Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: Please Note: The screengrabs used here are from the standard-definition DVD released in 2002, not from the Blu-Ray. It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic landed in cinemas.
Recommended A Blu-ray release of Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), a biopic of composer/band leader John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), is welcome if somewhat baffling. Though popular when it was new, it would seem an awfully hard sell in 2012 – perhaps distributor Fox is betting consumers will confuse it with Warner Home Video’s The Music Man (1962). Usually deep catalog titles like this are tied to …
Highly Recommended The Movie: One of Jean Rollin’s more interesting films, 1975s Levres De Sang (better known in North America as Lips Of Blood , which is how it was released on DVD a few years back from Image/Redemption and how it’s being re-released again through Redemption and Kino with this Blu-ray debut!) begins with the simple image of a van heading through the night towards an eerie old …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are promotional stills and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. There is a scene in Godard’s turning-point 1965 film Pierrot le fou in which stars Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo perform an impromptu “play” for American tourists in which an event as vast, urgent, and serious as the Vietnam War–including all its …
Highly Recommended THE MINISERIES: Please Note: The screen captures used here are taken from the accompanying DVD version of the miniseries, not the Blu-ray edition under review.
Recommended It never fails – You give a television network pure gold, and they’ll beat it and roll it around in the mud before you ever had a chance to realize what was happening to it. Instead of looking at the quality of any given program, network executives would rather comb feverishly through their charts, graphs and reams of statistical data, and in pondering how much blood they might be …
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Christopher Plummer film Beginners share the top prize for best feature at the Gotham Independent Film Awards.
Skip It THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are promotional stills and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. Considered solely as a career-launching vehicle, one can understand the appeal of Michael Cristofer’s 1998 made-for-HBO movie, Gia , a biopic recounting the tragic life and untimely death of Gia Carangi, America’s first “supermodel,” who died of AIDS in 1986, when …
Skip It The Movie: Hollywood will occasionally tend to have a moment of odd convergence when all of the stars of a particular era will get together for one film that is implausibly premised, but the production serves as more of an excuse for the cast to get together and drink and cavort until the wee hours of the morning.
Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: Please Note: The images used here are promotional stills and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. From Ang Lee’s urbane but serious-minded portrait of the 1970s, The Ice Storm , to Richard Linklater’s openly comic and lovingly mocking take on the same, Dazed & Confused