Cinema

Blu-ray potpourri for the holidays

December 21st, 2016

Although the commercial celebration began the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve is this Saturday night (coincidentally this year, also the first night of Hanukkah). The holiday season of a week or so features religious observances, sharing of traditional activities, memories, food, and fun. It is also typically a vacation time for relaxing with family and friends, often watching movies together.

The various cable TV channels are rife with repeated showings of favorite Christmas…

Being Darth Vader: “I Am Your Father” peers behind Prowse’s mask

December 14th, 2016

With the October 2016 announcement that he would no longer attend international shows to meet fans and sign autographs in person, David Prowse closed a chapter of his life that some “Star Wars” aficionados had anticipated since a 2009 cancer diagnosis and a controversial 2014 claim that the Darth Vader portrayer had been suffering from dementia.

Prowse, whose sour grapes and willingness to communicate with the press have run afoul of Lucasfilm gatekeepers on multiple occasions over…

Spanish director’s black comedy masterpiece

December 14th, 2016

Most fans of international cinema are probably familiar with the names of Luis Buñuel, Pedro Almodóvar, and Alejandro Amenábar. Other important Spanish directors such as Luis García Berlanga, however, are little-known outside of Spain, even though Berlanga’s “Plácido” (1961) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

The film that Spanish filmmakers, critics, and Berlanga himself consider his masterpiece, “El Verdugo” (“The Executioner”) (1963), recently…

Comedy legends with limited Blu-ray exposure

December 7th, 2016

Three Stooges fans probably already know that all 190 of their Columbia shorts are on DVD in a multi-disc collection and in eight individual volumes. Although remastered in HD, sadly none are yet on Blu-ray. That will change next month when the two 1953 shorts they filmed in 3-D will be bonuses on the 3-D restoration of Vincent Price’s “The Mad Magician” (1954), coming to 3-D Blu-ray from Twilight Time.

Meanwhile, last year Mill Creek Entertainment released two triple-feature…

Big Sky stories: Reichardt’s “Certain Women”

December 7th, 2016

Master filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” based on stories by Maile Meloy, shares the quiet fortunes and misfortunes of three protagonists and the friends, family, and strangers in orbit around them.

Set in Montana, the film moves at the director’s deliberately measured pace, a technique that suits Reichardt’s alliance with the western, the genre that perhaps best describes her body of work.

As taciturn, secretive, and enigmatic as her best films, “Certain Women”…

An actor’s struggle and a woman’s sacrifice

November 30th, 2016

“The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum” (1939) is an ambitious and idiosyncratic work by master filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956), based on a stage play adaptation of a novel about Japan’s stylized kabuki theatre. This September the Criterion Collection released to Blu-ray the Shochiku Studios’ new 4k digital restoration of the film.

Mizoguchi was one of Japan’s major directors, making about 75 films from 1923 until his death, but little of his earlier career survives, and he…

Jenkins Makes Magic in the “Moonlight”

November 30th, 2016

Admirers of Barry Jenkins’ excellent 2008 feature “Medicine for Melancholy” waited years for the filmmaker’s next project. “Moonlight,” one of 2016’s finest films, was worth that lengthy silence. In between the two movies, Jenkins made a handful of shorts and directed an episode of a TV series, but one viewing of “Moonlight” will convince anyone who loves the cinema that the prodigiously talented artist should keep telling long-form stories.

Inspired by Tarell Alvin…

Family-friendly Blu-ray Castle movies for the holidays

November 22nd, 2016

A month ago I reviewed a pair of William Castle horror films released on a double-feature Blu-ray this summer by Mill Creek Entertainment. The same day, Mill Creek released another Castle double-bill with titles that sound like horror films but are really something else, especially the second.

Castle aimed his memorable thrillers “Homicidal” and “Mr. Sardonicus” (both 1961) mainly at teen and adult audiences. Both were serious horror films played straight, except for Castle’s…

Talking in Circles: Villeneuve’s Close Encounter “Arrival”

November 22nd, 2016

Following Oscar-nominated breakthrough “Incendies,” filmmaker Denis Villeneuve put together a hat trick of beautifully shot features, stylish enough to straddle the line between auteurist individuality/prestige and studio-massaged commercial aspirations.

“Prisoners,” “Enemy,” and “Sicario” are now joined by “Arrival,” a cerebral, or ersatz cerebral – depending on your tolerance for beautiful people expressing deep thoughts – science fiction drama in the thematic…

Noirs pushing mid-century sexual taboos

November 16th, 2016

The subgenre of crime thrillers known as “film noir” was at its height during the 1940s and 1950s. It is noted for cynical anti-heroic characters, a pervasive sense of inexorable fate, usually leading to the doom of one or more characters, and moody low-key cinematography featuring plenty of shadows with expressionistic lighting and camera angles.

Often there is a strong female character, frequently an aggressive “femme fatale,” and as often as not a seething sexual subtext that…