Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD from 2011 and earlier.
Bamboozled
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
Beach Blanket Bingo
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Easily the most consistently entertaining movie in the [beach party] series.
Blue Collar
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
Building A Broken Mousetrap
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Cavalcade
- Excerpt: As an early winner of the Best Picture Oscar, Cavalcade is one of the weaker films to hold a place in film history books.
Deadball
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: I’d rather watch an A-Rod at bat than see “Deadball” again; they both cheat the audience, but at least Rodriguez is trying.
Demon Seed
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
The Devil’s Backbone
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
Dive Bomber
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: This is a docudrama at best, and that director, with those actors, was not the right man to make a docudrama.
East of Sumatra
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: This is what comic-book movies look like when they’re not blown up into $200 million monstrosities: friendly and eldritch and kinda cosy even in the middle of outrageous escapades.
Foolish Wives
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
From Beyond
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: … pales a bit in comparison to its immediate predecessor—and it would have taken a miracle to recreate “Re-Animator”‘s mix of carnage, black comedy and general outrageousness—this one is still a good time for horror fans looking for cheap thrills delivered with a otherworldly panache.
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes
The Happy Sad
- Excerpt: Sexual “experimentation” is rendered largely as a symptom of insecurity rather than a sensual quest.
Heavy Traffic
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: There’s not much of a story, and what plot there is turns needlessly nasty, but as a series of visual experiments “Heavy Traffic” is a success.
The Incredible Melting Man
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
Jaws 3-D
Jaws: the Revenge
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Marilyn Ferdinand @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: The recently restored silent film, based on the best-selling 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, establishes in one package all of Hitchcock’s major obsessions—the wrong man, blondes, voyeurism, and the threat of nature.
Love And Death
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
Love Me Tender
Ministry Of Fear
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
The Muppet Movie
- Excerpt: Without anything to model itself after, the 1979 film debut does an incredible job of blazing new trails.
Orpheus
Jonathan Richards @ www.jonrichardsplace.com
- Excerpt: Cocteau’s vision is intoxicatingly poetic, and his effects are ingenious. The pace is sometimes slow, but for a viewer willing to surrender to it, the film is magic.
Robin Hood (1973)
- Excerpt: When judged within Disney’s animated canon, Robin Hood clearly falls in the middle of the pack and probably at the lower end of the class. But it’s a film with no desire to be any better than the easygoing diversion it is.
Rumble Fish
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
Samurai Pirate
Peter Nellhaus @ Coffee Coffee and more Coffee
The Satanic Rites of Dracula
Seconds
- Excerpt: As it approaches its fiftieth anniversary, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds remains a creepy movie with the power to unsettle.
Tony Dayoub @ Cinema Viewfinder
- Excerpt: …it is this double-life that the private Hudson kept quiet for so many years that truly enhances his performance as Tony Wilson né Arthur Hamilton.
- Excerpt: A despairing John Frankenheimer funhouse of paranoia.
Since You Went Away
- Excerpt: “Since You Went Away” has a definitively pro-America approach to its style, but it effectively conveys the hardships and dangers fraught with serving your country even while focusing on the stalwart matriarch of a damaged family.
Swing High, Swing Low
Marilyn Ferdinand @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: This is first-rate melodrama that is very shrewd about the character flaws and incompatibilities that were bound to cause trouble sooner or later. The attention to this detail is indicative of the entire enterprise, certainly a labor of love for the relatively untested director, Mitchell Leisen.
That Touch of Mink
- Excerpt: t’s fluffy, but then, mink is supposed to be fluffy and soft and only harmful to the animals that gave up their fur, so that That Touch of Mink is kind of innocuous and anemic is sort of okay.
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
- Excerpt: For Coppola, it is among his most personal films, not only because it spent the longest time in gestation, but because it’s the closest the filmmaker has ever come to a confessional about the professional betrayals he’d contended with in his career…
Walk Cheerfully
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
