Earlier this year I wrote about Criterion’s Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits boxed set and declared it one of the best Blu-ray releases of all time. Less than two months later, the producers at Criterion have already topped themselves with the 15-disc The Complete Films of Agnes Varda collection, a comprehensive look at the work of one of the French New Wave’s grand masters. The set contains 39 features and shorts, arranged not in chronological order but in a series of intelligently curated programs, as though the movies were being shown in a public retrospective; there are discs devoted to […]

Fifteen years ago I was touring the regional horror film festival circuit with my first feature when I discovered the work of John C. Lyons, a filmmaker based in Erie, Pennsylvania whose short Hunting Camp was one of the more inventive and compelling movies I encountered that year. It was also one of the most interestingly photographed, by cinematographer Dorota Swies, who formed Lyons Den Productions with Lyons in 2004; the two of them have been working together ever since. Their latest collaboration and first feature together is the environmental horror movie Unearth, set to premiere on August 25 at this year’s virtual […]

Shifting points of view, complicated flashbacks, elaborate optical effects and a fluid approach to objective reality are not typically characteristic of American movies released in the early sound era, which makes Phil Goldstone’s 1933 picture The Sin of Nora Moran a real discovery. Goldstone was a producer and director who worked on Hollywood’s “poverty row,” the section of studios located around Sunset and Gower that cranked out extremely low budget features designed to fill out the bottom halves of double bills; like Frank Capra, Edgar G. Ulmer, and several other filmmakers who spent all or part of their careers on […]

Ever since she made her directorial debut in 2003 with Thirteen, Catherine Hardwicke has been one of the American cinema’s great chroniclers of young people navigating the transition to adulthood. In films as diverse as Lords of Dogtown, Twilight, Red Riding Hood and The Nativity Story, Hardwicke has explored teenage crises and discoveries with serious intent and the sharp attention to visual detail that she developed as a production designer on movies like Three Kings and Vanilla Sky. Her work on those films and other often demonstrated a bold and original approach to color, and this is true of her […]

Writer-director Scott Wiper’s The Big Ugly is the best kind of genre film, a crime movie aware of the traditions in which it’s working but not beholden to them; combining elements of ’40s and ’50s crime fiction (Jim Thompson seems to be a particular touchstone) with the flavor of ’70s Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill filtered through the visual grammar of ’90s Tony Scott, The Big Ugly synthesizes its influences into a unique and compelling western noir. Its emotional power comes largely from Wiper’s richly textured script and the performances by his consistently riveting ensemble, which includes Vinnie Jones, Malcolm […]

My first two recommendations this week are two excellent thrillers from last year that are newly available on DVD, The Whistlers and The Room. The Whistlers, which premiered in competition at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, is a gleefully twisty, darkly hilarious Romanian crime film that recalls movies like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in its jigsaw structure and fluid loyalties but finds a unique tone all its own thanks to director Corneliu Porumboiu’s approach. He adopts a whimsical attitude toward his eccentric group of cops playing both sides of the law and the criminals they’re […]

It’s often hard for me to avoid using superlatives when writing about the work done by the Criterion Collection, and they’ve made it even more difficult with their new Blu-ray set Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits, a seven-disc package that ranks with the company’s best releases – which means it’s one of the best Blu-ray releases ever, period. The box contains the four features martial arts icon Lee made at the height of his powers (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, and Enter the Dragon) as well as two films cobbled together after his premature death […]

Evil was one of the best new television series of the 2019-2020 season, a thoughtful consideration of a vast array of moral, spiritual and sociopolitical issues in the guise of a supernatural procedural. The show follows Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), a clinical psychologist with a complicated family life who teams up with David Acosta (Mike Colter), a haunted ex-journalist who works for the Catholic Church as an assessor; he investigates – then confirms or debunks – incidents involving miracles, demonic possessions, and the like. Series creators Robert and Michelle King (the husband and wife team responsible for The Good Wife […]

Japanese horror and action master Takashi Miike is one of those directors who’s so prolific that it’s easy to take him for granted; ever since he caught American cinephiles’ attention in 1999 with Audition and Dead or Alive, he’s been cranking out something close to a half-dozen movies each year, releasing his kinetically supercharged orgies of style and violence faster than some viewers can keep up with them. While I wouldn’t try to make the case that all 100-plus Miike productions are masterpieces, when he’s firing on all cylinders – as with Audition, or last year’s First Love – he’s […]

Ever since the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the International Olympic Committee has commissioned films of the games to be produced in collaboration with their host countries; though many of them are relatively traditional sports documentaries, there are a handful – such as the experimental anthology film Visions of Eight, which chronicles the 1972 Summer Olympics via segments by Arthur Penn, Milos Forman, John Schlesinger, and other major directors – that are cinematically significant even for viewers who couldn’t care less about anything athletic. The best of the Olympic films that I’ve seen is Kon Ichikawa’s 1965 masterpiece Tokyo Olympiad, a […]