DVD & Blue Ray
Wilmington on DVDs: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
There are three Deborah Kerrs in Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s strange and wonderful British war epic, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and like many young male moviegoers, I fell in love with all of them the first time I saw the movie.
Read the full article » No Comments »Wilmington on DVDs: Starlet; Cloud Atlas
CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: NEW – STARLET (Three Stars) U.S.: Sean Baker, 2013 (Music Box) There’s ’at least one redeeming thing about the movies. Sometimes, they don’t really need hundreds of millions of dollars worth of superstars and special affects and expensive stuff to engage and move us. Sometimes pretty much all they have to…
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Escape, Charles Swann III, Back to 1942, Frankie Go Boom, Face 2 Face, Last Stand, Eagles, Of Two Minds, Bletchley … and so much more.
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Jack Reacher, Upstream Color, Starlet, Oranges, Safe Haven, ID:A, Mama, Rabbi’s Cat, Gatsby, Henry Fonda, Zapata… and so much more.
Read the full article » 1 Comment »Wilmington on DVDs: Strictly Ballroom; Cloak and Dagger; The Guilt Trip; Mama
Strictly Ballroom, Cloak and Dagger, The Guilt Trip and Mama.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Silver Linings Playbook
Silver Linings Playbook is the strange name for what seems a sort of semi-screwball comedy for the new millennium: a smart and amusing movie felicitously co-starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jackie Weaver, Julia Stiles, and Chris Tucker in roles meatier than we expect and played probably as well as they could be, with great big dollops of joyous spontaneity, live-wire energy, bristling wit and just a touch of darkness.
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China Beach, Broken City, Not Fade Away, Happy People, Vampire Lovers, Kluge, Graham Greene…and so much more.
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Gangster Squad, Django, Pawn, In the Blood, Central Park 5, G-Dog, Mr. Selfridge, Cold Prey, Electric Button and even more.
Read the full article » No Comments »Wilmington on DVDs: The Red Menace; Jack Reacher; Gangster Squad
Is The Red Menace really “The Reefer Madness of anti-Communist movies? Or is that flattering it? Too earnest to be funny, too serious to be camp, too boring to be effective propaganda, this Herbert Yates-produced doozy from Republic (for which it stands) is probably one of the worst of the post-war anti-Commie thrillers, entertainment-wise. It isn’t even dumb enough be dumb fun, since writers Albert Demond and Gerald Geraghty know something about their subject. They have dialogue about Hegel, and a Red temptress has a bookcase full of tomes by Marx and Engels.
Read the full article » No Comments »Wilmington on DVDs: My Son John; The Woman on Pier 13 (I Married a Communist); Promised Land.
My Son John; The Woman on Pier 13; Promised Land
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The setting is, once again the industrial, largely working class city of Seraing in Belgium: the Dardenne Brothers’ home city and the location for most of their films since La Promesse.
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Future Weather, Save the Date, Kobayashi, Gate of the Ghost, Ringo, Dragon, One Day on Earth… And more.
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Waltz is a good guy this time, Django’s mentor, but there’s some high-grade screen villainy by Leonardo Di Caprio and Samuel L. Jackson, both of whom would have stolen the movie if Waltz didn’t already have it stuffed in his back pocket.
Read the full article » No Comments »DVD Geek: Red Hook Summer
Once Spike Lee made Malcolm X, he seemed to lose all of his relevance as a filmmaker, thus reinforcing the adage about being careful what you wish for. But he really has only himself to blame. His first films were genuinely edgy, exciting, and revelatory. Other than his documentaries, his later films have all been flailing around in the dark, trying to find any kind of edge at all. His 2012 feature, Red Hook Summer, is heartbreakingly bad, because it almost isn’t.
Read the full article » 2 Comments »Wilmington on DVDs: Ruthless; Despicable Me; Battleship; Lawless
Who is Edgar G. Ulmer and what is he doing in any pantheon, or semi-pantheon of world classical filmmakers? It’s been a classic nagging anti-auteurist question ever since Andrew Sarris introduced him.
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Down the Shore, Into the Cold, Gate of Hell, Phantom Father, Hong Kong Confidential, We Are Egypt, Crush, Sexcula…. More
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PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC The African Queen/ Casablanca (Also Blu-ray) (Four Stars) U.S.: John Huston/ Michael Curtiz (Warner Bros.) Here, of course, are two of Humphrey Bogart’s best—and two of the most wonderful shows that American Movies in their celebrated Golden Age, ever concocted. If you don’t have these pictures in some format, or (worse) if you haven’t even seen them at all,…
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Dolly, Lincoln, Bible, John Dies, Sweeney, LUV, Vietnam, Knuckleball, Untouchables, Phillip Roth… and more.
Read the full article » 1 Comment »Wilmington on DVDs: Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un Ete)
We watch those people from long ago, and the fact that, in the movie images, they’re still young (or still middle-aged) and that they have still (in the film) not yet met the problems and wars and tragedies and reversals that we know are coming, gives them a privileged position, an immortality conferred by hand-held camera. It’s a more casual immortality, not endowed with any of the painstaking ardor and expense routinely spent in preserving a movie superstar for the ages, or even of a cover girl for a shoot at Cannes. These are people talking about how they live and how to change it for the better, as we all did once, as we sometimes do now. Death is temporarily banished.
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Killing Them Softly, Royal Affair, A Man Escaped, Monsieur Verdoux, Parental Guidance, Comedy, Dead In France and more…
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