Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD from 2010 and earlier.
Arachnophobia
The Aristocats
A Brighter Summer Day
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
The Day the Sun Turned Cold
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Dead Ringers
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: …it’s only when you sit down and analyze “Dead Ringers” afterwards that you can think of it as anything approaching a normal, rational story. While you’re in the movie’s grips, it’s a weird and uncomfortable experience; the film equivalent of being put into stirrups while a masked man probes your insides with experimental instruments of his own invention.
Fernando Di Leo’s Madness
Full Contact
- Excerpt: Stripped down and savage where Woo is big, busy, and whirring with more flying bullets than a small war, you could call Full Contact the anti-John Woo Hong Kong gangster film. Where Woo prized loyalty under fire—even adversaries found themselves bonding via bullets—for Lam, violence is the catalyst for mistrust, betrayal and a poisoning of one’s character by hate and vengeance.
Great Guns
I’m Going Home
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
The Last Boy Scout
Stephen Carty @ Flix Capacitor
Love on the Run
Jamie S. Rich @ Criterion Confessions
- Excerpt: Love on the Run could have just as easily been called “Coming Home to Roost,” but the film’s title is not merely meant to be descriptive of this, the final entry in Francois Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, but of the entire cycle of films.
M*A*S*H
Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: “M*A*S*H” ruthlessly satirizes the hypocritical U.S. military, and by extension the U.S. Government, for its systemic barbarism and arbitrary means of doling out draconian punishments to friends and foe alike.
Maidstone and Other Films by Norman Mailer
Jamie S. Rich @ Criterion Confessions
- Excerpt: …a trio of films more interesting for what they represent than how they actually turned out. I give Norman Mailer credit for going at moviemaking whole hog, even if he does end up proving he should have stuck to prose.
The Man Who Could Cheat Death
Night in Paradise
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Octopussy
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: While the film is the first of the genuinely bloated Bond movies, it only rarely drags.
Ordet/The Word
Donald Levit @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Chiefly successful because of its commitment to an artistic ideal: make something that looks, talks, feels, and moves like a cartoon.
Quadrophenia (1979), Margaret (2011) and more
Tony Dayoub @ Cinema Viewfinder
Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer
Rebel Without a Cause
Carson Lund @ Are the Hills Going to March Off?
- Excerpt: Ray is a master of adding spatial and geographical components to dramatic relationships, using specific locations or relationships within the physical space to organically suggest subtexts beneath the image.
Rosetta
Matthew Lucas @ From the Front Row
- Excerpt: In Rosetta the inherent essence of her struggle is clear – sometimes pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is impossible when there is nothing to hang your bootstraps on in the first place.
The Sea Gull
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue
Marilyn Ferdinand @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: Slaughter on Tenth Avenue has been hung with the unfortunate label of stepson to On the Waterfront (1954). Slaughter has one virtue On the Waterfront lacks: based on the nonfiction book The Man Who Rocked the Boat cowritten by former New York district attorney William J. Keating, it tells in compelling fashion the true story of the only murder conviction achieved against a mobbed-up union official from the prosecutor’s point of view.
Terminator Anthology
John J. Puccio @ Movie Metropolis
- Excerpt: For those folks who have Blu-ray players but somehow missed getting one or more of the four “Terminator” films in high-def, here they are in a big box set from Warner Bros.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
Darren Mooney @ the m0vie blog
- Excerpt: I think that Thunderbolt & Lightfoot might be my favourite Michael Cimino film. It’s a film that offers a great deal of depth beneath a relatively accessible surface layer, serving as an exploration of seventies America, but one with significant hidden depths.
Tomorrow Never Dies
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: What I found in Tomorrow Never Dies is that this film veers dangerously close to being the first official Bond parody.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Tony Dayoub @ Cinema Viewfinder
- Excerpt: Perhaps the most telling scene in the film is its opening, in which a slow zoom-out from a TV set ends with a club crashing down upon it.
Unstoppable
Stephen Carty @ Flix Capacitor