Archive for category: DVD
5 February, 2010 (17:06) | DVD, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Just in this week on the Criterion website: Criterion is losing the rights a number of titles in their collection in March. (See the original post on Criterion Currents here.)
The home video rights to a number of films from the StudioCanal library will go to Lionsgate at the end of March. The Criterion editions will [...]
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3 January, 2010 (14:05) | DVD, by Sean Axmaker, lists | By: Sean Axmaker
I’m winding down my year in DVD coverage with this highly subjective survey of the box sets of 2009 that brought new titles to DVD (no collections of previously released titles in new packages here). To be clear, I didn’t see every set that came along, or even every film in those that [...]
Tags: Best of 2009 | No comments
31 December, 2009 (07:15) | DVD, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
My oh my how spoiled we get. Once upon a time, cult hounds would hunt through neighborhood video stores to uncover off-brand VHS releases of obscure Italian horror films and dubbed editions of other foreign movies, which we would devour no matter how grainy the transfer or censored the print. Now, more [...]
Tags: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Andrzej Zulawski, Attraction, Cairo Station, Deadly Sweet, Gradiva, Hal Ashby, L'important c'est d'aimer, L'Urlo, Lookin' to Get Out, Nerosubianco, The Howl, The Important Thing is to Love, Tinto Brass, Youseff Chahine | No comments
29 December, 2009 (07:10) | DVD, Television, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
What I love about TV on DVD is the sense of discovery, of rediscovery and celebration of great television from all eras. You’ll not find Lost or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles or even The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency on this list. Those shows and other hit series and cult [...]
Tags: Children of Earth, Dollhouse, Genesis II, It's Garry Shandling's Show, Life on Mars, Marty, Patterns, Planet Earth, Playing Shakespeare, Sesame Street, Sons Of Anarchy, The Comedian, The Golden Age Of Television, The Middleman, Torchwood | No comments
26 December, 2009 (07:30) | DVD, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
I’ve done my “Best of 2009 on DVD and Blu-ray” list for MSN, which features the usual mix of films old and new and packages creative, lavish and otherwise really, really cool. Here I’d like to do something a little different. This isn’t about the greatest transfers, the most splendiferous supplements, the [...]
Tags: A Matter of Life and Death, Best of 2009, Death In The Garden, Gabriel Over the White House, Gumshoe, Husbands, Jeanne Dielman 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles, La Mort En Ce Jardin, Reign of Terror, Stairway to Heaven, The Black Book, The Exiles, The Man I Love, The Tall Target, Wise Blood | No comments
30 October, 2009 (22:27) | DVD, Horror, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Instead of the usual “best of” countdown of familiar classics, here’s a look at some of the more interesting horrors that have arrived on DVD within the last year. (Reviews originally published on seanax.com)
Direct to DVD:
The Hills Run Red (Warner) is the rare self-aware horror by an unabashed fan of the genre [...]
Tags: 13 Frightened Girls, Audition, Fermat's Room, Frankenstein 1970, Homicidal, Left Bank, Mad Monster Party?, Mr. Sardonicus, Night Of The Creeps, Repulsion, The Burrowers, The Hills Run Red, The Midnight Meat Train, The Tingler, The Walking Dead, Trick 'r Treat, [REC] | No comments
24 August, 2009 (17:18) | DVD, Film Noir, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
“A singular work in film history,” begins the description on back of the case of Criterion’s long-awaited DVD release of Chantal Akerman’s astounding 1975 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. That is no hyperbole. Jeanne Dielman is a painstaking, excruciatingly exacting [...]
Tags: A Colt Is My Passport, Chantal Akerman, Cruel Gun Story, Delphine Seyrig, I Am Waiting, Jeanne Dielman, Nikkatsu Noir, Rusty Knife, Seijun Suzuki, Take Aim at the Police Van | No comments
19 August, 2009 (15:28) | DVD, Science Fiction, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection
Though his name is conspicuously absent from the cover, the Icon of Sci-Fi celebrated in Sony’s three-disc set is Ishiro Honda, the prolific director of the original Godzilla and a legendary run of giant monster movies. This collection from Sony highlights his science fiction output with the stateside DVD debuts of [...]
Tags: Battle in Outer Space, Husbands, Ishiro Honda, Jacques Tati, John Cassavetes, Mothra, Playtime, The H-Man | No comments
3 July, 2009 (17:25) | Claude Chabrol, DVD, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Consider this a post-script to Ten Days’ Wonder: The Claude Chabrol Blogathon: your guide to revisiting Chabrol on DVD (U.S. DVD releases only). More than half of Chabrol’s over 50 features have been released to DVD stateside, thanks in large part to such labels as Kino, Kimstim, Pathfinder and First Run, with [...]
Tags: A Double Tour, Comedy Of Power, Cop Au Vin, Eye of Vichy, Flower of Evil, Innocents with Dirty Hands, Inspecteur Lavardin, La Ceremonie, La Femme infidèle, La Route de Corinthe, La Rupture, L’Enfer, Le Boucher, Le cri du hibou, Les Biches, Les Bonnes Femmes, Les Innocent aux Mains Sale, M. le Maudit, Madame Bovary, Masques, Merci Pour le Chocolat, Nada, Poulet au vinaigre, Que le bete meure, Six in Paris, Story of Women, Ten Days’ Wonder, The Bridesmaid, The Cry of the Owl, The Pleasure Party, The Swindle, This Man Must Die, Une Partie de Plaisir, Violette, Who's Got the Black Box? | No comments
17 June, 2009 (17:17) | DVD, Ingmar Bergman, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Arguably the most famous of Ingmar Bergman’s films and certainly his most iconic, The Seventh Seal is Bergman at his most allegorical. Max von Sydow, young and blond and heroic, is a disillusioned knight returned from the Crusades in a state of spiritual desperation: his faith has been shaken by senseless [...]
Tags: The Seventh Seal | No comments
26 May, 2009 (01:20) | Animation, DVD, David Cronenberg, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
M Butterfly (Warner)
Warner Home Video releases a quartet of DVD debuts, all with troubled critical histories: loved by some, disliked by many, largely ignored by most. And that’s what makes their arrivals so interesting: it gives us a chance, an excuse even, to revisit the films. That said, I’m up to my eyeballs in the [...]
Tags: David Cronenberg, Jonathan Frakes, Leonard Nimoy, M Butterfly, Mamoru Oshii, Patrick Stewart, Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection, The Captain's Summit, The Sky Crawlers, Whoopi Goldberg, William Shatner | No comments
19 May, 2009 (00:47) | DVD, David Cronenberg, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! (Kino)
It may not be the best film of the week but this early Seijun Suzuki yakuza potboiler certainly sports the greatest title I’ve seen flash across my flatscreen all year: Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards! The film, starring a cocky and cool Jo Shishido [...]
Tags: Crimes of the Future, Detective Bureau 2-3, Fast Company, Jo Shishido, KazuhikoYamaguchi, Meiko Kaji, Seijun Suzuki, Stereo, Wandering Ginza Butterfly | No comments
12 May, 2009 (00:01) | DVD, Documentary, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Of Time and the City (Strand)
If Liverpool did not exist, it would have to be invented. And in some ways, that’s what Terence Davies does in his cinematic essay, a personal remembrance of a city that he recalls from his ambivalent perspective of troubled affection and critical commentary. Freely mixing history and [...]
Tags: Alexander Korda's Private Lives, Of Time and the City, Rembrandt, Robert Mark Kamen, Taken, Terence Davies, The Private Life of Henry VIII | 1 comment
4 May, 2009 (18:17) | DVD, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Wendy and Lucy (Oscilloscope)
Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, a road movie that captured both the possibility and freedom of the weekend road trip and the tensions of anxieties of old friends who reunite only to find they have nothing in common anymore (not to mention the distinct shades and textures of Oregon’s backroads), [...]
Tags: Enchanted April, Kelly Reichardt, Mike Newell, The Curious Birth of Benjamin Button, Wendy and Lucy | No comments
27 April, 2009 (17:46) | DVD, Horror, Science Fiction, Television, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker
Deadly Sweet (Cult Epics)
Shot in England by an Italian director with a French leading man and a Swedish sex-doll leading lady (both dubbed into Italian), Deadly Sweet is advertised as a giallo (an Italian horror with cruel and flamboyant murders) but is really a vague murder mystery romp directed as a pop-art [...]
Tags: Barbara Steele, Deadly Sweet, giallo, JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mabrouk El Mechri, Michael Reeves, Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series Season One, The She-Beast, Tinto Brass | 1 comment