This week's DVDs feature a mix of heart warmers and love and danger on the run. Get your tingles and thrills inside for the whole list! 

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

It's a modest week for DVDs but there are still some treasures on this week's slate, including 2 new David Lean films released to DVD in a new box set from Criterion. More inside!

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: March 27, 2012.

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

Among its other accomplishments, the new documentary The Swell Season manages very clearly to differentiate fan bases: that of the fans of the 2006 movie Once (which starred the subjects of this new film: Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová), or the fans of the performers themselves. Fans of the former -- such as myself, who found Once a tiny, no-budget marvel with a lovely story, some wonderful songs and a bittersweet ending about as close to perfection as movies get -- can only feel supremely indebted to John Carney, the writer/director of Once, who, probably more than anyone, brought this film to fruition with his sense of pacing, subtlety and story-telling skills.

Continue Reading The Swell Season

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

I really don’t want to say a thing about  World on a Wire. I wish you could just take the above five-star rating to heart and watch it, untainted by any sort of preconceived notion other than how awesome it is.

That said, I’ll try my best to describe its awesomeness while tiptoeing around the finer points of the plot.

World on a Wire is a made-for-German-television science fiction film directed by enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The film is set during an approximation of the present in a Euro-metropolis. A technological thinktank – the IKZ – is developing a synthetic reality, known as Simulacron-B. The project’s purpose is to create an algorithm that can predict future occurrences so that trends in business, defense, and government can be anticipated and planned for. Simulacron-B is a resounding success and a few trouble-shooting sessions away from a full launch.

Continue Reading World on a Wire (Criterion)

When a murder mystery next door forces agoraphobic heiress Abigail Clayton (Selma Blair) to face her terrifying new neighbors (Amy Smart and Jason Lee), the safe and solitary world she created for herself violently unravels. Peering anxiously through her peephole each day, Abigail soon learns that the dangerous new tenants, may threaten more than just her privacy.

A dark and suspenseful thriller, Columbus Circle, made its debut on Blu-ray™, DVD, Digital Download and On Demand on March 6, 2012, from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.

And here's your chance to win a copy of Columbus Circle on DVD!

Continue Reading Columbus Circle DVD Giveaway!

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Ratings (out of five): *** 1/2

The wonderful Raro Video is single-handedly reminding the world that the Italian crime director Fernando Di Leo once existed. Last year they released a wonderful four-disc box set of Di Leo films (with a Blu-Ray set added just a month ago). The company has also been releasing some of Di Leo's screenwriting efforts for other directors, notably the awesome Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976).

Now comes Young, Violent, Dangerous (Liberi Armati Pericolosi) (1976), directed by Romolo Guerrieri. Though it has an equally crazy title, it's distinctly different in tone. This one is more cautionary, and comes with a little bit of conscience.

Continue Reading Young, Violent, and Dangerous

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): **** 1/2

In one of the opening shots of Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letter Never Sent, four Soviet explorers struggle wordlessly through a throng of birch trees in the middle of a Siberian hinterland. The hand-held camera lurches along with the adventurers as they push on, hip-deep in water and dragging their gear behind them on rafts. There’s something about this scene – the close-up, shaky images of desperate characters fighting against a cold, indifferent nemesis – that instantly recalls George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. In fact, much of Letter Never Sent’s man-vs.-nature conflict plays like a horror film. Here the relentless boogeyman doesn’t wield an axe but fire and ice.

The bare-bones plot involves a geological expedition into Russia’s unforgiving taiga. A team of four surveyors has been sent on a third and final mission to find diamonds, in the hopes that the gems will spur an “industrial revolution” and revitalize the stagnating economy.

Continue Reading Letter Never Sent (Criterion)

The luck of the Irish must have spilled onto this week's DVDs, as we've got a huge slate of offerings to suit all manner of tastes, and several Blu-Ray options to boot! More inside. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: March 20, 2012.

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

At times, and very briefly, as I watched David Cronenberg's new movie A Dangerous Method -- about Freud and Jung, their relationship, a female patient whom they "shared" for a time and another, male, whom one analyst passed to his peer -- the 1962 John Huston film Freud would flicker through my mind. This was brief, yes, because I wanted nothing to distract me from the excellent work at hand. But I could not help but marvel at how much movies have grown up -- in terms of subject matter and how it is handled -- in the nearly half-century between the two films. That is to say, when cinema actually takes the trouble to make real and intelligent use of what is permitted, now that so many barriers have fallen in regard to what may be shown and discussed on screen, what marvels we can sometimes be served.

Continue Reading A Dangerous Method

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Ratings (out of five): ****

Clint Eastwood more or less established the modern-day biopic formula back with Bird (1988), though it was not a formula back then; the proof is that the movie only received one Oscar nomination, for its sound design. Two years ago, Eastwood revisited the biopic genre with the interesting, if not entirely successful Invictus; if anything, that movie simply bit off more than it could chew. Now Eastwood is back with a third biopic, J. Edgar (also on Blu-Ray), and given the first two, there was no reason for high hopes.

However, thanks to a smart script by Dustin Lance Black, who also wrote Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008), and Eastwood's typically understated direction, J. Edgar turns out to be a fascinating portrait, not so much of a man, but of the way that man tried to manipulate his own legacy.

Continue Reading J. Edgar