DVD & Blu-ray
These are our most recent DVD and Blu-ray reviews. Skip to the bottom of any review ("How to Use This DVD") for advice on which extra features are worth watching and which ones are a waste of your time.
“There’s strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold...”
— Robert Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee
How many times have you wondered to yourself, “Can Brazil make a good scary werewolf movie?” I can now tell you that the answer is “Yes!” and that movie is Good Manners. It’s a solid horror film and a lot more bedsides.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed
****
This set is a must-have on the shelf of any student of animation art.
Somewhere within the Big Diagram of Film History there is a line drawn from Windsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), that rises up through Disney’s Fantasia (1940), and arrives at today’s Bowjack Horseman. Peppered below Gertie are a variety of random cases of proto-animation all starred with asterisks (*close but no movie cigar). Gertie marks the point at which the figure on the screen not only moves but tells a story. In Fantasia’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence , the tour de force of the animation art itself is the star of the show. Bowjack gets a nod from me because it’s the most engaging animation I’ve seen currently, dumbing down the graphic art in the modern manner but going beyond the Simpsons in its writing. So, in a way, Bowjack is the culmination of animation art... or sure sign of its demise, your choice.
Strange Victory
***1948
Would have been positively radioactive had you tried to show it in the 1950s
There are many strange things about director Leo Hurwitz’s Strange Victory, perhaps the strangest, given the film’s politics, is the time and place in which it was made: 1948/USA. Stranger still is that Strange Victory survived the 1950s Extinction Event of the American Left. Now, 70 years later, it is being reissued on DVD and Blu-ray by Milestone Films. Perhaps with the resurgence of a new American Left, Strange Victory will finally find a home.
The Dumb Girl of Portici
1916, Lois Weber
Lois Weber finally starts getting credit among film historians
A funny thing happened on my way to the review of The Dumb Girl of Portici. I stumbled upon its director, Lois Weber.
Viva la Liberta
****2013, Roberto Ando
Here on Earth 2.0, on the other side of the Looking Glass, anything is possible.
What a difference a day makes. The day I have in mind is Election Day, November 8, 2016 when we all passed through the Looking Glass. Off in a quiet corner of the filmmaking art, a clever Italian movie from 2013 was also turned on its head. (Well, of course what wasn’t?) In this case though, its almost as if Viva la Liberta was made into a new film. Let me explain.
Stray Dog
***2014
Granik walks the razor-thin line between exploitation and revelation in Stray Dog.
“My mind’s got a mind of its own!”, sang Jimmie Dale Gilmore, “It takes me out walkin’ when I should have stayed at home.” Ronnie “Stray Dog” Hall’s mind has taken him out walking his whole life. It took him to the Army, to Korea, to Viet Nam, afterwards to a veteran’s hell. When we meet him he is an aging rebel biker trying to rehab his life. Ever the rebel, Ronnie Hall’s mind is now rebelling its way back to Earth.
Colorado Springs once had an opera house. For any up-and-coming Western American town, having your own opera house meant you had left the sketchy existence of a frontier settlement and become a real place on the map. The Springs had to wait until 1911 before its opera house, the Burns Theater, was built whereas the mining towns of Central City and Leadville had built their opera houses decades earlier... well, better late than never.
The Magic Box: Project Shirley Volume 4: The Films Of Shirley Clarke 1929-1989
2016, Shirley Clarke
Like finding a twenty-dollar bill at the back of a drawer
Anyone who’s ever moved their household knows there comes a time in the move when the big stuff is gone, the good stuff is packed and what’s left are the odds and ends of life lived in one place. It’s that catch-all drawer with all the strange stuff that is an archeological history of what you’ve been up to. Milestone’s Volume 4 of their tireless Project Shirley is that catch-all drawer at the end of the move. It is filled with material that will bore the unimaginative and fascinate the students of Shirley Clarke. In short, yes, there are home movies.
Suicide Squad bombs out.
Suicide Squad had a chance to set a corrective course for DC’s burdensome, heavy-handed approach to creating a movie universe along the lines of Marvel.
If you want to spend a couple of hours watching Matt Damon play a character who’s running for his life, Jason Bourne — the latest in the series about an amnesiac spy — might be the movie for you.
Jason Bourne
**2016, Paul Greengrass
Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass miss an opportunity to do something new with Jason Bourne.
After a 9-year hiatus, Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass miss an opportunity to do something new with Jason Bourne.
Like its eponymous subject, Sully is pretty low-key and soft-spoken. That’s not entirely complimentary, given the life-altering drama that thrust Capt. Chesley “Sully” Â Sullenberger into the headlines.
This modern take on the classic Western could use a little more soul, but it serves up almost everything else in heaping helpings.