Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD from 2011 and earlier.
10 Rillington Place
Accidentally Preserved – Volume 1 (DVD)
Phil Hall @ Film Threat
- Excerpt: A review of Ben Model’s DVD anthology of rare silent short films
Boca
Marcio Sallem @ Em Cartaz [Portuguese]
The Bootleg Files: Future Shock
Phil Hall @ Film Threat
- Excerpt: A review of the 1972 film version of the Alvin Toffler best-seller
Clint Eastwood 20 Film Collection
Brent McKnight @ Beyond Hollywood
Dear God
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
Hard Times
- Excerpt: [Charles] Bronson moves with the easy bounce of a jungle caught, always poised to pounce while looking for his opening, but this isn’t about the grace or art of boxing, it’s about bare-knuckle brawling and hammering the opponent into submission for a crowd hungry for blood.
High Treason
Marilyn Ferdinand @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: High Treason, an ambitious production that clearly was influenced by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, is an early British sound film that has been lovingly restored by The Film Foundation and the Library of Congress. A superior transitional silent-to-sound film, this scifi film offers a pacifist sensibility with real emotion.
The Howling
- Excerpt: [Joe] Dante discarded the usual lone wolf route to frame the drama in terms of the wolf pack. His wolves weren’t mad dogs on the rampage, but a primal force balancing survival with primal urges.
Howl’s Moving Castle
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: Like Howl’s castle, this movie is cobbled together from mismatched parts; it looks unstable and threatens to tumble over as it rambles along, but magic holds it together.
The Key
- Excerpt: The Key is a dark film, more existential treatise than war picture. The words “sober” and “morose” come to mind.
Marketa Lazarová
- Excerpt: Set in 13th century Czechoslovakia, in a medieval culture of warring feudal lords, it’s a film of primal imagery, poetic filmmaking, and ephemeral storytelling that looks hewn out of the stone and wood and the very earth of the ground beneath
My Bloody Valentine (1981)
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: [Has] a sense of place matched by literally no other slasher film I have seen.
Night of the Creeps
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Of Human Bondage
- Excerpt: While this Hollywoodized Great Book frequently falls short, it preserves the crackling launch of Bette Davis’s legend.
One For The Book
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Second-Hand Hearts
- Excerpt: How do you make two specific misfits stand out in a landscape where everyone is a misfit? Push them harder and further over the top, whether it makes sense or not.
Superman (1948)
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Evoke[s] a simple, happily naïve impression of how gosh-darn terrific a superhero would be to have around.
The Voyage
Roderick Heath @ This Island Rod
- Excerpt: Vittorio De Sica’s last image confronts his own impending mortality in the raw.
Waxwork
Kenji Fujishima @ The House Next Door
Whoopee!
- Excerpt: Cantor strikes me as an early Woody Allen prototype, with his Jewish neuroses and baffled reactions to everything and everyone around him. His patter is funny, as is his physical comedy, but it’s when he sings that his stardom starts to make particular sense.
The World Ten Times Over
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
