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

Plot of Fear is a pretty good title for such a twisted example of the giallo genre. The "plot" starts out in a recognizable fashion, but eventually moves into a series of flashbacks and twists, gets a little on the convoluted side. The "fear" part comes at the thought of trying to describe the "plot" part.

Continue Reading Plot of Fear

Huge catalog updates this week, so start queueing up those titles through July! This week brings us some indie gems you wont want to miss. More, inside. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: June 5, 2012.

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

Loneliness is not the easiest quality to capture on film, at least not without boring us by offering up the usual visual clichés of the figure, alone in a landscape, or within but separated somehow from the world around him/her. Loneliness when you're with other people is a harder thing to pinpoint, and one of the treats of the new film Hello Lonesome is that its writer/ director Adam Reid manages this odd and tricky task very well.

Continue Reading Hello Lonesome

Audiences everywhere are buzzing over Moonrise Kingdom, the new movie directed by two-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Wes Anderson.

"Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, Moonrise Kingdom tells the story of two 12-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore – and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in every which way."

"Beguiling and endearing," (Joe Morgenstern), the film is now playing in theaters. Here's your chance to win an awesome prize pack thanks to our friends at Focus Features!

Continue Reading Moonrise Kingdom Prize Pack Giveaway!

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

Summer Interlude *** 1/2
Summer with Monika **** 1/2 

Watching Ingmar Bergman’s Summer Interlude and Summer With Monika back-to-back has somewhat conflated the two films in my head. The films explore young love during the titular season and both are set in the wind-swept dreamland of Stockholm’s outer archipelago. However, there’s a sharp line that divides the Bergman of Interlude from the Bergman of Monika. Only two years (and one other film – 1952’s Secrets of Women) separate Bergman’s two Summers but it’s clear that that period represented a major shift in the august filmmaker’s sensibilities.

Continue Reading Ingmar Bergman's Summer Interlude / Summer With Monika (Criterion)

We need to talk about some stellar DVDs released this week. Two from Bergman, thrillers of the psychological and pure action variety, Shakespearan reboots, jazzy romances, and much, much more. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: May 29, 2012.

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): Certified Copy **** 1/2
The Report **** 

Over the course of its 106-minute running time, Certified Copy primarily features two attractive people – Juliette Binoche and William Shimell – involved in a heated discussion about art and love. Their argument ultimately calls into question the fate of their own relationship. If this sounds like boiler plate “art house” fodder, it’s because it is. As Godfrey Cheshire remarks in the liner notes for Criterion’s release of Copy, the film “confidently revives a certain kind of European art cinema” – belonging to a tradition that includes My Voyage to Italy, My Dinner With Andre, and Richard Linklater’s Before films.

Continue Reading Certified Copy / The Report (Criterion)

Steamrolling into what will be an amazing summer for DVDs, chock full of classic re-releases and great films from 2011-2012, this week brings us loads to enjoy as well, including one of the most highly regarded 2011 films, Certified Copy, many long-sought-after films from Robert Downy Sr., and more!

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: May 22, 2012.

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

Robert M. Young’s ¡Alambrista! was released in America as The Illegal but an actual translation of the Spanish title is Tightrope Walker!, a much more evocative description of the film’s central drama. In this case, the “tightrope” is the US-Mexican border and the “walker” is young Roberto (Domingo Ambriz).

The film opens with Roberto working the soil on a failing farm in Mexico. A few scenes later, after celebrating the birth of his first daughter, Roberto turns to his wife and calmly intones: “I’m thinking of crossing the border and going north. We can’t make ends meet.”

Continue Reading ¡Alambrista! (Criterion)

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

A couple caveats before we dive in here. Firstly, I am out of my depth writing about the avant-garde, and bow to other qualified guides (Michael Sicinski, among others) well-versed in this terrain. I’ll try to split the difference between sounding like a pretentious wanker/a brain-dead rube writing about this, but I’m in vaguely foreign territory here.

Secondly, Frampton’s films require the viewer to engage them in a way that almost makes the viewer a co-creator in the works. Extremely subjective, personal response is, for me, the only way to begin to approach these films, hence, my use of the dreaded first person in the following analysis.

Continue Reading A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (Criterion)