Highly Recommended The Movie: Long before Martin Scorsese would become for lack of a better phrase, Martin Scorsese was hungrily trying to get his personal film Mean Streets some big studio support and distribution, particularly in light of friend Francis Ford Coppola’s success with The Godfather . However Scorsese felt that his was a film closer and truer to his experiences growing up. But not …
DVD Talk Collector Series THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are stills provided by Cinema Guild and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. “Even the embers went out.” Anything resembling conventional narrative is dispensed with quickly and tersely, at the very beginning of Hungarian film maestro B la Tarr’s superlative The Turin Horse
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials and the 2009 Criterion DVD edition , not the Blu-ray edition under review.
Highly Recommended THE SHOW: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the series’ promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. The second season of HBO’s New Orleans drama Treme takes the series into a comfortable stride, settling deeper into the characters and the city’s culture and proving that David Simon ( The Wire , Generation Kill ) is one of the more expansive …
Highly Recommended The Movie: A lost Ernst Lubitsch spectacle, one of the last two filmsthat he made in Germany before going to Hollywood, has been found,restored,and released on a lovely Blu-ray disc. The film is Das Weib des Pharao or The Loves of Pharaoh as it’s knownin English, is a large, impressive film filled with thousands of extrasandsome very striking sets (including a Sphinx!), but it …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from the 2006 Criterion DVD edition , not the Blu-ray edition under review. Whit Stillman ( Damsels in Distress ) is a magical filmmaker, and a challenging one, too, though in few of the ways that word might usually apply. He presents viewers (or at least, speaking for myself, a viewer like me) with the challenge of stories …
Recommended The Series: To start – a recap of the series blatantly swiped from the review of the Season One Blu-ray set: Created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, The Big Bang Theory is based around the exploits of two roommates, Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), who share an apartment together and work as physicists at the California Institute of Technology …
Skip It THE FILM: Channing Tatum is in demand these days after stripping for Steven Soderbergh and fighting crime undercover with Jonah Hill. Step Up , released back in 2006, is not up to par with Tatum’s more recent films, and plays like a bland knockoff of the already-middle-of-the-road Save the Last Dance .
Recommended Robert Redford has spent more than 40 years in front of (and behind) the camera, so it’s no surprise that he’s amassed quite a deep filmography.
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from Criterion’s 1999 DVD edition and do not reflect the picture quality of the Blu-ray under review. In the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the world of seemingly everyday, normal, ordinary experience merely represents the precarious waters lying just outside a powerful whirlpool of danger, intrigue, and sobering (or even …