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 […]

Barry Lyndon joined the Criterion Collection last week, and they’ve shared an excerpt from one of the disc’s supplements in which focus puller Douglas Milsorne and gaffer Lou Bogue discuss the difficulty of shooting with all those candles — oxygen got scarce on the ground — and surreptitiously bouncing light to provide the necessary amount of illumination. For more, see this video on various DPs discussing the film’s groundbreaking cinematography and Jim Hemphill’s interview with three of the cast members.

James Quandt analyzes Robert Bresson’s themes and motifs in this video essay on L’argent, which just joined the Criterion Collection last month.

Martin Scorsese famously considered becoming a priest before taking another path, and he clearly never lost the evangelical impulse. In the 38 years since Scorsese used his influence and finances to restore and rerelease Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, he has done more to spread the gospel of cinema than any other director in film history, devoting countless hours to film preservation and education while simultaneously amassing a body of work that in its breadth, depth, and quality rivals that of any of the masters his scholarly efforts aspire to honor. In 2007 Scorsese embarked on one of his most important […]

Two very different but equally essential classics find their way to Blu-ray and DVD this week courtesy of the Criterion Collection, which has issued exemplary special editions of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). The Antonioni film, in which a fashion photographer finds evidence of a murder in one of his stills, heavily influenced later American political thrillers like The Conversation and Blow Out in spite of the fact that Blow-Up itself is less a mystery than an anthropological document of swinging ’60s London. It was Antonioni’s first film outside his home country after L’avventura, La Notte, […]

To finish off 2016, I’d like to round up some of the year’s best Blu-ray releases that I didn’t get a chance to cover in my weekly column. It was an exceptional year for physical media thanks to labels like Criterion, Twilight Time, Arrow, Kino Lorber, and Olive, all of which continue to license neglected titles from studio vaults and give them the first-class treatments they deserve. While the list below barely scratches the surface of the efforts of these companies and others, it contains what I consider to be the most essential discs of the year — movies that […]

One of the major film restoration events of 2016 was Universal’s digital overhaul of Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961), an important bridge between the classical Westerns of John Ford and the genre-busting revisionism of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, not to mention Arthur Penn, who would work with Brando on another great iconoclastic Western, The Missouri Breaks, around 15 years later. Like The Missouri Breaks, One-Eyed Jacks is an unruly passion project filled with idiosyncratic touches and auteurist preoccupations. Yet since Brando never directed another movie before or after, the motifs connect not to his other work behind the camera […]

For film lovers of all stripes, the launch this month of FilmStruck, a new streaming service partnership between Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Channel, is nothing short of a major event. As Netflix tilts more and more towards television and original programming, and actual movies cycle on and off on-demand services at a dizzying pace, FilmStruck is poised to be a dependable and invigorating destination for anyone wanting to watch a simply great movie at any time of the day or night. FilmStruck will source films from indie distributors such as Janus Films, Zeitgeist, Film Movement, Oscilloscope Laboratories, as […]

In advance of the release of Criterion’s 4K restoration of Blood Simple, photographer Grant Delin created a video essay which compares scenes from the finished film to the original storyboards. With commentary by the Coens, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, and actor Frances McDormand, this glimpse into their creative process highlights the meticulous planning and elaborate storyboards behind the film’s signature aesthetic. The restored version of the Coens’ 1984 debut feature will be available in both Blu-ray and DVD editions beginning on September 20. Find out more here. You can also watch the Coen Brothers’ pitch trailer for the low-budget classic here.

Yi Yi, the first of Edward Yang’s films to receive distribution in the United States (in 2000), was also his last before the revered Taiwanese filmmaker died in 2007. Still, Yang’s 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day, managed to find a fan base in the U.S. though it was available for decades only in abridged form on low-quality home video. In March, after an arduous restoration effort that spanned years, The Criterion Collection released A Brighter Summer Day on Blu-ray and DVD. Back in 2011, the restored work was screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and in other limited engagements, but it has otherwise been […]