The Day After
-
Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Home Viewing Recommendations: The Day After and NCIS: New Orleans — The Fourth Season
One of the bleakest, most affecting and most expertly directed movies ever made for television arrives on Blu-ray this week in the form of Kino Lorber’s special edition of Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After. When it first aired on ABC on November 20, 1983, Meyer’s harrowing vision of the impact of a nuclear war on a Kansas town was a phenomenon — over a hundred million people tuned in, making The Day After the highest rated TV-movie in history. It also happened to be one of the most powerful and sophisticated thanks to Meyer’s uncompromising approach to his material (an […]
by Jim Hemphill on Aug 10, 2018 -
NYFF 2017: Hong/Garrel/Hong
NYFF’s second week of press screenings were scheduled in such an apropos way: over 36 hours, you could watch two Hong Sang-soo films sandwiched around Philippe Garrel’s latest. Two of my absolute favorite working filmmakers, they share at least two important traits: creating an illusion of verisimilitude so strong it’s near-impossible to catch anyone onscreen “acting,” and an obsessive return to the same super-straight-male preoccupations, with the Venn diagram decidedly overlapping at infidelity. (Claire Denis is a big fan of both, and her Let the Sunshine In acts as an unexpected companion piece to the films discussed here; more on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 2, 2017
