DVD Talk DVD Reviews https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/list/DVD Video DVD Talk DVD Review RSS Feed en-us Fantomas 1960s Collection (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73867 Mon, 17 Jun 2019 17:01:25 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

Directed by André Hunebelle and released between 1964 and 1967, the three films in the Fantômas Three Film Collection update, by the standards of their day at least, the characters created by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre that were originally brought to the silver screen with the 1913 film by Louis Feuillade.

Fantômas:

The first film in the run, made in 1964, introduces us to Fantômas (Jean Marais). He's essentially a supervillain and very much a master of disguise and has the uncanny ability to accurately impersonate anyone he wants to. He uses this ability and his skills at making masks to keep his actual appearance a secret from the authorities, which obviously makes it easier for him to go about pulling off his various schemes and crimes.

When a reporter named Fandor (Marais again) prints a phony interview with Fantômas, the villa...Read the entire review

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Maximillian & Marie De Bourgogne (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73086 Tue, 12 Jun 2018 22:26:03 UTC Highly Recommended



Director: Andreas Prochaska
Starring: Jannis Niewohner, Christa Theret
Year: 2016

Like Rome or The Tudors before it, Maximilian attempts to bring history in bite-sized chunks to audiences who have become used to series television, especially the more racy kind that can be found on HBO and Showtime. This is what we want now; short-run shows that push the boundaries, tell us sordid tales, and leave us wanting more. Sometimes it turns into Emmy-caliber entertainment, sometimes we're happy just watching a handful of episodes and then forgetting all about it, but American audiences in particular have shown a specific interest in binge watching; if we can swallow down a bit of education in the mix, all the bett...Read the entire review

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Faust (2011) DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/64425 Fri, 01 Aug 2014 12:59:52 UTC Rent It

THE MOVIE:

Revered Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov has been known to undertake the lives of iconic, difficult, and often evil men in his films. Earlier efforts include portraits of Hitler, Lenin, and Hirohito, for instance. For his 2011 motion picture, he takes on the legend of Faust, working the classic Goethe stageplay into an experimental, neo-psychedelic movie. It's intended to be the end of that particular cycle, going from those real-world leaders to a fictional character who likewise met his doom by being less concerned with "shoulda" than "coulda."

This Faust stars Johannes Zeiler as the titular doctor, a man who has re...Read the entire review

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Afternoon of a Faun DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/65056 Sun, 13 Jul 2014 01:43:48 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

History is filled with countless fictional stories delving into the tragic reversal of fortune - the painter who went blind, the musician who lost his hearing, the athlete who suffered a crippling blow. But what of the actual people who inspired the stories? The 2013 documentary Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq sheds some light on a real-world example from the realm of 20th century dance. It tells the story of Tanaquil "Tanny" Le Clercq, an expressive ballerina who had her career cruelly cut short by contracting polio.

Tanny Le Clercq was apparently a legend in her brief time as a dancer; this episode of the PBS series American Masters combines the reminiscences of friends with copious amounts of archival performances to expl...Read the entire review

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Tabu (2012) DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/64072 Wed, 12 Mar 2014 12:23:01 UTC Rent It

The Film:


Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes casts an esoteric spell with his third feature-length film, Tabu, a tale of guilt, forbidden love, and mythical crocodiles set through the sweltering African landscape, with a mystery embedded within about the woman whose experiences prove to be the code to comprehending events in the past and present. Obstinate lyricism and an inclination towards silent-era homage styling somewhat in the vein of Chris Marker and Guy Maddin lend the film a strange, resonant core, hallmarked by rich motifs distilled from misc...Read the entire review

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In Another Country DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/61273 Sun, 07 Jul 2013 13:18:30 UTC Highly Recommended

THE MOVIE:

Following on the heels of the mesmerizing, elliptical The Day He Arrives, South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo returns with his own unique take on cinematic romance. Like his previous film, In Another Country relies on a little storytelling trickery, using repetition and revision to come at the same set-up from a variety of different angles.

In Another Country begins in a seaside town where a young girl (Jeong Yu-mi) and her mother (Yoon Yeo-jeong, The Housemaid) are holing up waiting to see how a family crisis turns out. Bored with the situation, the girl takes pen to paper, abandoning her diary to write a fictional script about a female film direct...Read the entire review

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Meet the Fokkens DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/60129 Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:48:06 UTC Rent It

In 10 Words or Less
Sex and the Double Senior Citizens

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Adult-themed documentaries
Likes: Quirky subjects
Dislikes: Miserable old people
Hates: Old sex workers

The Movie
You know that weird thing where two movies about the same subjects are developed and released around the same time, like Antz and A Bug's Life or No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits? Well, I got to experience a similar phenomenon, reviewing two documentaries with similar themes close together. After taking a look at the senior-citizen stripper at the heart of Satan's Angel: Queen of the Fire Tassels, this time I've got two of the oldest women working in the world's oldest p...Read the entire review

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In Another Country DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/60261 Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:46:41 UTC Highly Recommended

THE FILM

Much like the foreigner-in-Korea character(s) played by French screen legend Isabelle Huppert in In Another Country -- Korean director Hong Sang-soo's (Night and Day) latest deceptively easygoing stroke of genius -- we have no idea what adventures and twisty-turny, unpredictably forking and interconnecting paths await us during our stay in Hong's movie wonderland. As with many of Hong's works, the film is at first glance quite pleasantly modest and compact, a delicate contrapuntal piano piece, pretty with a melancholy undertow, by scorer Jeong Yong-jin accompanying the colorful, childlike scrawl of the credits; ther...Read the entire review

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Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/60727 Sun, 14 Apr 2013 13:13:34 UTC Highly Recommended

THE FILM

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is technically a documentary by Sophie Fiennes about an especially bold and rich period in the career of German-born painter/sculptor/all-around celebrated artist Anselm Kiefer. But, even more so than Corinna Belz's similarly-minded artist doc Gerhard Richter Painting, the aim of Fiennes's film is much less informational than experiential, with Kiefer's biography, wider body of work, and the huge amount of criticism/appreciation/interpretation that's built up around it over the decades all kept at a radical (but, at least according to Fiennes's sensibility, necessa...Read the entire review

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Post Mortem DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56185 Fri, 04 Jan 2013 21:35:58 UTC Highly Recommended

THE MOVIE:

Set in Chile in the early 1970s, during a time of political upheaval, Post Mortem is a small story playing out against a larger backdrop. It's the tale of one man's personal struggles, his heroic impulses and his selfish humiliations, told as a series of lingering moments, largely unexplained, sometimes tricky to decipher. If you're not careful, the narrative structure will throw you. Writer/director Pablo Larraín (No) has tucked his ending into the early scenes with not much of a tip-off to what is happening. Time rolls backward imperceptibly, causing us to wonder if and how what we saw really happens.

Alfredo Castro, who also starred in Larraín's acclaimed Tony M...Read the entire review

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The Well-Digger's Daughter (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/58152 Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:21:10 UTC Highly Recommended

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

Respected French actor Daniel Auteuil (Caché) steps behind the camera for the first time to direct a remake of Marcel Pagnol's 1940 film The Well-Digger's Daughter. The filmmaker pulls double-duty here, also playing Pascal Amoretti, the widower father of six daughters. He lives in the French countryside, in the village of Salon, and as the title would suggest, makes his living digging wells. At the start of the picture, his eldest daughter, Patricia (Astrid Bergè-Frisbey, Read the entire review

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Khodorkovsky DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/59088 Tue, 18 Dec 2012 03:03:03 UTC Recommended

THE FILM:

The Russian oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once named "the richest man under 40 in the world," but as of 2012, his fate seems rather out of time for what we think of as modern, post-Soviet Russia: he resides in solitary confinement in Siberia after being convicted on convoluted charges of massive theft and corruption (with an ongoing, government-propagated smear about him allegedly putting out hits on some public figures who stood in his way). Many Russians despise him as exemplary of the robber-baron class that exploited the abrupt (if not hasty) switch from Iron-Curtain communism to global-village capitalism; these opportunists swooped in with great greed and speed just as soon as they could, snatching up Russia's now-privatized assets whil...Read the entire review

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Khodorkovsky DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57967 Tue, 06 Nov 2012 21:14:24 UTC Rent It

Less than a decade ago, Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was credited as the world's richest man under the age of 40. As head of the massive Siberian oil company Yukos, the billionaire was arrested in 2003 for tax evasion and sentenced to eight years in a Siberian prison. In 2010, Khodorkovsky was tried again for money laundering and oil theft, after which he was sentenced to another six years in a labor camp. Popular opinion paints his imprisonment as politically motivated, since Khodorkovsky's ideals stood in contrast to then-president (and current Prime Minister...Read the entire review

]]> Black Sunday: Remastered Edition (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/58456 Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:54:10 UTC Highly Recommended

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the standard edition DVD issued by Kino and not the Blu-ray edition under review.

This is my first exposure to the work of Mario Bava, but based on Black Sunday, I need to start seeking out his other films right quick. The Italian horror master's 1960 debut is stylish and spooky, a little bit sexy and a little bit scary, the right combination for a ghouls and witches story.

Black Sunday opens in the late 17th Century, as the Vajda family burns one of their own, alongside her lover, for being a minion of Satan. It's a gruesome death. A metal demon's mask is nailed to their faces before they are burned, so that anyone who looks upon their corpses will know why ...Read the entire review

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Lisa and the Devil / The House of Exorcism: Remastered Edition DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57548 Mon, 15 Oct 2012 19:29:43 UTC Highly Recommended

Twice the fun for the price of one. Kino Classics has released Lisa and the Devil and The House of Exorcism, the one-two punch from famed Italian horror director Mario Bava (and Alfredo Leone), starring Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer, Alida Valli, Eduardo Fajardo, Alessio Orano, Sylva Koscina, and Robert Alda. Originally shot in 1972, Lisa and the Devil's lyrical approach to operatic horror found no takers for international distribution in 1973, so a year later, Bava and producer Leone filmed a completely new subplot involving demonic possession (of course Leone wasn't ripping off The Exorcist...), cut out about twenty minutes of footage, and turned the unsaleable Lisa and the Devil into the box-office smash, The House of Exorcism. Kino has included some tasty extras here for these terrific-looking transfers. Let's look briefly at both movies.

Read the entire review

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The Woodmans DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/58442 Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:13:44 UTC Highly Recommended

THE MOVIE:

The question of why an artist is chosen to create and how he or she divines ideas from the ether is one that will never be answered to any real satisfaction. That is the mystery of artistic expression; if we knew how to nail it down, everyone would be artists. Likewise, we aren't really sure why one person might be born with skills that allow him or her to cope in the face of any adversity, and why some find life to be a brittle, fragile, depressing endeavor. Sure, there is the chemistry of the body and other medical explanations, but the ephemeral question remains: why can't I be like you? Why am I automatically sad while you maintain and stay happy?

These are questions that, in some way, drive C. Scott Willis' documentary The Woodmans, whe...Read the entire review

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Headshot DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57550 Tue, 09 Oct 2012 04:07:53 UTC Highly Recommended

THE MOVIE:

Buddhist Neo-noir. Let that phrase roll around on your tongue. There's something a bit incongruous about it. At least, that's how I felt until I watched Headshot, which uses the phrase in its marketing material. After seeing the film by Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, I can't think of a better way of describing the blend of philosophy and nail-biting tension contained within.

The film follows Tul (Nopachai Chaiyanam) across fragmented timelines. He used to be a passionate cop until he crossed paths with a drug lord who had political ties. When Tul wouldn't accept a bribe, he was framed for a murder he didn't commit (and that may not have been a murder after all). After being tossed into the gears of the very penal system he had sworn to protect, his idealism slowly faded away. Now, he is employed as an assassin for a shadowy group that is working outside the l...Read the entire review

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Black Sunday: Remastered Edition DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57549 Thu, 04 Oct 2012 20:08:59 UTC Highly Recommended

THE MOVIE:

This is my first exposure to the work of Mario Bava, but based on Black Sunday, I need to start seeking out his other films right quick. The Italian horror master's 1960 debut is stylish and spooky, a little bit sexy and a little bit scary, the right combination for a ghouls and witches story.

Black Sunday opens in the late 17th Century, as the Vajda family burns one of their own, alongside her lover, for being a minion of Satan. It's a gruesome death. A metal demon's mask is nailed to their faces before they are burned, so that anyone who looks upon their corpses will know why they have died. Unsurprisingly, the devilish lovers drop a devilish curse on the Vajda family for this indignity. No matter how long it takes, Princess Asa Vajd...Read the entire review

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Black Sunday (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56676 Fri, 28 Sep 2012 05:08:24 UTC Highly Recommended

The Film:




Billowing torches and fire pits, shadows cast by knotted trees, and an eerie voiceover describing the ritualistic "cleansing" of satanic sympathizers adorn the first minutes of Black Sunday (also known as The Mask of Satan, or La maschera del demonio), the debut feature film from Italian horror icon Mario Bava. Setting the tone for what's to come in an ominous tale of family curses and demonic enchantment, the scenes that follow drip in gothic atmosphere that not only fixates on unsettling images, but also tells a story almost as clearly as the context itself -- as they should, given Bava's experience behind the camera. Not until a statuesque, ghostly figure emerges in the crumbled ruins of a church does this classic tr...Read the entire review

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Headshot (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57428 Wed, 26 Sep 2012 23:38:26 UTC Highly Recommended

US distributors of Headshot have hung the film on a gimmick: a cop takes a bullet in the skull and wakes to find his vision is flipped, and he's forced to adjust to this new spin on life while several groups of people try to take him out. It sounds like the recipe for an off-the-wall action film built around wild, disorienting cinematography, but Headshot is almost the opposite, a contemplative character piece with a heavy film noir flavor. Instead of visual flair, the film offers a heavy dose of Buddhist teachings, broken up by brutal violence and some surprisingly compelling, understated romance.

After an opening showing the incident the film was named for, director/writer Pen-ek Ratanaruang jumps back to show the character of Tul (Nopachai Chaiyanam) as an angry police officer who firmly believes his job is to punish evil people. After a bust gone wrong leaves his partner dead, he roughs up...Read the entire review

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Gerhard Richter Painting (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56784 Fri, 21 Sep 2012 02:08:41 UTC Highly Recommended

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are taken from stills provided by Kino Lorber, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

"Watching paint dry" is the go-to cliché when we're searching for a way to verbally illustrate our boredom with a movie or other experience we find dull, but painting itself makes, oddly enough, a captivating subject for a movie. That's painting, not necessarily painters; as good in their way as Pollock or The Horse's Mouth or Vincent and Theo...Read the entire review

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Lisa and The Devil / The House of Exorcism: Remastered Edition (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56670 Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:42:38 UTC Highly Recommended

The Movie:

In Mario Bava's 1974 film, Lisa And The Devil, the lovely Elke Sommer plays Lisa, a very pretty young woman who decides to vacation in Spain. After running into a truly strange painting of the devil housed in a building her tour group visits, she winds up getting separated from the vacationers she was traveling with and finds herself lost in an old city. As she wanders around the town, strange things start to happen to her and eventually she meets up with the butler of an old Spanish villa (Telly Savalas) who looks suspiciously like the devil she saw earlier in the painting.

A slow and dreamlike film, Lisa And The Devil proves to be a genuinely unsettling film that builds to a truly eerie conclusion. Rich with metaphors and strange imagery, the film toys around with the connections that may or may not exist between the spiritual world and the physical plai...Read the entire review

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Elles (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56669 Mon, 17 Sep 2012 21:20:54 UTC Rent It

The Movie:

Films that tend to include a bit of explicit sexual material while attempting to not be entirely sensationalist are a hit and miss proposition among audiences because they largely include too much of one and not enough of the other. An interesting entry into the foray is Elles, a French film starring an attractive Oscar winning actress.

Said actress is Juliette Binoche (The English Patient), who plays Anne, a wife, mother and journalist for the French version of Elle magazine. Her most recent article focuses generally on French prostitution, but specifically on two young women. Charlotte (Anais Demoustier) is a young middle class girl who lives with her parents and has a boyfriend, though no one appears to know what she is doing. The other girl is Alicja (Joanna Kulig), an immigrant f...Read the entire review

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Post Mortem (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56157 Mon, 10 Sep 2012 04:14:11 UTC Highly Recommended

THE FILM:

The quietude of certain films, their calm contemplation of troubling events, can be extremely disturbing and devastating, even more traumatizing than eye-averting graphic violence. Such is the case with Pablo Larrain's (Tony Manero) 2010 picture Post Mortem, a political allegory set in Santiago, Chile during the horrendous, mass-murdering 1973 military coup that overthrew that country's elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and installed in his place a brutal dictator, the notorious (and, quietly, U.S./CIA-abetted) general Augustin Pinochet. Coolly, stoically eliding the actual Pinochet bloodbath to show us the "normal" lives that went on around it, the p...Read the entire review

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The Fairy DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56061 Fri, 31 Aug 2012 12:11:24 UTC Highly Recommended

THE MOVIE:

Playful. Sweet. Silly. Delightful. These were words I jotted down as I watched The Fairy. I couldn't be bothered with constructing complete sentences because I was too busy smiling from ear to ear for the duration of the film. Filmmakers Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy use a firm foundation of physical and visual comedy to give us a touching tale that speaks to a bygone era while feeling timeless itself.

Dom (Dominique Abel) is going though another day of drudgery, working the night shift at a small French hotel when a woman approaches him with a most intriguing offer. Her name is Fiona (Fiona Gordon) and she claims to be a fairy. As part of her job description she offers him three wishes. He, in utter confusion, offers her a room. And so begins their unusual courtship. One skinny-dipping-and-underwater-dance-sequence (!!!) later, Dom is absolute...Read the entire review

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The Fairy (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57538 Sat, 11 Aug 2012 12:30:22 UTC Highly Recommended

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are promotional stills provided by MK2 and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review.


The Fairy (La Fée) is the third film by a trio of French filmmakers -- Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy -- who are old-fashioned in the best possible sense. The Fairy could accurately be described as a romantic comedy, but as in the films where Chaplin (City Lights), Keaton (Seven Chances), or Jacques Tati (Read the entire review

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The Fairy (La fée) (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/55664 Sat, 28 Jul 2012 14:09:53 UTC DVD Talk Collector Series

If the great Jacques Tati were alive and still making movies, I suspect he'd be directing something awfully close to The Fairy (La fée, 2011), a very funny and clever French-Belgian comedy clearly directly inspired by Tati and other gods of film comedy, but which is also a completely distinctive work with plenty of original sight gags, funny situations, and appealing, contemporary characters. As a great admirer of Tati (I consider Play Time one of the greatest films ever made) this is no small compliment.

Another compliment is that while the film has some French dialogue, it's overwhelmingly visual and so much in the tradition of silent and early talkie comedy that one could easily turn off the English subtitles and still have no trouble following the story. It's a real gem, and one of the best films I've seen this year.

This Kino Lorber release offers a flawless 1920 x 1080...Read the entire review

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The Last of England DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56058 Fri, 27 Jul 2012 17:37:03 UTC Recommended

THE MOVIE:

Derek Jarman was both punk rock auteur and sensitive artist, and his obsession with life's shabby beauty is given an excellent vehicle in his 1987 film, The Last of England.

The Last of England is ostensibly a post-apocalyptic motion picture, a divergent future made possible by Margaret Thatcher's conservative politics and all the misery they entailed. The film is not really science fiction, nor is it in any way conventional in terms of narrative. It's more collage than story, more like a performance piece than genre cinema. Cut to the music of Barry Adamson, Diamanda Galas, Marianne Faithfull, and others, Jarman's film has a lot in common with 1980s music videos--a few of which he was even responsible for. (He directed clips for the ...Read the entire review

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The Last of England (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/55659 Tue, 24 Jul 2012 01:09:35 UTC Highly Recommended

THE FILM:

A band of ski-masked figures holding machine guns puts handsome young men up against a wall for execution; elsewhere, in some sort of hellish, bonfire-lit twilight, some of the same gunmen stand guard over a group of the huddled masses on a grimy pier somewhere along the Thames against a backdrop of an apocalyptically bombed-out-looking London in the distance. A happy, free young woman (Tilda Swinton, whose memorable but very brief appearance it's probably somewhat misleading to call "starring," as this Blu-ray's front cover copy understandably does) remembers flowers and springtime as she prepares for her wedding, then slashes more and more desperately with a knife and even tears with her teeth at a binding gown she can't seem to get out of. A mod...Read the entire review

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The Woodmans DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/55370 Mon, 02 Jul 2012 22:59:06 UTC Highly Recommended

THE FILM:

I had never heard of the photographer Francesca Woodman before watching The Woodmans, director C. Scott Willis's recent film about Woodman's life and that of her artistic family, whose own lives were permanently altered by her suicide at the age of 22. The fact is, the film may not even have existed without the Woodmans' story being marked by that sad, scarring event, and indeed, Francesca's work and her posthumous fame is one of the things about which the film is most incisive, evenhanded, informative, and involving. But that's not nearly the extent of its accomplishment. Willis so clearly and powerfully evokes the complexity of the multiple, enmeshed stories within this unusual (but also, in its dynamics and roles, very recognizable) famil...Read the entire review

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Going Places (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56641 Sat, 16 Jun 2012 20:53:37 UTC Highly Recommended

The Movie:
Seventies French film Les Valseuses a/k/a Going Places is an often disturbing erotic farce. The French title is apparently a vulgar euphemism for testicles, which gives you some idea of the level of discourse that director Bertrand Blier is aiming for, though he pulls off the film with skill and wit.

Jean-Claude (Gerard Depardieu in his first major film role and Pierrot (Patrick Dewaere) are a couple of down at the heels grifters, who roam across France looking for sex and fine food. They have no problem with copping a feel, slapping a woman around, or forcing themselves on her sexually. Neither do they see much of an issue with stealing money or cars, which they do eight or nine times during the film. In fact, it is through stealing a car that they meet the girl who becomes something of an anchor or a muse for them. She's Marie-Ange (Miou-Miou), and they grab her...Read the entire review

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The Search for One-Eye Jimmy DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/53995 Tue, 05 Jun 2012 12:47:10 UTC Rent It

The Film:

Ah, the dreamy 90s, when independent film finally bled into the mainstream and a former porn-theater-usher-slash-video-store-clerk exploded on the scene with a brutal verbose crime film. How we got there has been detailed in all its intricacy by career journalist Peter Biskind in his two must-read books Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures. Would Biskind agree with this writer in condemning Sam Henry Kass' The Search for One-Eye Jimmy as an irritable slice-of-Brooklyn-life ham sandwich that landed an outstanding ensemble cast and proceeded to waste their considerable talents? This is a film that skates bare on charm alone, and frequently even that is not enough.

In resurrecting Kass' debut feature, Kino Lorber smartly chose to highlight the cast, despite the fact that several members appear for, at most, five minutes, if not less. The morsel of...Read the entire review

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Bear Nation DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/55362 Wed, 30 May 2012 20:02:08 UTC Rent It

In 10 Words or Less
A look at what makes a real man's man

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Good documentaries
Likes: Kevin Smith, the bear concept
Dislikes: "Travelogue" documentaries
Hates: Homophobia

The Movie
If I was gay, there's no doubt I would be considered a "bear," Though my predilection for flannel died in the late '90s, I've long maintained the facial hair and bulk that would mark me as part of the LGBT sub-culture dedicated to large, hairy manly men (though admittedly whether I'm a "manly man" is certainly up for debate.) Though it's come to be positioned as something of a fetish, where guys have a taste for a cuddly teddy-bear of a man, the bear scene is far more than an physical thing, as it's wr...Read the entire review

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Littlerock (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/54549 Wed, 16 May 2012 19:47:15 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

Littlerock is the story of Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto) and Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka), siblings from Japan, on their way to San Francisco. Shit happens and they are detoured into one of California's more sleepy towns. The town is Littlerock, which is in the Antelope Valley next to Lancaster. Essentially, they're way off course.

Rintaro and Atsuko have time to kill and join up with some of the local young people to party it up. They spend their time drinking, smoking, and whatnot. Atsuko spends her time turning down the various advances from all the guys in the town. Even language barriers transcend turning down creepers.

Rintaro and Atsuko befriend Cory (or the other way around)(Cory Zacharia), who is one of the local kids that lives in Littlerock. Cory has problems of his own like avoiding certain drug dealing parties that he owes money to. The funny part is that after...Read the entire review

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Modus Operandi DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/53492 Sat, 31 Mar 2012 01:37:52 UTC Recommended

The Movie:
It's difficult to describe a film such as Modus Operandi. It is an independently produced, micro-budgeted mélange of such disparate genres as Blaxploitation, giallo, spy thriller and noir, filmed (almost) entirely in Milwaukee, WI. Writer, director, editor Frankie Latina is either a certified film genius, or suffering under a deep obsession. Either way, we get to enjoy the cinematic confection he's whipped up.

The story (such as it is, and at its best it is tenuous and confusing) concerns ex-CIA super agent Stanley Cashay (Randy Russell). After Cashay's wife is murdered, he retires from the CIA to drown his sorrows in booze. When two briefcases containing sensitive material are stolen from presidential candidate Squire Parks (Michael Sottile), Cashay is pulled out of retirement to retrieve them. Cashay recruits two old friends to help, playboy Casey Thunderbird (Barr...Read the entire review

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