Highly Recommended Death Hunt (1981) was the last “serious” film of star Charles Bronson. The reliable supporting actor-turned-Euro-star found mainstream success in the U.S. with Death Wish (1974), then for the next several years mostly appeared in genre action-thrillers similar to those of box office rival Clint Eastwood
Rent It Perhaps spurred on by the success of the hit Discovery Channel program “Deadliest Catch” (which makes an “appearance” here), Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel climbed on board a New England fishing boat to film Leviathan , a nearly wordless 90-minute documentary. Captured on GoPro cameras mounted on sticks, the movie has no traditional narrative, no interviews, no obvious …
Recommended The Movie: Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1961, La Notte follows a wealthy married couple, wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) and her husband, an author named Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni), as they travel around their home city of Milan.
Highly Recommended Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) was more or less my first exposure to Japanese animation. A friend of mine, who had spent several years of his childhood in Japan, owned both domestic VHS versions of the film in the early 1990s: one was subtitled, the other was dubbed in English. Not surprisingly, the film’s mature subject matter, intense atmosphere and jaw-dropping visuals …
Rent It The Movie: Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson have done various things since they struck comedic and cinematic gold when they co-starred in the 2005 smash hit Wedding Crashers .
Skip It Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials and other sources, not the Blu-ray edition under review.
Highly Recommended First released in Great Britain as Expos and in the United States as Trauma , the now-titled House on Straw Hill (1976) is an extremely minor, muddled erotic thriller with slight horror movie elements, and notable only as the lone British film on the original list of “Video Nasties” compiled by the Department of Public Prosecution. Severin Films’ new Blu-ray presents it …
Rent It THE FILM: Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution. British import I Give It a Year is part successful bawdy comedy and part tiresome romantic melodrama. Rose Byrne makes anything better, but so much of Director Dan Mazer’s film rests on its unimpressive romantic-comedy foundation that the final result crumbles into a bore
Recommended THE FILM Please Note: The images used here are from promotional material provided by The Cohen Media Group and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. I’m prepared to accept that smart, crowd-pleasing French filmmaker Fran ois Ozon ( 8 Women , Swimming Pool ), whose work I’ve often enjoyed and appreciated, is middlebrow, a skilled and intelligent writer/director whose …
We pick four movies that spelt rain differently and succeeded in doing so. Continue reading …