Recommended The Movie: Make no mistake, Andrew Lau’s The Guillotines is an epic tale of honor, brotherhood, sacrifice and betrayal, set in Qing Dynasty era China. There are enough sword fights, chases through crowded streets and sprawling battles to satisfy any action aficionado. However, it’s also a bit confusing and incoherent, and leans a bit too heavily on bathos.
Skip It THE FILM: I can say with some confidence that this isn’t the worst science fiction film Roger Christian has ever directed. That would be Battlefield Earth , the John Travolta/Scientology in space disaster that won four Golden Raspberry Awards and lost Warner Brothers a ton of money
DVD Talk Collector Series Charulata (1964), previously known as The Lonely Wife , is the protagonist of Indian director Satyajit Ray’s straightforward and exquisitely acted humanist drama about a bored, creatively stifled wife whose carefree cousin-in-law inspires her but also threatens her marriage. Adapted from Rabindranath Tagore’s novella The Empty Nest , it’s a simple humanist drama very …
Recommended THE FILM: Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution. J
Recommended THE FILM Please Note: The images used here are taken from the standard-definition DVD version of Blancanieves also included, not the Blu-ray edition under review. Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is a pastiche of selectively recruited silent-film stylings that, like its inevitable comparison-point The Artist (a film that beat it to the punch even though Berger’s was already well into …
Rent It Oh, Movie! You had me [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] at ” Frankenstein’s Army “.
DVD Talk Collector Series Submarine movies come in all shapes and sizes, from the highs of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and The Enemy Below (1957, really half a submarine movie) to the depths of Hellcats of the Navy (1957, not nearly as bad as its reputation) and the absurdities of Atomic Submarine (1960). But Ren Cl ment’s The Damned (1947) is the most authentic submarine movie I’ve ever …
Highly Recommended It seems a bit odd reviewing a Blu-ray disc that sold out even before this reviewer received his own copy in the mail, but hopefully that’s an indicator of Columbia/Sony need to reissue movies like this on its own, or at least allow current distributor Twilight Time another print run. It’s also a sure sign that Body Double (1984), a Brian De Palma movie raked over the coals by …
Skip It THE FILM: Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution. If you’re going to shoot a “found footage” movie in 2013, you better have a damn good reason for doing so. I’m not against this cinematic trick sparked by The Blair Witch Project in 1999, but I am against lazy, nauseating filmmaking.
Rent It Jean-Francois Laguionie’s The Painting (2011) is an animated oddity. Essentially, this fable aims to remind its audience that appearance shouldn’t matter, especially since we have no choice of lives before we’re created