It took so long for Hollywood to finally find a way to harness the unique mix of martial arts mastery, dance-like grace, playful humor, and giddy charm that had made Jackie Chan a superstar throughout the rest of the world that he was almost too old to show off the extent of his physical prowess […]
A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost walk into a bar. No, it’s not a joke, it’s a scene in the BBC series Being Human, a supernatural drama about a trio of “monsters” sharing an apartment in Bristol and trying to live as humans despite the challenges to normal life. Mitchell (Aidan Turner), once the […]
Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy (Criterion). Roberto Rossellini had been a journeyman director working within Mussolini’s Italian film industry when he redefined his career and all but inaugurated the neo-realist movement with this trio of films made at the end of World War II. Though he was no partisan, he started working on Rome Open City […]
Zaza (Kino Lorber) Gloria Swanson plays the music hall star Zaza (1923), Allan Dwan’s spirited silent film adaptation of the 19th century play by Pierre Berton and Charles Simon. This is “the Zaza of today,” reads the introduction, a 20th century version with Swanson as the temperamental star attraction of the top music hall in […]
Playing for Time (1980), based on the memoir by Holocaust survivor Fania Fénelon and scripted for television by Arthur Miller, arrived a couple years after the excellent 1978 mini-series Holocaust to present a far more intimate drama and one of the most powerful TV events of its era. Vanessa Redgrave was a controversial choice to […]
All six Pink Panther features directed by Blake Edwards and starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau are featured in this six-disc Blu-ray collection, four of them making their respective Blu-ray debuts. Clouseau was but a supporting character in The Pink Panther (1963), a comic heist film with David Niven as the legendary jewel thief “the […]
Death Line (aka Raw Meat) (1972) – Gary Sherman directs this underrated (and for years largely unseen) British horror film about the last survivor of a literal underground clan (trapped in a subway construction cave in a century before) who emerges from his cave to hunt for food on the London Underground. Yes, it’s a […]
When director James Nguyen toured with his absurdly inept no-budget horror film to Britain, it was introduced to the audience as “A genuine American phenomenon.” I don’t know if I should take pride or feel insulted by the description. Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2011) is indeed a phenomenon, a midnight movie with a devoted following […]
Paterson (2016) is the name of Adam Driver’s character, a blue collar city bus driver; the location, Paterson, NJ; and a reference to a book of poetry by William Carlos Williams, a son of Paterson (the city) and the favorite poet of Paterson (the man), who is also a poet. Got it? Paterson pens his […]
Sword Master (Hong Kong, 2016) – Before he stepped behind the camera, director Derek Yee was the star of scores of martial arts dramas, among them the 1977 Shaw Brothers epic Death Duel. He directs the remake, which is produced by Tsui Hark, which evokes the romantic chivalry of the wuxia genre in a lavish, […]
