Category: Criterion Collection reviews
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Blu-ray Review: An All-Time Great Party Scene Graces Criterion’s COLD WATER Blu-ray
“The plot isn’t much and neither are the characterizations, and it’s not until the second act that the film really kicks into gear, by abandoning plot and characterization altogether and jacking straight into adolescent phantasmagoria.”
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Blu-ray Review: King Hu Makes Sword-Sharp Wuxia in DRAGON INN
Made in 1967, Hu’s wuxia thriller hits the Criterion Collection this week at spine #937. The film has been restored in 4K. Colour in the outdoor scenes is stunning: the scorched electric blues of the sky against the mountains, or the loamy greens of forest streams, pop our quartet of martial heroes out of the…
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Blu-ray Review: Time, Memory, and Parents Confound in Victor Erice’s EL SUR
“Voiceover narration from Estrella as an adult — a woman piecing together things she half-understood as a child — gives the film the aura of a Michael Ondaatje novel. Estrella’s father Agustin, played with careworn rebelliousness by Italian actor Omero Antonutti, is almost a wizard character, all dowsing rods and divining pendulums. His behaviour, even…
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Blu-ray Review: A double dose of Cristian Mungiu’s New Romanian Cinema comes to the Criterion Collection
Beautifully photographed in austere but nimble long takes that pierce the daily goings-on of the monastery, Beyond the Hills is something of a revelation to me. It locates its story in a community of women by focusing on the fraught relationship between its lead pair: Voichita, who has fled the implied sexual exploitation and abuse of her…
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Blu-ray Review: THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, Scorsese’s Finest, a Transcendent Piece of Mannered Savagery
The film has remained my favourite of Scorsese’s work since its debut a quarter-century ago, a transcendent piece of mannered savagery whose wars of unspoken words land as brutally as the bullets of Goodfellas and the fists of Raging Bull. Read more: http://screenanarchy.com/2018/03/blu-ray-review-the-age-of-innocence-scorseses-finest.html
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Blu-ray Review: In AN ACTOR’S REVENGE, a Female Impersonator Walks Home Alone At Night
Made right in the middle of the most fertile period in the career of director Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Tokyo Olympiad), An Actor’s Revenge joins the Criterion Collection this week as spine #912. It’s a drab tale of melodrama and revenge set in 19th-century Edo, as an onnagata (a male actor playing exclusively female…
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Blu-ray Review: THE BREAKFAST CLUB, a Criterion Collection Triumph
If STRANGER THINGS 3 doesn’t have a BREAKFAST CLUB episode, I’m out.
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Blu-ray Review: Landmark Lesbian Drama DESERT HEARTS Looks Tremendous and Feels Almost as Good
Donna Deitch’s 1985 film sees two women falling in love against a breathtaking Nevada landscape.
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Blu-ray Review: Musical Man-Eating Mermaids in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s THE LURE
Polish horror-musical repatriates The Little Mermaid by way of feminist carnage.
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Blu-ray Review: Kelly Reichardt’s CERTAIN WOMEN Joins the Criterion Collection
This rewarding trio of stories bring out the best in four great actresses.