Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD.
Reviews of Classic Films
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
- Excerpt: … the film dropped audiences into an aggressively unreal world and celebrated its theatrical artifice as a vision of madness and horror. It set the style for a movement, influenced a generation of filmmaker from Fritz Lang and Universal horror movies, and created images so vivid they are still referenced today.
The Conformist
- Excerpt: It’s a superb performance by Trintignant, whose presence is the film is physically passive even as he tries to play the confident, intellectual leader of men. He is stiff and still and pulls himself inward, instinctively resistant to physical contact.
The Long Hair of Death
- Excerpt: … the beauty of figures that float through the atmosphere of Margheriti’s sets and locations and the mesmerizing presence of Steele, whose scary beauty is delicate and vulnerable yet feral and fierce.
Out of the Past
- Excerpt: In a genre full of desperate characters scrambling and plotting to grab their slice of the American dream, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) is a hard-boiled tale of betrayal with an unusually haunting quality.
Rocky Mountain
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Verdun: Looking at History
- Excerpt: It is part human drama and part history lesson, complete with detailed statistics and animated maps of troop movements to put the big picture around human experience.
Recent Home Video Releases
Bunny Lake is Missing
Kristen Lopez @ Awards Circuit
Long Hair of Death
Peter Nellhaus @ Coffee, Coffee and more Coffee
Lord of Illusions
Brent McKnight @ The Last Thing I See
- Excerpt: Are you in the mood to sit on your couch and watch a supernatural detective story starring Scott Bakula? If the answer to that question is yes, you’re in luck, as Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions just got a special edition Blu-ray release, including an extended director’s cut, courtesy of the fine folks at Scream Factory.
Other Reviews from 2012 and earlier
The Adventures of Tin Tin and The Secret of the Unicorn
Blake Howard @ Graffiti With Punctuation
Attack the Block
Blake Howard @ Graffiti With Punctuation
The Fan (1981)
Stacia Kissick Jones @ She Blogged By Night
Safe
- Excerpt: Safe’ is nearly 20 years old, and when it was released back in 1995, critics read it as metaphor for any number of maladies. Now, from a distance, Haynes’ target seems clearer, and the film all the more prescient: in many ways, Safe predicts both the insular nature of contemporary society, and the (counter-intuitive) disease of conformity that’s synonymous with it.
The Shawshank Redemption
Betty Jo Tucker @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2
- Excerpt: Half of the second movie is basically a “just the good parts” version of the first, if you have a super-loose definition of the word “good.” I’ll say this: the inclusion of a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book of the first film makes the rental of the second quite economical (it’s two movies for the price of one!).
