Search results for: “label/Masters of Cinema”
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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 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: 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 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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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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Blu-ray Review: ‘Pickup on South Street’
★★★★★ In an age where more films are available to us than ever before, the role of the curator is paramount. As the medium of criticism becomes defined by an anxiety born of the continued uncertainty of the uneasy shift to the post-print world, modern critics are finding themselves shackled to the gospel of now.…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Faust’
★★★★★ F.W. Murnau was a director who fused the sweeping atmosphere of silent film, with a visual poetry all of his very own and in doing so crafted some of the most incredible films ever made. Before heading to Hollywood in the late 1920s – where he would make the sensational Sunrise (1927) – his…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘The Naked Island’
★★★★☆ Kaneto Shindô’s Naked Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960) receives the Blu-ray treatment this week thanks to the UK’s foremost purveyors of highly acclaimed filmic artefacts – Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label. Presenting the intolerably difficult life of a peninsula-dwelling family, Naked Island is a cinematic ode to life separated from civilisation and a masterfully…
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DVD Review: ‘Nosferatu’
★★★★★ The jewel in the crown of the BFI’s ongoing Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film season, F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu is restored and rereleased this week thanks to Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label. One of silent cinema’s most widely celebrated offerings, A Symphony of Horror remains an eerily expressionist nightmare of cultural anxiety…
