immortal Story (1968) is a fitting capstone to Orson Welles’ illustrious yet highly compromised directorial career, a filmography lodged beneath the...
Criterion Collection: Woman in the Dunes | Blu-ray Review
Arguably one of the most enigmatic figures associated with the loosely defined Japanese New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s is Hiroshi Teshigahara, who...
Neon Bull | Blu-ray Review
Premiering at the 2015 Venice Film Festival in the Horizons sidebar, Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro’s exceptional sophomore feature Neon Bull won the Special Jury...
The Ones Below | Blu-ray Review
Pregnancy and psychological thrills make for comfortable bedfellows in screenwriter David Farr’s (Hanna; “The Night Manager”) directorial debut, The Ones Below. Premiering at the...
Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? | Blu-ray Review
Beyond some brief moments of hysterical camp fervor courtesy of a frumpy lead performance from Shelley Winters, in prime matronly hyper drive, it’s difficult...
Female Prisoner Scorpion – The Complete Collection | Blu-ray Review
Outside of audience members determined to catalogue Quentin Tarantino’s kitschy extra textual references (he utilizes the film’s them in Kill Bill: Vol.2), the iconic...
The Lobster | Blu-ray Review
Director Yorgos Lanthimos transplants his celebrated narrative aesthetic from the Greek Weird Wave with his English language debut, The Lobster. The highly anticipated international...
Criterion Collection: Muriel, or The Time of Return | Blu-ray Review
War, in some shape, way, or form, was infused in most of the famed early works of New Wave auteur Alain Resnais, who broke...
Five Miles to Midnight | Blu-ray Review
Decidedly weird but not altogether enthralling is the 1962 title Five Miles to Midnight, a melodramatic thriller with noir elements and one of the...
Belladonna of Sadness | Blu-ray Review
Eiichi Yamamoto’s bizarre, upsetting, and perverse 1973 lost masterpiece Belladonna of Sadness makes a formidable resurgence this year following a loving restoration courtesy of...
Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Vol.2 | Blu-ray Review
Arrow Video continues with its Nikkatsu Diamond Guys collection, although its second assemblage of obscure offerings plucked from the annals of the esteemed studio...
Cat in the Brain | Blu-ray Review
Director Lucio Fulci, the oft designated Godfather of Gore, starred as himself in one of his final efforts, the infamous Cat in the Brain,...
La Chienne | Criterion Blu-ray Review
Popular discussions of Jean Renoir tend to highlight his most renowned titles from particular periods of his career, though his greatest contributions and considerable...
Criterion Collection: Le Amiche | Blu-ray Review
Many forget Michelangelo Antonioni had been directing films for over a decade by the time 1960’s L’avventura was booed at Cannes, eventually solidifying his...
The Films of Maurice Pialat, Volume 2 – Under the Sun of Satan | Blu-ray Review
In their continued remastering of Maurice Pialat's works, Cohen Media Group unleashes Volume 2 as one solo title, his 1987 Palme d’Or winner Under...
Gold | Blu-ray Review
Fans of Fritz Lang’s eternally magnificent sci-fi epic Metropolis (1927) should find considerable enjoyment in the Austrian Karl Hartl’s overlooked 1934 talkie, Gold. A...
Symptoms | Blu-ray Review
A title which deserves to tag along in conversations pertaining to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) or Robert Altman’s Images (1972) is the 1974...
