8 years ago
DVD/Streaming (10 posts found)
DVD Review: “Run of the Arrow”
The problem with race as a subject in Hollywood is that the complexities of systemic oppression are fundamentally incompatible with the simplification necessary for narrative-driven filmmaking, where the priority of story resolution often results in laughably ...
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Blu-ray Review: “McFarland, USA”
In the annals of White People Learn That Other Cultures Besides Theirs Exist, Isn’t That Crazy? films, McFarland, USA is neither the best nor the worst. It’s the latest entry in the Disney live-action subgenre of sports movies based on true stories, and is rou...
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Blu-ray Review: “Mad Max”
The innovations of Mad Max have been so thoroughly ripped off that it’s easy to insufficiently appreciate the freshness of its grim, primitive futurism. Not the first post-apocalyptic movie, George Miller’s debut nonetheless stands out for the plausibility of ...
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Blu-ray Review: “Ladyhawke”
Ladyhawke is a baffling film. It begins with Matthew Broderick’s scamp of a thief, Philippe Gaston, worming his way through the mud walls of a prison’s bowels to escape into a sewer, and it truly settles on a plot when he stumbles across two shapeshifting love...
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DVD Review: “Strange Magic”
The film Strange Magic answers two age-old questions. First, what would happen if George Lucas made a movie inspired by what was on his iPod? And second, what would happen if George Lucas refused to sell Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company unless they release...
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Blu-ray Review: “42nd Street”
Movies about backstage drama tend to fall into one of two emotional categories: awestruck wonder and cynical self-martyrdom. Classic behind-the-scenes melodramas and comedies burst with the joy of being in a boom industry in which even the most nobly starving ...
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Blu-ray Review: “Into the Woods”
Into the Woods, on the stage, is a lovely and mature tale about accepting responsibility in the darkest of circumstances, filtered through some of the most memorable characters of storybook lore. The film version is less successful at communicating the message...
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Blu-ray Review: “Big Hero 6”
The magic of the newly minted Best Animated Feature Oscar winner Big Hero 6 is that it finds a way to be exciting, clever, and genuinely emotional in spite of being wholly inevitable. One of the film’s directors, Don Hall, mentions in one of this Blu-ray’s spe...
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Blu-ray Review: “Don’t Look Now”
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now presents its world of grief as something both recognizable and sympathetic, but it’s also one that becomes more frighteningly askew and enigmatic with each passing minute. Endlessly resisting the urge to move forward and backward ...
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Blu-ray Review: “Every Man for Himself”
Jean-Luc Godard’s so-called “second first film” isn’t really a patented return to zero, even if it does betray flashes of modern and postmodern references to Breathless. Techniques honed on video crop up throughout, and the tone is clearly that of an older, mo...
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