Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD from 2011 and earlier.
The Bad & Beautiful
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: Minus the framing device of the flashback, The Bad and the Beautiful is a strong portrait of an ugly business where a good idea trumps such things as morality.
Buster Keaton Collection – 14-Disc Set Blu-Ray Review
- Excerpt: The sheer amount of classic comedy content and a mountain of extras make this no less than an encyclopedia of Keaton’s career.
Capsule Reviews: Entry #1
Danny King @ The King Bulletin
Capsule Reviews: Entry #2
Danny King @ The King Bulletin
Doughboys
A.J. Hakari @ Classic Movie Guide
- Excerpt: …this military farce gave us a Buster who was visibly more confident marrying his trademark slapstick with the sound era’s demands.
Empire of Passion
Jamie S. Rich @ Criterion Confessions
- Excerpt: By embracing a more typical genre story, Oshima found a nice balance between traditional storytelling and the extreme impulses that made me think some of his other work was a tad adolescent. Here he manages to walk a carefully drawn line, spinning a good yarn while also addressing his usual thematic concerns and even finding room for at least one shocking scene.
The Great Escape
Marcio Sallem @ Cinema com Crítica [Portuguese]
Gypsy Blood
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
The Haunted Palace
Andrew Wyatt @ Gateway Cinephiles
- Excerpt: Its story problems aside, The Haunted Palace is nonetheless an entertaining work of camp horror, chock-a-block with shockingly gorgeous widescreen visuals and a typically lip-smacking (if lesser) performance from Price.
High Art
Marilyn Ferdinand @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: In her memorable feature debut, director Lisa Cholodenko offers Cholodenko offers a look at lesbians leading lives that contain as much love, dysfunction, ambition, and familial relationships as any other way of life.
Hollywood Ending
- Excerpt: …as both silly farce and clever satire, “Hollywood Ending” has weakened a decade down the line, amusing in patches but disconnected and half-cocked on the whole.
Innocence
Carson Lund @ Are the Hills Going to March Off?
- Excerpt: Sharing, and ultimately putting to shame, her spouse Gaspar Noé’s penchant for oblique storytelling and enveloping symbology, Lucile Hadzihalilovic relates a simple, streamlined tale about young girls housed in a bare-bones boarding school whose lives are dictated by a small group of female headmasters and the rituals they impart on their students.
Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Killer’s Kiss
Marilyn Ferdinand @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: “Killer’s Kiss” sees Kubrick seemingly more at home in the precincts of Manhattan he had spent his teenaged years haunting as a photographer, to the point where the film often feels less like a narrative movie than a photographic record and portfolio showing off the manifold attractions, both glitzy and seamy, of the cityscape.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains
- Excerpt: …a sloppy drama that neither criticizes or sympathizes with its lead character in any meaningful way.
Les Misérables [1952]
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: It is not much of a good movie… What strength it has comes largely from the strength inherent to the material.
Les Misérables [1978]
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Even if it’s mostly one for the Les Misérables completionists, they’re not likely to walk away disappointed.
Letter Never sent
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Minnesota Clay
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Mrs. Miniver
- Excerpt: William Wyler creates a moving wartime family drama in “Mrs. Miniver”, a transcendent piece of motion picture propaganda, one that puts a very human face on World War II.
A Page Of Madness
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
The Psychopath
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Teorema
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: True to its name, “Teorema” is a dry theoretical film that’s more interesting to discuss afterwards than it is fun to watch.
Titanic (1953)
Matthew Lucas @ From the Front Row
- Excerpt: It’s pure Hollywood melodrama, and a pretty goofy one at that.
Wild Strawberries
Donald Levit @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
Wonder Woman (1974)
- Excerpt: …this “Wonder Woman” plays it safe and suffers for it, supplying a dreary spy game that’s the very antithesis of “super.”
