8 years ago
DVD/Streaming (10 posts found)
DVD Review: “Wind Across the Everglades”
Wind Across the Everglades opens with a train of progress barreling toward the southeastern tip of the United States, to the blossoming city of Miami. Yet the blend of hissing steam engines and screaming birds on the soundtrack announces, along with the narrat...
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“Inside Out” Stands Out On Blu-ray
It’s been a very good year for Pixar; November, in particular, is a banner month for the studio. In a few weeks’ time, just before Thanksgiving, the animation studio is releasing its second film this year, The Good Dinosaur, a first in its history. That releas...
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Blu-ray Review: “Tomorrowland”
Tomorrowland is an immensely frustrating film, precisely because it gets so many things right.. As directed by Brad Bird, Tomorrowland is a bright, well-paced, visually intriguing, and complex spectacle. In many ways, it feels like a Brad Bird film in that its...
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In “The Brood,” Even Cronenberg’s Basics are Intricate
It’s a testament to the heady complexity of the later works of Canada’s proudest son David Cronenberg that a film as fully realized as 1979’s The Brood would be considered one of the basics of his deep filmography. He’s moved through so many phases as a stylis...
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Watching “Aladdin” on Blu-ray Is Looking At A Whole New World
At the movies, 1992 was the year of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, of Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, of Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. But the biggest movie of the year was Aladdin, outgrossing even the widely anticipated sequel to Home Alone. It’s not u...
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Blu-ray Review: “My Own Private Idaho”
To watch My Own Private Idaho (1991) is to bask in the freedom and horror of the open road and its unpredictable rhythms and patterns. Molded by an imperfect, rough conceit, writer-director Gus Van Sant’s third directorial effort stands as an obvious precursor...
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Blu-ray Review: “Black Coal, Thin Ice”
Black Coal, Thin Ice is noir stripped so bare that its stark procedural lapses into the abstract, where bleached daytime shots create a purgatory that lapses into the hell of the night, where monochrome contrasts of black skies and icy streets are given a sini...
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Blu-ray Review: “Cinderella”
We have entered a brave new world of Disney live-action filmmaking, which you can choose to take literally or ironically depending on your point of view. Disney’s recent, splashy re-do of Cinderella is the latest entry in what appears to be an expansive genre ...
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Blu-ray Review: “Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection”
The foundation for the Walt Disney Company is the short film. It’s easy to forget this simple fact--too often encapsulated in the quote from Disney himself that “it all started with a mouse”--because Disney now owns roughly 80% of our childhoods in the form of...
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Blu-ray Review: “The Hunger”
Tony Scott foregrounds the aesthetic context for his vampire-movie debut The Hunger before the first images roll. Over introductory credits comes the sound of goth outfit Bauhaus striking up their biggest hit, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” as the frame fades up on fron...
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