2012
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Southern Comfort’
★★★☆☆ Walter Hill once said: “Every film I’ve done has been a western”, alluding to the assimilation of a moral (and, at times, very immoral) universe fabricated by the genre. The maverick director had a natural panache to strip contemporary stories down to their bare virginal bones; usually concentrated on real men with very real…
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DVD Review: ‘The Jia Zhang-Ke Collection’
★★★★☆ Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke may already be well-known to cineliterate Western audiences for his 2006 film Still Life or, perhaps from his effort two years later, 24 City (2008). A pivotal part of the ‘Sixth Generation’ of Chinese filmmakers, Zhang-Ke’s confrontational films present a more gritty and realistic portrait of his home country than the…
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DVD Review: ‘The Czechoslovak New Wave’
★★★★☆ Many a film fan may have gone through life thus far without lavishing an abundance of attention on the cinema of Czechoslovakia – or even, for that matter, being aware of the Czech New Wave. This movement saw films of previously unseen quality coming from the country in the 1960s, including highly regarded work…
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DVD Review: ‘Ted’
★★★★☆ Making the effort to think of something that Seth MacFarlane (the much-loved creator of hit American adult animations Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show) and his brand of outlandish animated comedy is yet to poke fun at is like trying to trawl through episodes of Family Guy to find one where Peter…
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DVD Review: ‘Trouble in Paradise’
★★★★☆ Widely considered as one of the most sophisticated comedies ever produced, Trouble in Paradise (1932) fizzes like a glass of vintage champagne – frothy and light, yet with a tangy aftertaste which lingers long after the last drop is finished. Featuring Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis, two incomparable stars from the Golden Age of…
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DVD Review: ‘Hit So Hard’
★★★☆☆ One of the most influential acts of the grunge era, second perhaps only to Kurt Cobain and his mighty Nirvana in terms of their capacity to eat up column inches, Hole were a true product of their time – a pro-feminist, angsty collective that gave rise to the über ego that is Courtney Love.…
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DVD Review: ‘In Your Hands’
★★☆☆☆ Over the past decade or so, multilingual stage and screen star Kristin Scott Thomas has carved a palatable little niche for herself; appearing in intense French dramas such as 2008’s I’ve Loved You So Long. This has seen the actress, who has been a resident in Paris since her teens, acquiring the kind of…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Passion of Joan of Arc’
★★★★★ Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) receives a welcome Dual Format rerelease this week, bundled with two very distinct versions of the film. The first, a painstaking 20FPS restoration featuring a delicate piano score from Japanese composer Mie Yanashita, is widely regarded as the purist’s choice, so faithful is this…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Floating Weeds’
★★★★☆ Yasujirō Ozu’s Floating Weeds (1959), a remake of the director’s 1935 silent short A Story of Floating Weeds, was given a magnificent colour reworking (emphasised with this meticulous Blu-ray transfer) and allowed to flourish with its new extended 119-minute runtime. Whilst never heralded as one of Ozu’s strongest features (he did make 54 films…
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DVD Review: ‘Air Doll’
★★★☆☆ From Hirokazu Kore-eda, the acclaimed director of world cinema oddities After Life (1998) and Still Walking (2008), comes Air Doll – finally released in the UK on DVD after appearing at the BFI London Film Festival back in 2009. Traversing the smut and juvenile humour evoked by its peculiar premise of a life-sized sex…