No, I can hardly believe it either, myself. Merry Christmas, no coal in your stocking, etc.
Players: PS3 for domestics, OPPO BDP 83 for imports. Display: Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30. Amp: Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV.
12 Angry Men (Criterion)
Despite now being something resembling an old liberal myself, I have never quite warmed to this particular chestnut of tele-liberalism alchemized into cinema, and I suppose I never really will. Still. Its very insistent earnestness is somewhat mollified by Sidney Lumet’s crafty direction and the ever-engaging spectacle of lotsa gruff-voiced men smoking and yelling and being irritable. The presentation of the 1957 film is very handsome, with fantastic gray-scale contrasts and what you might call real meat-and-potatoes graininess. And the package as a whole is plenty generous, including a kinetescope-looking transfer of a kinetoscope of the original television program. I can’t imagine any fan of the film wanting a whole lot more. —A+
Attack the Block (Sony)
This nifty and cheeky British of sci-fi and social commentary on race and the youf is an almost ideal Blu-ray experience and a good way to experience the picture for the first time. 
The film, directed by comic polymath (they’re practically a class in the U.K.) Joe Cornish, first makes a knowing in-joke of the not-quite-lifelike aspect of its initial alien. Keeping thins dark to mask its effects budget AND convincingly evoke a down-at-heels milieu, its scenes unfold under different monochromes. And the Blu-ray reproduces them and the details with nice sharpness. Gratifyingly atmospheric. —A
Branded to Kill/Tokyo Drifter (Criterion)
Wowsers. A one-two punch of ‘60s Japanese weirdness from still-at-it eccentric Seijun Suzuki. Branded is an utterly lunatic hitman tale that became a leitmotif in Steven Erickson’s epic cine-novel Zeroville, a black-and-white sex-and-murder nightmare, while Drifter is an eye-popping candy-colored sort-of musical. With guns. Back in the day these films were sufficiently rare that their very existences in watchable video form were something to be grateful for, so we didn’t bitch too much over quality, which didn’t quite meet the standard Criterion had set for itself. These new high-def discs based on recent restorations are pretty much perfect, and jaw-droppingly great. Even the imperfect stuff is perfect: all due respect to the mavens at DVD Beaver, it’s hard to fathom how they couldn’t grok that the blown out, nearly solarized images of the b&w prologue to Drifter aren’t entirely deliberate. As you get deeper into Drifter, check out the exquisite powder-blue suit on the hero, and swoon. These upgrades feel almost like MORE THAN WE DESERVE!!! —A+
Captain America (Paramount)
I’m very taken with this movie but a little on the fence of the painterly-sometimes-leaning-to-cartoony (as opposed to comic-bookish) look of the CGI environments and effects, which are reproduced very accurately for high-def television here. Also odd is the slight video noise in an early scene, in the dust kicking up in a German castle that those damn Nazis are overrunning. Odd. Maybe I’m nitpicking. The rest of the presentation is rock-solid and All-American. —A
The Clowns (Raro)
Fellini made his tribute to the circus performer for Italian television, and it has a loose, casual but insistently affectionate tone that some find cloying. On balance I find the film almost as lovable as it wants to be. What’s undeniable here is the presentation, which is clean as a whistle and bright as freshly-applied whiteface under a brand-new spotlight. Really beautiful. The accompanying booklet is another token of the care Raro put into this, its first Blu-ray presentation. More, please. —A+
Design For Living (Criterion)
I believe this is the first time Lubitsch’s beloved Paris, Paramount has seen the light of Blu-ray, and it’s an auspicious stepping-out. The 1933 romantic comedy—alternate title How To Avoid Saying “Menage a Trois” For 91 Minutes—looks very lovely and silvery and nitrate-like here. All I could ask for is a scene featuring Miriam Hopkins in skimpier clothing. I guess we’ve got the Eclipse Lubitsch Musicals box for that. But those aren’t Blu-rays. Damn it all.—A+
Destroy All Monsters (Tokyo Shock)
The first thing this disc does right is be Destroy All Monsters on Blu-ray. The second is that it includes the original Japanese-language soundtrack too. The English dub IS funnier, to wit: “The monsters look cute when you look at them from THIS angle!” and “I’m at the moon base. This phone call [pause] costs a lot.” The picture itself is a little on the soft side. The colors are great, and the flames in the explosions look real good, the mark of competent Enthusiastic and informative commentary, too. —A
Detective Dee And The Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Indomina)
The latest U.S. release from Hong Kong action genius Tsui Hark is an object lesson in How Asian Genre Directors LOVE Their CGI Environments. The elaborate out-of-thin-air settings for this period fantasy/mystery are pretty incredible and bald-faced in their overt artificiality, and yet, rather than bugging me the way similar backdrops did in Captain America, I found them glorious. Maybe I AM a snob, and I’ll forgive foreign filmmakers anything. I like to think that Tsui’s enthusiastic embrace of artificiality helped win me over. In any event, this is a beautiful presentation, especially at its least “real” looking (check out the molten liquid at the film’s climax). Also, a talking deer that’s a lot more pleasant than the fox in Antichrist. The film itself is a lot of fun too. —A
Frankenhooker (Synapse)
Frank Henenlotter’s relatively blithe 1990 Frankenstein variant, in which a blue-collar mad hobbyist revives his dead sweetie from the body parts of exploded hookers (no, it doesn’t really make ANY sense), is not quite Re-Animator but it’s lots of good skeevy cult fun anyway. And the Blu-ray looks excellent, although the film is admittedly not a triumph of lensing (Henenlotter cops to have shot a lot of it solo, sans DP, on account of…labor problems and such). So let’s say it looks excellent in its grungy way. Lead actress Patty Mullen remains one of the most game scream queens, and she looks well to this day, as one of the extras show. The commentary reveals Henenlotter as somewhat more of an earnest fellow than you might have expected. I’m glad to own this disc, and you probably know already whether you’ll be as well. —A
Giorgio Morodor Presents Metropolis (Kino Lorber)
In one of the oddest wrinkles in film preservation history, back in the mid-80s fabulously well-off Teutonic hitmaker Giorgio Moroder backed a restoration of Lang’s classic and copyrighted it and put his own song soundtrack over it. This added yet another level of incoherent bombast to the ever-eccentric work, not to mention some new design overlays (check out that nightclub sign). For a while it was the only game in town; I remember seeing a live score performance by the Alloy Orchestra that used a print of this version. In terms of its brevity and tinting and stuff it’s an interesting variant. As for the song score, well, it’s a far cry from Morodor’s composing peak (that would be “I Feel Love,” and I bet you knew I would say that) but it’s still pretty distinctive. Too distinctive, some might say. It’s kind of amusing how even the most ostensibly identifiable voices (Jon Anderson! Billy Squier!) have the distinction of their own pipes subsumed by Morodor’s synth-and-processor heavy production value. It’s like he’s an AUTEUR or something!? (Wonder what Mike Reno’s Loverboy bandmates did while Mike Reno sang over a drum machine…) Some call it redundant, I call it a curio that’s kind of a time capsule squared. —A
Going Places (Kino Lorber)
Boy, remember when Bertrand Blier was a scandalously controversial director? Maybe you don’t, unless you’re of a certain age, so thoroughly has his work been forgotten (and gone out of print). This 1974 picture about a couple of long-haired layabouts wandering around screwing and stealing and getting shot at put Blier on the map in American arthouses, and it’s still bracing in its nonchalant attitude towards its crass protagonists. One of whom is a young Gerard Depardieu, and many of you won’t BELIEVE how attractive once was! Really, check it out—he’s got a jawline here. While never really noted for its pictorial beauty, this is a surprisingly handsome presentation; there’s a bit of video noise here and there, and some shots have a degenerated look, like they’re from a 16mm source (the final bits of the duo’s train adventure, in which they cadge breast milk from the now-grown-up little girl from Forbidden Games, no, really), but for the most part its better than OK (those blotchy male shoulders during the plentiful sex scenes are plenty blotchy). Then there’s the noticeably poor rear-projection in some of the night-driving scenes. But why carp. As a cinephile who enjoys grappling with the twisty, oft-disagreeable Blier, I’m delighted with this and hope it bodes well for the future Blu-ray release of perverse French obscurities. Like, how about Corneau’s ’79 Serie Noire, featuring this film’s costar Patrick Dewaere? No? Aw, come on…—A-
Harakiri (Criterion)
Damn. this black-and-white widescreen picture from 1962, the story of a former samurai and his non-commission of the titular face-saving act, looks fabulous; check out the detail on the robes worn by the characters. Also, the walls of the houses have a lot of gray scale variation but no video noise; it’s all really impressive. Those concerned about content should be advised that director Masaki Kobayashi is a filmmaker so thoroughly earnest and direct that he makes Kurosawa look like a Lubitschean ironist by comparison. Just so you know. This is a cracking, passionately told story in any case and scholar Donald Richie makes a compelling brief for it in his video introduction to the film. —A
The Hollywood Knights (Image)
Buyer beware: this seems a Blu-ray in more or less name only. That is, it really looks like crap, like maybe a straight rip from the standard-def DVD released in 2000. And this doesn’t even have the Floyd Mutrux commentary from that version. Fans of Newbomb Turk, sorry to dash your hopes. My wife: “Wow, that Lawrence of Arabia song is a real thing? I thought you just made that up.” —D
Horror Express (Severin)
Not the most distinguished Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing pairing but a cheesily enjoyable one, especially if you like train movies. I LOVE train movies. Anyway. A scratchy Spanish language-titled print seems the source for the disc; after the credits sequence , things clean up considerably. Pretty excellent color values throughout, although actual variation of footage, in terms of saturation and sharpness, is kind of interesting if you’re watching with an eye to that sort of thing. Also, it’s in 1.66, which I’m also developing a thing for. —B+
House By The Cemetery (Blue Underground)
Another disgusting Lucio Fulci horror, which is made more disgusting, as is not uncustomary, by dint of featuring child actors. Not as crass as New York Ripper, not as exuberant as Zombie, not as, um, groundbreaking as City of the Living Dead, so, maybe about the level of The Beyond. I’m so glad my cinema assessment powers have been honed to the point that I’m able to make these distinctions. Anyway, an excellent representation of the film. —A
The Lady Vanishes (Criterion)
Whoa. Look at that opening shot, with the model of the train station and the toy car and all that. He’d try the same thing with Psycho, and have to use dissolves just like he does here. And if he were alive to day he’d be trying something similar with CGI instead of models/dissolves. Anyway, this is a really super gorgeous upgrade of the original standard-def release. Get it. —A+
Pulp Fiction (Miramax/Lions Gate)
At first I thought this looked a little bright; the backlighting of Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer is thisclose to looking blown out. But then it hit me: it’s perfect. The brightness, which is modulated within the frame within the scene, jibes beautifully with the neon lurid pop art of the film’s, erm, conceptual continuity. Really brilliant. —A+
Quatermass and the Pit (Optimum, Region-B locked U.K. import)
Love this movie, but didn’t expect much from a Blu-ray. It’s a wonderful idea, spooky as hell, but unabashedly achieved on the cheap. So I’m delighted to report the Blu-ray looks VERY nice; vivid, bright, crisp, all adding to the immediacy of the idea it’s selling. The aggregate is that the effects at the end, while still not very convincing, are nevertheless very convincing. All hail the cast and its conviction, director Roy Ward Baker and his storytelling chops. And the demons. EXTREMELY impressive overall. And in FABULOUS 1.66, yet.—A+
Red Sonja (Optimum Region-B locked UK import)
Arnold says this is his worst film and that he threatens to punish his children by forcing them to watch it if they’ve been unruly. I wonder if he means all his children, or just…OH! Somebody stop me. Also, as an assessor of his own cinematic work, Schwarzenegger would make a great Governor. OH! But seriously, folks, this isn’t THAT bad; it’s directed by Richard Fleischer, after all. But truth to tell, it’s no Follow Me Quietly, either. It’s interesting to see Brigitte Nielsen before she morphed into Ted Cassidy with concrete breasts and a fright wig, so there’s that. And the Blu-ray image here is pretty impressive, I must say. Much pretty scenery AND individually discernable candle flames in the hundreds! Recommends to those who get a kick out of Dino deLaurentiis’ “not the bore worms!” mode. —A-
Rushmore (Criterion)
A reader asked why I didn’t rate this last time. Well, we had just watched the standard-def version in July, so we were fresh on the film. Not to be blasé, but we didn’t expect a surprise from the Blu-ray upgrade, which is a high-def reboot of the same extras package as the original. Looked a it recently and, as I would have predicted, it’s beautiful. Incredibly crisp, a delight to the eye, an essential library edition/addition. —A+
Sherlock Holmes (Kino Lorber)
Honest, if this didn’t feature John Barrymore in the title role nobody would much care about it and it would merely demonstrate that perfunctory adaptations of Conan Doyle are practically a cinematic staple. But this DOES have Barrymore, in his profile prime, in the title. And Leo G. Carroll Roland Young, bless him, as Watson. This is not much in the way of a revelatory improvement from the original DVD. Clarity is boosted, but scratches and jumps from the source material remain. And the film is still kind of not great. But worthwhile for curio value. —B+
Taking Off (Park Circus Region B locked UK import)
Milos Forman’s first U.S.-shot film is an amazing and beautiful and terribly sad and funny picture, and he’d never make another as loose or free again. It also features, for what it’s worth, Kathy Bates as you’ve never seen her before and will never see her again, either. This Blu-ray appears to have been transferred from a recent restoration. Given Universal’s general disposition toward its catalog, the fact that this restoration happened at all is a miracle on the loaves-and-fishes scale. In any event the picture quality is staggering early-70s grit and grain and light. The skin tones are wonderful, and when the action ventures out into broad springtime daylight about 33 minutes in, well, you believe all the mythic hype you’ve heard about film stock back in the day. I hope for some kind of domestic release of this iteration of the film, which is wonderful enough that I don’t want to spoil it just yet, but I consider this an essential item along the lines of Deep End, so if you have the equipment I suggest you just go ahead and spring for this, I guarantee you won’t be sorry. —A+
Terri (Fox)
Like Aaron Katz and Jeff Nichols, two other youngish male American directors of recent vintage I admire, Azezal Jacobs infuses his work with an acute appreciation of his shooting environments. The particular quality of the California sun gave the deadpan anomie of The GoodTimes Kid a real charge, and Jacobs really burrowed in to the purposefully, neurotically cramped spaces of his real-life parents’ shadowy lower Manhattan loft for Momma’s Man. Terri finds Jacobs back in Southern California, Pasadena for heaven’s sake. A decidedly inapposite, it would seem, environment for his hero, a hard-to-like yet easy-to-feel-bad-for self-described “monster” of an overweight adolescent. This is a typically unusual film for Jacobs, unsparing but compassionate, and the look of it—Terri is alternately framed by big open skies, whited-out institutional spaces, and shadowy cramped domestic interiors—does a good deal of its work. Looks like…an Azazel Jacobs picture! —A
Tora! Tora! Tora! (Fox)
Looks pretty hot. Good sound. Is it really as long and boring as I’m told it is, or as I might remember it as being from when I was a kid? Or: How bad can it be? Richard Fleischer directed it! Again: It’s no Follow Me Quietly. But: How bad can it be? Kinji Fukasaku directed the Japanese segments. Well, it’s no Yakuza Papers. From what I could tell when I could manage to remain engaged, this has aged into one of those WWII films you’re glad to have around, to remind you that you once lived in a world where, oh, I don’t know, n+1 didn’t exist, or something. Still. The damn thing IS pretty unimaginative in its exposition, e.g., ”Our meetings so far have been unproductive. He brings me proposals, I offer compromises. He brings me counterproposals, and so on.” Nice booklet though. And it DOES look good; even the stock footage seems like it’s been upgraded, although of course that’s not possible. —B+
The Tree of Life (Fox)
I think the editing rhythms get more familiar/parse better on repeated viewings, honest I do. And the voiceovers seem more…No? Not buying? All right, be that way, but seriously. I do very much love this film and I’m actually glad this Blu-ray is the theatrical cut and I don’t care if they never release a six-hour version because as far as I’m concerned THIS is The Tree of Life and it’s just fine. And this is a really beautiful Blu-ray of it, and the title card at the beginning, a more polite version of the opening of The Last Waltz, is advice worth heeding: the surround soundtrack is spectacular, room-shaking, the Wagner on the upcoming Melancholia disc, whenever that happens, will be hard-pressed to do better. —A+
Trois Couleurs (Three Colors) Trilogy (Criterion)
This has existed in such thoroughly indifferent DVD transfers for so damn long that the first and maybe most apt reaction to their Criterion-ization is a sigh of relief. Getting down to brass tacks, the reality of the new thing is again a miracle, albeit in a less spectacular/sensationalist register than the miracle of the Suzukis. To wit: Blue. Boy, this film has some of the best hospital corridor shots since the second Magnificent Obsession! Of all the films, this seems to have the most shifts in color value/approach. Looks as if for some complex combinations of shallow focus and close-up there were some filters used…this is all stabbing in the light, as it were, but I’d imagine that this film posed the biggest challenge to the transfer/post team, and they did an excellent job. White is grayer, dingier, exemplary cold winter-cum-Eastern European light, fantastically chilly. Red is gorgeous, the key sequence, when Trintignant says “the light is beautiful,” about 35 minutes in, sums the look up. Essential cinema in an essential package—I haven’t plumbed all the extras yet but they’re plentiful and sensitive. —A+
Way Down East (Kino Lorber)
I haven’t been in the mood to look too hard at the much-bruited Birth of a Nation, because that’s a film I really have to beat myself into dealing with. This, one of my favorite Griffiths, is much easier. Like The Charterhouse of Parma, it’s a surprising masterpiece of expanded and compressed time. I’ll get into that elsewhere, I suppose. Maybe when I do my doctorate. In any event, this Blu-ray is from the same MOMA restoration of the 1920 film, and it’s just wonderful, with great tints that the Blu-ray really boosts into a realm of transcendent cinematic beauty. And the rescue on the ice climax still thrills like nothing else, nearly 100 years later. Beautiful! —A+
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