Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD.
Reviews of Classic Films
Dragon Inn (1967)
- Excerpt: A tour de force of action and romanticism
Une Femme est une femme
- Excerpt: It is a slightly dated musical-without-the-musical-numbers but one that is certainly not without interest.
Out 1
Kenji Fujishima @ The Playlist
Le Petit Soldat
- Excerpt: Le Petit Soldat is amongst Godard’s best films because it is a challenging, committed, bold and angry work from a young filmmaker who was still finding his voice in cinema and in politics.
Star Trek: First Contact
- Excerpt: …the franchise took the first full feature with just the TNG cast and turned out one of the franchise’s best outings with “Star Trek: First Contact”
To Sleep With Anger
Marilyn Ferdinand @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: To Sleep With Anger, Burnett’s third feature, is his first to use professional actors, but the thread linking it to his earlier works remains strong. The folklore his parents and grandparents shared with him during his formative years offered him a different template for exploring the African-American community, one that allowed him to tell a horror story of his own that can easily join other cautionary tales passed through the generations.
Recent Home Video Releases
Black Girl & Borom Sarret: Two films by Ousmane Sembène
Dusty Somers @ World Cinema Paradise
La Ciudad (The City)
The Deadly Bees
Stacia Kissick Jones @ She Blogged By Night
Edgar Allan Poe’s Black Cats: Two Adaptations by Sergio Martino & Lucio Fulci
Jordan M. Smith @ IONCINEMA.com
Final Girl
- Excerpt: This film just lacks a reason for being that leaves its characters disconnected from the viewer, resulting in 84 minutes of pretty pictures.
Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer
A LEGO Brickumentary
- Excerpt: More a film about LEGO fandom than about LEGO, this documentary goes in a lot of directions in showing the cultural impact of the construction toy, but lacks any kind of through line to string it all together.
Mannequin
- Excerpt: The general tone is light and breezy, with the kind of slapstick and snappy wordplay that wouldn’t be out of place in a classic black-and-white comedy, while the characters are all fun to watch.
Manos: The Hands of Fate
- Excerpt: A truly terrible movie, to the point where it is often ridiculous, but it’s rarely hilariously bad.
Tu dors Nicole
The Wolfpack
- Excerpt: The Wolfpack features some genuinely fascinating subjects in the Argulos, but is either uninterested, unable or unwilling to chase their most interesting stories, leaving the viewer with more questions than any good documentary should leave unanswered.
Other Reviews from 2014 and earlier
The Beaches of Agnès
Jared Mobarak @ Jared Mobarak Reviews
- Excerpt: The result’s an intimate self-portrait wherein subject/director even forgot she was being filmed—a brief outtake where she’s cleaning her mouth with a napkin soaked in coffee is wonderfully left in. The brooms have mounted yet 2008’s Agnès Varda on celluloid has the same smile and vitality as the young girl in photographs from the War.
Dressed to Kill
James Jay Edwards @ FilmFracture
- Excerpt: Cinema Fearité Presents ‘Dressed to Kill’ – An Impressive And Unashamed Hitchcock Rip-Off That Still Retains Its Own Identity
Escape to Witch Mountain
Kristen Lopez @ Journeys in Classic Film
Genocide
Jamie S. Rich @ Criterion Confessions
The Joker is Wild
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Lilting
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
The Serpent and the Rainbow
Roderick Heath @ Ferdy on Films
- Excerpt: One of Wes Craven’s strangest, most defiantly individual films, as well as one of his best – ridiculous, weird, and riotously entertaining.
