Blu-ray Movies
"The Shooting / Ride in the Whirlwind"
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
December 2014
Revisionist Cult Westerns from 1965
The Criterion Collection 734, 735
Format: Blu-ray
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
In the 1960s producer/director Roger Corman developed a moviemaking machine that gave first opportunities to many budding actors and directors. Monte Hellman was one of the latter, Jack Nicholson one of the former. The two teamed up to make two short Westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. They were made concurrently in six weeks on a low budget, and they featured overlapping casts but different leading men.
"F for Fake"
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
December 2014
Revisionist Welles
The Criterion Collection 288
Format: Blu-ray
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
Orson Welles. Mention the name and images come to mind immediately: Welles who made Citizen Kane, a movie that many consider the best one ever made. Welles whose radio version of The War of the Worlds seemed so real that it started panic in the streets. Welles who was married to the incredibly beautiful Rita Hayworth. Welles who mesmerized audiences in The Third Man.
"My Darling Clementine"
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
November 2014
Wyatt Earp Reinvented in a Western Classic
The Criterion Collection 732
Format: Blu-ray
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
Wyatt Earp is one of the bigger legends in US western history. Who hasn't heard of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral? He's been a character in movies many times over, and was most recently played by Kevin Costner (Wyatt Earp, 1994) and Kurt Russell (Tombstone, 1993). Twenty years on, it looks like we're due for yet another version. Hollywood keeps reinventing the same story. So did Earp.
"The Vanishing" (1988)
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
October 2014
A Deadly Cat-and-Mouse Game Generates Intense Suspense
The Criterion Collection 133
Format: Blu-ray
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
Modern audiences have come to equate suspense and horror movies with blood. But when you think about it, the great ones have little of that. Thus it is with the original European version of The Vanishing. The movie builds incredible suspense and brings you to the edge of your seat, but without guns or blood.
"Dracula" (1979)
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
October 2014
Fine Blu-ray Transfer Sheds New Light on Langella's Portrayal
Universal 61131593
Format: Blu-ray
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
Here's another film in time for Halloween. I've been waiting eagerly for Universal to release John Badham's Dracula on Blu-ray. Though I like the camp of Bela Lugosi, the menace that Christopher Lee provides in the Hammer films, the overall Ruisdael-like look of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, and the multilayered performance of Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, it is this 1979 version that I find most satisfying overall (by coincidence, Herzog's film and this one were both released in 1979: Herzog's in January, Badham's in July).
"The Innocents"
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
October 2014
A Chilling Ambiguity from Criterion
The Criterion Collection 727
Format: Blu-ray
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
Halloween is just about here again, and Criterion has celebrated by releasing a near-perfect edition of one of cinema's greatest ghost stories.
"Macbeth" (1971)
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
September 2014
A Bloody and Entertaining Macbeth from Roman Polanski
The Criterion Collection 726
Format: Blu-ray
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
Thespians often refer to Shakespeare's quest-for-power masterpiece as "bloody Macbeth," a name that Roman Polanski took to heart in creating his masterful, moody, and suspenseful film version in 1971. There's already plenty of blood in the stage version. Macbeth sees a "dagger of the mind" that turns bloody, and Lady Macbeth spends a portion of the last part of the play trying to wash imaginary blood off her hands. There's a lot of talk about blood here and there.
"All That Jazz"
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
September 2014
Art Imitates Life
The Criterion Collection 724
Format: Blu-ray and DVD
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
Not many directors would take a heart attack as inspiration for an autobiographical movie, but not many directors were like Bob Fosse, a song-and-dance man and choreographer with a very dark side. In All That Jazz he created a most entertaining movie about his life that only he could have made.
"Vengeance Is Mine"
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
September 2014
Chronicling a 78-Day Killing Spree in Japan
Criterion Collection 384
Format: Blu-ray
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
Japanese director Shôhei Imamura stopped relating to actors and spent a lengthy part of his career knocking out documentaries for Japanese television. After eventually making peace with his attitudes and opinions, he made his feature-film comeback with 1979's Vengeance Is Mine, based on a bestselling novel by Ryūzō Saki, who in turn based his book on actual events. A real-life Japanese serial killer, Akira Nishiguchi (1925-1970), dispatched five victims from October 18 through December 29, 1963. For the book, Saki renamed him Iwao Enokizu, and Imamura kept this name for his movie, casting Ken Ogata in the role.
"Insomnia" (1997)
- Details
- Category: Blu-ray movies Blu-ray movies
July 2014
A Different Kind of Thriller
The Criterion Collection 47
Format: Blu-ray and DVD
Overall Enjoyment
Picture Quality
Sound Quality
Extras
Insomnia was the first feature film for director and screenwriter Erik Skjoldbjærg, and it was so admired that Christopher Nolan did a US remake. That excellent version is probably best known to North American audiences, since it starred box office favorites Al Pacino and Robin Williams. Nolan's version is quite good, but the original has much to offer as well.
