Search results for: “label/Christopher Machell”
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Film Review: Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac
★★★★☆ The murder of Tupac Shakur in 1996, and the subsequent killing of Biggie Smalls the following year, are so important to the history of hip hop – the former inspiring a thousand conspiracy theories – that it is fair to describe them as mythic. Returning to the scene of his 2002 documentary, Biggie &…
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DVD Round-up: Sep-Oct 2019 edition
As the nights have drawn in over the last couple of months, the crop of home video release have been especially abundant. Criterion’s release of The Naked Kiss on 2nd September was the first of a number of Samuel Fuller titles – a suburban noir baked in sexual hypocrisy, misogyny and violence. Meanwhile, Eureka’s set,…
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DVD Review: Laura
★★★★★ Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is investigating the murder of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), who was found in her own apartment, apparently killed with a shotgun. Otto Preminger’s 1944 noir is a classic mystery, one where everyone and no one is a suspect and love and desire are corrupt, base urges that lead to nasty…
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DVD Round-up: Feb 2019 edition
While the debate over streaming versus cinema rages among the Hollywood elite, many are raising their concerns that physical home media is in decline, meaning that many older films will become increasingly hard to access. From this February on, we’ll be championing DVDs and Blu-rays with a monthly round-up of some of the best releases.…
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DVD Round-up: May 2019 edition
Another monster month for May, with Criterion and Eureka dominating again with a surfeit of releases. Nevertheless, cult label Arrow impressed with their release of the intense Japanese high school indie Blue Spring, while Bluebell offered a bare-bones but welcome edition of classic sex comedy La Ronde. A Face in the Crowd – 6 May (Criterion) Kicking…
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DVD Round-up: Jun-Jul 2019 edition
Across June and July, there has been an enormous volume of home releases, all worthy of mention. Due to the high volume of releases, a selection has been reviewed below, while the rest are summarised here. Criterion continues in its mission of delivering high quality, boutique packages for prestige cinema. In time for the 50th…
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Criterion Review: The Music Room
★★★★★ Indian master Satyajit Ray once said that music was more important to him than his beloved cinema. In the director’s The Music Room, re-released under the UK’s Criterion Collection label this week, his passion for the former and mastery of the latter is clear. Based on a Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay short, The Music Room depicts…
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DVD Review: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
★★★★★ Robert Wiene’s expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the most important films of the post-First World War era and has lost none of its strange and unsettling power in the near century since its 1920 release. Most noted for its abstract, angular set designs influenced by German expressionism, Caligari is…
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DVD Review: Microwave Massacre
★☆☆☆☆ Boutique home entertainment label Arrow Video has made a name for itself as a purveyor of premium cult schlock, specialising in the rediscovery and restoration of semi-forgotten video nasties and trans-Atlantic exploitation cinema of the 1970s and 80s. The films in Arrow’s collection may be cheap, nasty and even offensive, but they are nevertheless…
