Perhaps Criterion has been paying attention to my Best Movies posts. Next week sees the release of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita on Blu-ray, which was the first installment in my Best Movies feature and a title I'll be reviewing later this week, and now my third installment, Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom will be arriving on January 6 with a new high-definition digital restoration. Unfortunately the Sword of Doom release won't come with any new features, though the film, Hiroshi Murai's cinematography, Masaru Sato's score and an audio commentary from Stephen Prince will do for me as that is a title that simply must be part of my collection. Also coming in January is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant on January 13, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg on January 20, Preston Sturges's 1942 comedy The Palm Beach Story starring Claudette Colbert...
- 10/15/2014
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
Chicago – The remarkable photography in Francesco Rosi’s 1965 bullfighting drama is, alas, its sole redeeming feature. Nearly everything that unfolds in front of Rosi’s lens is flat-out appalling and borderline unwatchable. Critics have hailed the picture for its artful depiction of the action, but all I see is vicious animal cruelty cloaked in crowd-pleasing machismo.
Rosi is, of course, a celebrated Italian filmmaker who’s no stranger to controversy, and his gambles have often paid off tremendously in films such as 1962’s “Salvatore Giuliano” and 1972’s Palme d’Or-winner, “The Mattei Affair.” I don’t believe Rosi was attempting to glorify bullfighting in “Truth,” but aside from its appropriately cautionary finale, the film devolves into a repellent series of ritual slaughters that are as numbing as they are repellant.
Blu-ray Rating: 2.0/5.0
The instantly familiar story centers on a bored farm boy (played by Miguel Romero ‘Miguelín’) with aspirations to...
Rosi is, of course, a celebrated Italian filmmaker who’s no stranger to controversy, and his gambles have often paid off tremendously in films such as 1962’s “Salvatore Giuliano” and 1972’s Palme d’Or-winner, “The Mattei Affair.” I don’t believe Rosi was attempting to glorify bullfighting in “Truth,” but aside from its appropriately cautionary finale, the film devolves into a repellent series of ritual slaughters that are as numbing as they are repellant.
Blu-ray Rating: 2.0/5.0
The instantly familiar story centers on a bored farm boy (played by Miguel Romero ‘Miguelín’) with aspirations to...
- 2/8/2012
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
As a Hollywood ad man from the early 60s through the early 90s, Merv Bloch developed campaigns for dozens and dozens of major motion pictures (here's the tip of the iceberg), and he's got stories to tell, names to drop and photos to point to when Steve Macfarlane drops by his Upper West Side office for an interview for the L. "Bloch grew up in Manhattan; as a high school student, he caught word that a movie was being shot in his apartment building. He perched himself in a corner and, for hours, watched a scene reworked ad nauseum by a lanky, nasal-voiced director in his early 20s: it was Stanley Kubrick, shooting Killer's Kiss." The fun begins. Bloch produced but one feature, Nelson Lyon's The Telephone Book (1971), which he described in 2009 as "a dark comedy about a girl who falls in love with the world's greatest obscene phone call.
- 1/25/2012
- MUBI
Time is an annoying thing, it ticks away, aging us all and leaving behind things we meant to do, but never got around to. This is a statement that can be related to just about anything in our short lives, but in this case it happens to be my opening for a large batch of Criterion Collection Blu-rays I, shamefully, never got around to fully reviewing after mentioning them in my weekly DVD and Blu-ray columns. For some of you that is enough, for others you would like more, this is my attempt to clean off the shelves and start anew.
Let's get started...
Diabolique
Thanks to my trip to the Cannes Film Festival I got so backed up with my Criterion reviews I was never able to recover, so I'm heading as far back as May 17, when Criterion issued brand new DVD and Blu-ray editions of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique,...
Let's get started...
Diabolique
Thanks to my trip to the Cannes Film Festival I got so backed up with my Criterion reviews I was never able to recover, so I'm heading as far back as May 17, when Criterion issued brand new DVD and Blu-ray editions of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique,...
- 8/23/2011
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
Chicago – Criterion Blu-rays are beautiful enough that when one arrives that’s two discs, you know it’s something special. Very few films have warranted a multi-disc treatment from the most important home video company in history but very few films are as influential or as widely-regarded as “The Battle of Algiers,” the latest work given the upgrade from standard Criterion DVD to Blu-ray.
Blu-Ray Rating: 4.5/5.0
Using film as a commentary and critique of what were still-fresh wounds in Europe and North Africa, Gillo Pontecorvo’s film documents the Algerian War of the ’50s and early ’60s. Released in 1966, the stunningly-photographed work focuses on the evolution or a revolution and the colonial powers that stamped it out. The film is widely-regarded as a masterpiece, especially in the U.K. and the rest of Europe. It is an essential landmark in the use of current events for dramatic purpose in film.
Blu-Ray Rating: 4.5/5.0
Using film as a commentary and critique of what were still-fresh wounds in Europe and North Africa, Gillo Pontecorvo’s film documents the Algerian War of the ’50s and early ’60s. Released in 1966, the stunningly-photographed work focuses on the evolution or a revolution and the colonial powers that stamped it out. The film is widely-regarded as a masterpiece, especially in the U.K. and the rest of Europe. It is an essential landmark in the use of current events for dramatic purpose in film.
- 8/16/2011
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
Your Weekly Source for the Newest Releases to Blu-Ray Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
The Battle Of Algiers: The Criterion Collection (1966)
Synopsis: One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafe’s, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today. (criterion.com)
Special Features:
High-definition digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Marcello Gatti (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition). Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth,...
The Battle Of Algiers: The Criterion Collection (1966)
Synopsis: One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafe’s, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today. (criterion.com)
Special Features:
High-definition digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Marcello Gatti (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition). Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth,...
- 8/8/2011
- by Travis Keune
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Hailed as one of the most influential political films ever made, Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1965 war drama The Battle of Algiers gets the Blu-ray treatment from Criterion on Aug. 9.
The two-disc Blu-ray carries the list price of $49.95.
The Battle of Algiers (1965), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
The Battle of Algiers re-creates a key year in the tumultuous French-Algerian War. Wherein Algeria struggled for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style as violence escalates on both sides, the movie clicks as an examination of modern warfare, with its then-radical terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them.
Filled with shocking images of children shoot soldiers at point-blank range and French soldiers torturing captured Algerians to break their will, The Battle of Algiers has a whole lot of relevance in today’s tense world.
This Blu-ray edition features a...
The two-disc Blu-ray carries the list price of $49.95.
The Battle of Algiers (1965), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
The Battle of Algiers re-creates a key year in the tumultuous French-Algerian War. Wherein Algeria struggled for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style as violence escalates on both sides, the movie clicks as an examination of modern warfare, with its then-radical terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them.
Filled with shocking images of children shoot soldiers at point-blank range and French soldiers torturing captured Algerians to break their will, The Battle of Algiers has a whole lot of relevance in today’s tense world.
This Blu-ray edition features a...
- 5/27/2011
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
It’s so strange, writing this so long after the announcement yesterday. In today’s internet world of instant information, and twenty four second news cycles, yesterday’s August 2011 Criterion Collection new releases may as well have happened last week, or last month. I’m sure that the page views for this post will be markedly smaller than the usual, as I have tried consistently to have the new release post up within minutes of the pages going live on Criterion’s website. I know this all sounds like inside baseball stuff, but it’s on my mind, and darn it, this is my website.
I had a whole, several paragraph long, write up of the August titles, but since I’m finding myself writing this at 10pm on Tuesday evening, I think it’s better if I just scrap that whole thing and start over. I was going on...
I had a whole, several paragraph long, write up of the August titles, but since I’m finding myself writing this at 10pm on Tuesday evening, I think it’s better if I just scrap that whole thing and start over. I was going on...
- 5/18/2011
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
Boxcar Theatre announces the final performance venues for their upcoming production of Euripides? Ion. Performed as part of Boxcar Theatre?s Free Theatre Initiative, all nine performances are free of charge to all audiences. Featuring three Boxcar company members, Peter Matthews (also one of the Artistic Directors of Boxcar), Stephanie Maysonave, and Sarah Savage, Ion pushes all three actors to test their limits as they all share all seven characters.
- 5/4/2009
- BroadwayWorld.com
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