Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD.
Pre-2022 Film Reviews
Birth (2004)
Dan Stalcup @ The Goods: Film Reviews
- Excerpt: What makes the telling of this story work miraculously well is an outstanding control of tone. Jonathan Glazer, his cast, and his crew imbue the film with such sincere intensity that the high concept loops back around to profound.
The Harder They Fall (2021)
Dan Stalcup @ The Goods: Film Reviews
- Excerpt: The Harder They Fall hews very closely to western tropes and iconography. The spine-crushing coolness of the cast is its biggest appeal.
He Walked by Night (1948)
- Excerpt: He Walked by Night is really two films in one. The first is a police procedural shot in a semi-documentary style, a fictional representation of how the police go about their work in real life. The second is a more impressionistic film noir for the scenes featuring Basehart’s character, which are loaded with fog and shadows and canted angles and Venetian blinds.
Layer Cake (2004)
Dan Stalcup @ The Goods: Film Reviews
- Excerpt: The film’s biggest strength is the breakout performance of Daniel Craig. But the narrative is a bit convoluted, pulling beats from heist stories without the fun caper ambition.
Marketa Lazarova (1967)
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: Although ‘Marketa Lazarová’ is almost universally praised, everyone remarks on its confusing narrative… The narrative confusion matters less because the film is so beautiful.
Sexy Beast (2000)
Dan Stalcup @ The Goods: Film Reviews
- Excerpt: The script by Louis Mellis & David Scinto is terrific and unusual, disrupting the normal rhythms of a heist film. But the film really belongs to Jonathan Glazer, who is so in control of its tone that I almost can’t believe it’s his debut.
Stardust (2007)
Dan Stalcup @ The Goods: Film Reviews
- Excerpt: What keeps Stardust from greatness is that it’s more concerned with how the scenario looks like than what it feels like. But Vaughn ultimately proves himself a serviceable blockbuster director in a project with much more taxing demands than low-budget crime comedy like Layer Cake.
They Die By Dawn (2013)
Dan Stalcup @ The Goods: Film Reviews
- Excerpt: Jeymes Samuel takes the swaggering antihero charisma of ’90s gangster movies and The Wire, with an entirely Black cast, and filters it through western tropes and iconography.
