Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD from 2011 and earlier.
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Pure shtick, played by men who absolutely did not have the energy or the motivation to do their shtick well.
Boy Meets Girl
Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: Audaciously composed in a nocturnal Paris captured on saturated black-and-white film, the single-night narrative follows the intersecting trajectories of the recently dumped Mireille (Mireille Perrier) and Alex, a hotheaded misfit wandering the streets on his last night of freedom before entering the French Army.
The Chase
Donald Levit @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
Contempt
Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: Made the same year, 1963, as Federico Fellini’s “8 ½”, “Contempt” shares that film’s anxious search for artistic and poetic meaning beyond the glamour of cinema, insipid celebrity culture, and the ensemble spirit of filmmaking.
Creature With The Atom Brain
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Destroy All Monsters: The Poisonous Dread Of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3
Drums Along the Mohawk
- Excerpt: As rich as it is in history, and as tense as the final act becomes, Drums Along the Mohawk is really about building a family, albeit one with many extensions.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: Spielberg-on-the-Seine.
Five Dolls for an August Moon
- Excerpt: There’s more to recommend in terms of aesthetic and approach than anything else–which, depending on what you’re after, may be enough.
Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: This mini-masterpiece of alienation carefully walks that same line between fantasy and reality, dream and nightmare, that its namesake trod, but with an added dash of dry British wit.
Harvey
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
I Married a Witch
Jamie S. Rich @ Criterion Confessions
- Excerpt: René Clair’s 1942 comedy I Married a Witch is a nice [Halloween scary movie] antidote, fitting thematically with the horror holiday, but providing quite a few laughs to ease the tension.
Last Ride (FTW)
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Manhattan Murder Mystery
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
The Mummy’s Curse
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Just isn’t that much fun, even when it is enjoyably weird.
The Mummy’s Ghost
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: The signs of laziness set in almost immediately.
The Night of the Hunter
- Excerpt: ‘there’s a depth here to everything that means you’re shown things so quickly, you barely have time to take them in before the next scene comes to screen’
Oka!
Peter Nellhaus @ Coffee Coffee and more Coffee
Paris, Texas
Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: Wenders takes advantage of cinematographer Robby Müller’s poetic visual sense to contextualize the characters’ sense of looming, present, and past loss.
Phantom Raiders (1940)
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
R.P.M. (1970)
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Razorback
Stacia Kissick Jones @ Spectrum Culture Online
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trilogy
- Excerpt: ‘For those bored by the predictably wafer-thin plot entertainment can be had in playing spot the star; Sam Rockwell and Elias Koteas in the first film, Michael Jai White hovering in the background of a group of kids in the second.’
Twilight Zone – The Movie
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
- Excerpt: Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand’s reinvention of the movie musical has tinsel, Technicolor, and a beating, broken heart.
The Vincent Price Blu-ray Collection
M. Enois Duarte @ High-Def Digest.com
Wild Style
David Bax @ Battleship Pretension
- Excerpt: By the most pedestrian standards, Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style is not a very good movie. But one would have to be pretty far removed, not only from the history of hip-hop in New York City, but from the purpose and power of art itself not to be picked up and moved by such a singular and exhilarating work.
Wonder Bar
Stacia Kissick Jones @ ClassicFlix
Yellowbeard
Jerry Roberts @ Armchair Cinema
- Excerpt: The movie begins, actors move around, there are sets, there are costumes, things happen and eventually there are closing credits. Not one scene is the slightest bit interesting. An hour after you’ve seen it, you’ve forgotten it. A week after you’ve seen it, you can’t remember the title.
