Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD from 2010 and earlier.
Abraham Lincoln
Matthew Lucas @ From the Front Row
- Excerpt: A sad, weak swan song from one of cinema’s most legendary filmmakers.
Apocalypse Now (Redux)
Roderick Heath @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: Apocalypse Now, whilst offering a sustained and impressive catalogue and critique of the insanities of the specific war it dealt with, nonetheless stands most essential as a psychologised, stylised, oneiric study of the divide between humanity at its best and basest instincts.
Asylum
Peter Nellhaus @ Coffee Coffee and more Coffee
Being There
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
- Excerpt: It’s kind of turn-off-your-brain comedy. At the same time, to impressionable school-aged viewers, it’s turn-on-your-brain comedy, making these figures exciting and accessible in ways that young adult biographies and textbooks generally do not.
Broadway (1929)
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
The Definitive Document of Dead
Peter Nellhaus @ Coffee Coffee and more Coffee
Fate is the Hunter
Peter Nellhaus @ Coffee Coffee and more Coffee
- Excerpt: What is of interest is that the movie serves as a nicely preserved example of mid-Sixties entertainment, neither a top line prestige film, nor a low budget programmer, but the kind of medium budget production that normally played in movie theaters.
Husbands (1970)
In the Mood for Love
Matthew Lucas @ From the Front Row
- Excerpt: A rapturously romantic ode to unrequited love and unspoken longing.
John Cage: Journeys in Sound
- Excerpt: This lean documentary is exactly what it needs to be a presentation of the man and the music, stripped down to the essential, sidestepping the sentimental for the practical. John Cage: Journeys in Sound artfully arranges interviews and performances to clue viewers in to why Cage was such a unique composer, not to mention demonstrating how and why we should enjoy his music through the compositions themselves.
Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: A screamingly unnecessary sequel… [but] the best-animated of the Disney DTV sequels to that point, by an extraordinary margin.
The Last Performance
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Lawrence of Arabia
- Excerpt: Lawrence of Arabia is nothing if not spectacular. David Lean’s epic continues to resonate 50 years later as cinematic expression of the most ambitious order.
The Little Mermaid II: Return to Sea
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Carelessly stupid.
Love Exposure
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: For four hours ‘Love Exposure’ bounces back and forth between poles of purity and perversion, suggesting both the fetishistic perversity of organized religion and the purity of the dedicated pervert’s devotion.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
- Excerpt: In the history of entertainment, no other movie has embodied the phrase “word of mouth hit” as wholeheartedly and, with theatrical runs growing shorter all the time, none is likely to recreate such breakout success on such a large scale.
Olive Films’ Film Noir Collection, vol. 1
- Excerpt: Though a packaging of convenience more than a curated set, Olive’s Film Noir Collection, Volume One manages to be a fairly solid quartet of B-crime pictures with an A-list cast of stars. Some films are better than others, but all have something to recommend them.
Out of Sight
Carson Lund @ Are the Hills Going to March Off?
- Excerpt: A master of tone, Soderbergh is able to infuse the breezy two hours with an unrelenting sense of tossed-off cool, lending a feeling of detachment that is both comic and haunting. The result is a work that points ahead to Soderbergh’s star-studded Ocean trilogy even as it attains a dramatic gravity never quite reached by that slick franchise.
The Private Life of Henry VIII
Jamie S. Rich @ Criterion Confessions
- Excerpt: Charles Laughton plays the notorious king in the irreverent 1933 film. He is big and loud and boisterous and he enjoys his game hens–all the things we have come to expect from our knowledge of the marriage-prone monarch.
The Sin of Nora Moran
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
The Story of Temple Blake
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)
- Excerpt: Peek into the subconscious imagery of Jan Svankmajer
Thanks a Million
Marilyn Ferdinand @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: the campaign-centered musical Written with exceeding wit by Nunnally Johnson and starring Dick Powell at his most adorable, Thanks a Million, a campaign-centered musical comedy, was exactly the balm this classic movie fan needed to shake off the election blues.
Union City
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Week End (1967)
Jamie S. Rich @ Criterion Confessions
- Excerpt: Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s incendiary 1967 farewell to motion pictures as he knew (and redefined) them, gives new meaning to the term “road rage.”
The White Shadow
Marilyn Ferdinand @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: The rediscovered “lost” film that marks the earliest surviving feature for which Alfred Hitchcock received screen credit has debuted on the internet at www.filmpreservation.org.
