When film buffs talk about early sound horror films, they tend to associate the period with Universal and its justly famous monster movies. Yet at around the same time, Michael Curtiz directed three important horror pictures at Warner Brothers, the first two of which are far more transgressive, disturbing, and graphic than anything to come out of Universal City. Doctor X (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), and The Walking Dead (1936) aren’t as iconic as later Curtiz classics like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Casablanca (1942), and White Christmas (1954), but they’re every bit as atmospheric and […]

When writer, director, and film historian Bertrand Tavernier passed away on March 25, the art of cinema lost one of its most eloquent, passionate, and informed partisans. Thankfully, his last great work, the eight-hour documentary series Journeys Through French Cinema, is newly available on Blu-ray from Cohen Media Group and provides a beautiful summation of Tavernier’s devotion and an enlightening introduction to many of his favorite filmmakers. The documentary is a follow-up to Tavernier’s 2016 theatrical feature My Journey Through French Cinema and essentially picks up where that movie left off, exploring directors, actors, composers, and other artists Tavernier wasn’t […]

The best film by America’s greatest comic filmmaker arrives on Blu-ray this week in the form of Criterion’s release of Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life. Some Brooks partisans might argue on behalf of the more acidic and self-flagellating Modern Romance or the more influential Real Life (and if you caught me on certain days I could probably be convinced that Mother is as great a movie as anyone has ever made), but Defending Your Life is the director’s most philosophically dense, emotionally satisfying, and conceptually ambitious comedy, an inquiry into the meaning of existence as serious as Tree of Life […]

The Criterion Collection adds another indispensable boxed set to its library with this month’s release of World of Wong Kar Wai, a package of seven essential features, all restored and remastered and accompanied by an abundance of interviews, deleted scenes, and alternate endings. Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love have been released by Criterion before, but the remaining five films – As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and 2046 – are new to the label and presented here in vastly superior presentations to prior U.S. home video releases. The early films are […]

One of the surprise hits of the 1973 Cannes Film Festival was the low-budget coming of age film Jeremy, an unassuming drama starring two unknowns and directed by an American documentarian whose low-key approach yielded powerful emotional effects. Sixteen-year old Robby Benson had been acting on Broadway since he was nine but was fairly new to movies; his co-star, Glynnis O’Connor, was even less experienced and fluked into her part when she tagged along with her brother Darren (who starred in another interesting 70s high school movie, To Find a Man, the year before) on his audition for the part […]

The potential for horror films to serve as vehicles for provocative moral inquiry is fully realized in a pair of excellent thrillers new to Blu-ray and DVD from Lionsgate, writer-director Alex McAulay’s Don’t Tell a Soul and the surprisingly original 2021 reboot of the 2003 cult classic Wrong Turn. Both films seem, at first glance, to be routine low-budget programmers, but it quickly becomes apparent that the filmmakers are up to something more ambitious and rewarding than simply jerking the audience around with cheap shock effects. Don’t Tell a Soul follows two young brothers who break into an elderly woman’s […]

When I revisited the classic tearjerker Love Story last month, I was struck by the intimate connection between the actors and the camera; at every given moment, Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw’s doomed young lovers seemed perfectly showcased for maximum emotional impact, every gesture and expression captured from the proper distance and in perfect proportion from shot to shot—undoubtedly one of the reasons the film was the most popular of its year (1970), whether audiences were conscious of the delicacy of the framing or not. What’s all the more impressive about Love Story’s camerawork is how off the cuff some […]

No director of the classical Hollywood studio era capitalized on hot-button social issues or pushed the boundaries of censorship as successfully as Otto Preminger, who scored artistic and commercial triumphs with a number of films (Anatomy of a Murder, The Moon is Blue, Advise and Consent, The Man with the Golden Arm) that addressed rape, homosexuality, drug addiction, and various political and religious controversies at a time when few other filmmakers would dare. By the 1970s, however, Preminger became a victim of his own reputation; when young auteurs of the New Hollywood like Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich […]

On the relatively short list of truly great films about teenage alienation, writer-director Allan Moyle’s 1990 drama Pump Up the Volume ranks somewhere near the top, alongside earlier classics like Rebel Without a Cause and Over the Edge; yet unlike those brutally pessimistic movies, Pump Up the Volume manages to be as exhilarating as it is cynical, blending its authentic despair with an uplifting sense of liberating rebellion in a manner that compromises neither. Moyle had already directed one coming of age gem, Times Square, when he came to tell Pump Up the Volume’s story of a suburban loner (Christian […]

Writer-director John Hughes had just begun to make a name for himself with three films he made for Universal (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science) when Ned Tanen lured him over to Paramount with an overall deal designed to turn the filmmaker into a mogul. In less than three years, Hughes wrote, produced, and/or directed five movies for the studio (Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes Trains and Automobiles and She’s Having a Baby), all of which have now been reissued on Paramount’s “John Hughes 5-Movie Collection” Blu-ray with a generous supply of extra […]