Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of five): *** 1/2

Do the names Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky and William Burroughs set your heart aflutter? (My upstairs neighbor runs the other direction when he hears the roster.) For some, these are/were the kind of guys you love to read but wouldn't want to live with. You get the chance to do the latter, possibly as closely as you'd care to, in the new documentary The Beat Hotel that takes us back to the beatnik/bohemian Paris of the period between 1957 - 1963 and to the shabby (but hardly chic) little hotel where they, and others of their ilk, resided.

Continue Reading The Beat Hotel

Today's  roster picks up last week's slack with a huge slate of new releases this week, packed with star turns from leading men Ewan McGreggor, Clive Owen, Willem Dafoe, and more. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: July 17, 2012.

Time to decide whether or not you're on #teammargeret. Out on DVD today with the full, 3.5 hr director's cut, and on Blu-Ray. And we've got other sweeping epics, comedies, and more, leading up to a huge release week next week. Dive on in! 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: July 10, 2012.

Reviewer: Simon P. Augustine
Ratings (out of five): ****

"What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality… that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn't look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place." – Colin Wilson, The Outsider

All of us have seen, or known, or been one of those men or women who inhabit the borders of society, usually in large cities, moving about the corners of busy thoroughfares  –  outsiders or outcasts going about their business with an introversion and sense of sorrow accompanying a quiet presence. 

Continue Reading In the Realms of the Unreal

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of five): ** 1/2

Making Plans for Lena is writer/director Christophe Honoré's third film to use Chiara Mastroianni, but it comes nowhere near the level of his earlier Love Songs. I find myself running hot and luke-warm to the work of this filmmaker; his latest is definitely in the latter category. Beautifully filmed in Brittany, the movie -- as well as the Lena character played by Mastroianni -- fairly reeks of entitlement.

Continue Reading Making Plans for Lena

God Bless America, indeed, on this new DVD day falling the day before our nation's independence day. This week features some wonderfully darker fare than usual - enjoy!

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: July 3, 2012.

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): ****

Every hero has a beginning. At least, that’s what we’re taught by the Hollywood/comic book nexus that sees fit to shove a reboot/origin story into theaters every year or two. And Criterion’s Blu-Ray release (also on DVD) of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) lays bare the beginnings of an unequaled cinematic hero. The film is Hitchcock concentrate, a microcosm of the style and subjects that would mark the master’s five-decade career. Arguably, the period when he made his “thriller sextet” – which consists of Steps, the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Sabotage, Secret Agent, Young and Innocent and The Lady Vanishes – is the epoch where Hitchcock-the-man became Hitchcock-the-adjective.

Continue Reading The 39 Steps (Criterion) (Blu-Ray)

 By Simon P. Augustine

"Your liberation – who is it for?"
       – from Throw Away Your Books, Rally In The Streets

The advent of the internet has changed the landscape for cinema lovers forever,unveiling whole treasure troves, and in some cases entire sub-genres of filmic history that may have heretofore escaped the eyes of even the most ardent critic or cinephile. Within the matrix of video rental services, websites devoted to cinema culture, blogs, etc., there is almost no dark corner of the world’s movie theater that cannot now be explored. A happy example of this phenomenon for me is a recent encounter with a group of bold, visually stunning, intellectually challenging, spiritually and erotically charged films that rival the most daring films of today’s international and independent scene: the cinema which emerged from Japan in the 60’s and 70’s.

Continue Reading Primer - Dangerous Liberation: The Japanese New Wave of the 60’s and 70’s

A classic 80's cop show gets the comedy treatment, titans show their wrath (again) and a GreenCine Fantastic Fest Favorite (Bullhead) rears its head on DVD this week, along with many others. Check out the full list, inside!

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: June 26, 2012.

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): SET **** ½
Pearls of the Deep: *** ½ (Shorts: Mr Baltazer’s Death **, The Imposters *** ½, House of Joy **** ½ , The Restaurant The World *** ½ , Romance ****)
Daisies: **** ½
A Report on the Party and Guests: *** ½
Return of the Prodigal Son: *** ½
Capricious Summer: ***
The Joke: **** ½

Eclipse’s latest set ingeniously collects ten films – five shorts and five features – by five directors at the forefront of the retroactively titled “Czech New Wave.” Pretty much every film presented here was eventually banned by the Soviet overlords who micromanaged the Czechoslovakian culture following the Warsaw Pact.

Continue Reading Eclipse Series 32 - Pearls of the Czech New Wave