Blu-ray
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Jim Hemphill’s Top Ten Blu-ray Releases of 2021
Compiling my annual list of the year’s ten best Blu-ray releases (or, to be more accurate, my ten personal favorites), I have come to the conclusion once again that reports of the death of physical media have been greatly exaggerated – there were easily another three or four dozen titles in 2021 worthy of placement on the list, and I can’t even begin to claim familiarity with more than a small percentage of everything that was released. But these are ten titles I can confidently recommend, not only for the fine transfers of superlative films but for the lovingly produced […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 27, 2021 -
An Unmarried Woman, Urban Cowboy and Pretty in Pink: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
The best films of writer-director Paul Mazursky feel like small miracles, movies that are carefully crafted yet give the impression of life caught on the fly; they have the enthusiasm and audacity of Mazursky’s idol Fellini, but their subjects are almost entirely, gloriously American and their harsh truths are presented in a warm comic voice that is as accessible to mainstream audiences as it is sophisticated. His 1978 dramedy An Unmarried Woman is a case in point, a picture that was a box office smash (after being turned down by financiers all over Hollywood) yet still manages to deliver the […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jun 12, 2020 -
Masters of Horror, Madam Secretary, Rough Air: Danger on Flight 534: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
One of the more interesting experiments in mid-2000s cable television was Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror anthology for Showtime, a series that lasted only two seasons but yielded terrific work by John Landis, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, John McNaughton, and Garris himself. It’s now streaming free on the advertiser supported platform Tubi, and many of the episodes are well worth revisiting – particularly Joe Dante’s The Screwfly Solution, an entry from season two that presciently taps into current anxieties relating to both the coronavirus and the #MeToo movement. The movie begins with a series of unprovoked assaults on women by […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 10, 2020 -
A Little Romance, The Stalking Moon, and Things Behind the Sun: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations – March 20, 2020
Director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting) has no shortage of mass appeal crowd pleasers on his resume, but I don’t think he ever made a more purely delightful or deeply moving film that 1979’s A Little Romance. A sort of prepubescent Before Sunrise, the movie follows two 13-year olds – French movie fanatic Daniel (Thelonious Bernard) and American bookworm Lauren (Diane Lane in her film debut) – who fall in love in Paris and try to make the most of their summer romance before Lauren is dragged back to the states. Perfectly calibrated on […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 20, 2020 -
Scenes from a Marriage, Gloria and Rapid Fire: Weekend Blu-ray Viewing from Jim Hemphill
When Ingmar Bergman wrote the script for his six-part, five-hour miniseries Scenes From a Marriage in 1973, his wife told him that it was far too personal to connect with a wide audience. She was right about its specificity, but wrong about its appeal — when the show premiered on Scandinavian television it was a smash hit, leaving the streets deserted every night that it was on. Bergman re-edited the material into a feature film of around half the length for theatrical distribution in the United States, where it became a hit on the art house circuit on the heels […]
by Jim Hemphill on Sep 14, 2018 -
John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, and an Obscure Discovery for Die-Hard Horror Fans: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
After writing and directing the most savage, uncompromising film of his career with the independently financed They Live (1988), John Carpenter made one last stab at big-budget studio filmmaking with the 1992 Chevy Chase vehicle Memoirs of an Invisible Man to disappointing commercial and critical results. In spite of its reception at the time, however, Memoirs is a fascinating film on a number of levels – more fascinating, perhaps, than Carpenter realizes. It’s one of his few movies on which he declined to take a possessory credit, but Carpenter’s signature is all over Memoirs in its deft juggling of emotions […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jul 27, 2018 -
Rocco and His Brothers, Dietrich and Von Sternberg, and Dragon Inn: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
One of the most important restorations of the last few years makes its way to Blu-ray this week with Milestone’s exquisite release of Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). A brutally realistic, emotionally charged family saga that flies by in three of the most involving hours ever put on film, Rocco and His Brothers is an extraordinary combination of Visconti’s neorealist side (previously seen in Ossessione and La Terra Trema) and the operatic, ambitious tendency toward tumultuous historical change and penetrating social commentary that characterizes later masterpieces like The Leopard and The Damned. The film follows the brothers of […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jul 13, 2018 -
How to Deliver Your Film to a Festival (2018 Edition)
Back in 2015, I wrote an article for Filmmaker on the best practices for delivering an exhibition copy of your film to festivals. In the ensuing two and a half, almost three years, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback, including a few panicked emails from filmmakers submitting their films to a festivals I worked at. Now in 2018, my editors have asked me to update it. Why the update now? Allow me the use of a clumsy and imperfect technical reference to Moore’s law that computing power doubles every eighteen months and the same has happened to available filmmaking […]
by Sergio Andrés Lobo-Navia on May 1, 2018 -
Desert Hearts, Wild Bill, Pretty Little Liars and More: Jim Hemphill’s Year-End Home Video Recommendations
For my final home video column of the year, I’d like to round up the most interesting and enjoyable Blu-ray and DVD titles I’ve encountered in recent months — not necessarily a “ten best” list, but a compendium of highly recommended releases that rank among 2017’s home viewing highlights (and that make great gifts for cinephiles as the holiday shopping season approaches). Here goes: Desert Hearts. Director Donna Deitch embarked on her narrative feature debut with a simple goal — to tell a love story between two women that didn’t end with either of them dying or in a bisexual […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 24, 2017 -
L’Argent, The Quiet American, and Charles Bronson: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983) is the kind of final film any director would kill to have on his or her resume, a beautifully distilled summation of Bresson’s preoccupations and techniques that nevertheless strikes out in fascinating new directions. It’s simultaneously the director’s most empathetic film and his bleakest, a wrenching study of how a series of slight moral lapses creates a snowball effect of tragedy that leads to imprisonment and mass murder. Using a late Tolstoy novella as his source material, Bresson depicts the path of a counterfeit bill as it changes hands and inexorably alters the lives of those […]
by Jim Hemphill on Sep 8, 2017
