Warner Archive
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The Mothman Prophecies, Scarface, They Won’t Believe Me: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
One of the great American films of the early 2000s hits Blu-ray for the first time with Imprint’s exceptional special edition of Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies (2002), a truly unique thriller that has only improved with age. Loosely based on true events, The Mothman Prophecies follows a Washington Post reporter (Richard Gere) who finds himself at the center of a series of inexplicable supernatural events following his wife’s tragic death. Although Pellington explicitly set out to avoid making a conventional horror film – there are very few glimpses of the title creature and no gratuitous shocks – the movie […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 15, 2021 -
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 -
Play It to the Bone, New Titles from Warner Archive and More: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
Back in October 2015, I interviewed writer-director Ron Shelton for this site about the making of his immensely entertaining Play It to the Bone, a 1999 boxing picture that subverted sports movie clichés to its commercial detriment but artistic triumph. A deftly balanced work that is as smart and violent as it is sweet and funny, Bone is one of Shelton’s best films, and certainly his most underrated – something I’ve always found mysterious given how obvious and pleasurable its virtues are. It’s now available in a new Blu-ray edition along with Shelton’s Bull Durham follow-up Blaze (1989), which finds the director […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 4, 2018
