IFC's Video on Demand Connects Niche Movies and Their Audiences
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
If you have digital cable, you’ve probably already discovered the joys of the “on-demand” option, calling up last week’s episode of Mad Men or a just-out-of-theaters Hollywood blockbuster whenever the fancy strikes. But some of the smaller (and more interesting) theatrical film distributors are using video on demand to turn your set into an elite cinema outlet. Full story »
Warner Tries to Keep Up With Technology—and Beat Bootleggers—With On-Demand Archive
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
While it isn’t tough to find a Blu-ray copy of Avatar, more marginal titles are suffering as studios let them fall out of print or hold off on issuing them in the first place. After all, thousands of film nerds may want to see a certain film, but if the studio that owns the rights isn’t confident it can sell, say, 20,000 DVDs (a typical profit point on an older title), it’s a money-losing proposition to prep and manufacture them. Full story »
Three Interlocked Stories Pay Homage to the Seedy Side of Memphis in Jim Jarmusch's 'Mystery Train'
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Mystery Train hasn’t aged well, exactly, but it hasn’t aged poorly, either. Recently given the full Criterion Collection treatment on DVD and Blu-ray like a lost classic, it seems like exactly what it seemed like during its first run: a charming, quirky, but inert film, full of odd characters who never really get up to much other than provoke a few wry laughs. Full story »
'The Sun' and 'Tony Manero' Examine Two Unlikely Identities
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
The last living descendent of the sun goddess is mildly unappealing. He is slight and awkward and pallid and ridden with tics, most notably in his prominent lips, which flex almost constantly in a way reminiscent of both a fish’s pucker and a horse’s peeled-back smile. He appears depressive, though that could be, like his pallor, a side effect of living underground. And perhaps most unappealing of all, he carries an air of impenetrable obliviousness, although it’s hard to blame him too much for that. Full story »
Good-Bad or Just Bad? What's Happened to B-Movies?
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
What happened to good-bad movies? One must assume they still exist, but few B-movies these days boast that magic blend of crazed idea and crazed execution. The people who make genre films in Hollywood now are perhaps more competent that their predecessors in the ’80s, ’70s, and ’60s, but they seem less idiosyncratically inspired, and the movies tend to follow suit. Full story »
Ang Lee's New Director's Cut of Ride With the Devil Uncovers a Lost Classic
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
If you haven’t seen Ride With the Devil, you’re in good company. The 1999 Civil War epic with Southern sympathies starring a pre-Spider-Man Tobey Maguire failed miserably at the box office, but many of those who did see it, either during its first run or on home video, came away fans, and their devotion has been vindicated by the issue of a new director’s cut on Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray. Now you have a chance to see what you missed: a lost contemporary classic. Full story »
Disgrace and 35 Shots of Rum Explore the Relationships Between Fathers and Daughters
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
John Malkovich is almost too perfect for the part of Disgrace’s David Lurie. His patina of erudition, his reptilian eroticism, and the air of amoral self-absorption he so often embodies onscreen all fit the protagonist of Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel like a bespoke suit, but putting him at the center of a Job-like two-hour travail almost makes you long for someone slightly more likeable to watch suffer. Full story »
Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage Reboot 1992 Cult Classic Bad Lieutenant in New Orleans
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
It sounded like a disaster at green-light stage: Nicolas Cage, the loosest Hollywood cannon since Marlon Brando careened across the decks on a regular basis, cast in a remake/reboot of director Abel Ferrara’s 1992 post-grindhouse urban drama Bad Lieutenant that absolutely no one was crying out for, saddled with the unlikely/unwieldy title Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Full story »
John Woo's Red Cliff Is Visually Impressive, But The Killer Is Better
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
There is nothing small about Red Cliff, John Woo’s first Chinese movie since 1992. Even cut down for American audiences from the two-part, nearly five-hour Chinese, it clocks in at 148 minutes. Shooting in China allowed Woo to afford to field thousands of extras to portray the troops of the various massive armies that collided in the historic Battle of Red Cliffs along the Yangtze River in the third century A.D. Enormous fleets of ships, a series of huge battles, enough pyrotechnics to be visible from space—the scale here is rarely less than gargantuan. Full story »
Big-Budget Remakes Prompt DVD Reissues of The Crazies and Clash of the Titans
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
We have movies based on novels, on plays, on musicals, on musicals based on movies (Hairspray), on comic books, on video games, on glorified self-help books (He’s Just Not That Into You), and yet somehow we reserve special suspicion for movies based on other movies. Full story »
Three Continental Filmmakers Show Their Gritty Sides With Revanche, Flame and Citron, and Hunger
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Many American moviegoers would no sooner rent a foreign film than they’d drive a Citroen: too effete, too peculiar, not red-blooded enough. But over the past decade or so, that sort of prejudice has become harder and harder to maintain if you’ve been paying attention. Indeed, it’s almost easier to find a gritty Euro film on domestic DVD racks these days than the more stereotypical elliptical musings. Full story »
Lola Montes and Bright Star Bring the 19th Century to Vibrant Life
Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010
Director Max Ophüls’ 1955 mutilated masterpiece Lola Montes re-emerges lavishly restored on Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray at a serendipitous time. While cocaine, sex tapes, and reality shows were unknown in 19th-century Europe, the real-life Lola Montez was the great-great-grandmother of today’s tabloid queens, only modestly talented but famous for her lovers and her impunities. Full story »
This Is It and Soul Power Shed Light on Michael Jackson and an All-Star Soul Concert in Africa
Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010
By far the weirdest thing about This Is It (Sony), Michael Jackson’s posthumous kinda/sorta concert film, is that it was never supposed to be a film at all. Full story »
Sam Rockwell ("Moon") and Tilda Swinton ("Julia") Make a Pair of Good Films Great
Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010
It’d probably take billions to get to the moon these days, but Duncan Jones manages to take you there for a reported $5 million. With a handful of functional-looking corridors and bays, some blinking instrument panels, and a fleet of miniatures, he evokes a lunar surface mine, complete with automated mining machines throwing off arching debris that lands in soft plops of moon dust. But even James Cameron understands that even the most otherworldly world only works on a movie screen because it resonates with the one we know, and undoubtedly the best money Jones spent for his debut Moon (Sony) was hiring Sam Rockwell. Full story »
Star-Studded Documentary "It Might Get Loud" Explores the Magic and Mystery of the Electric Guitar
Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010
The mysterious connection between man, instrument, and the sound they make together manifests itself in Davis Guggenheim's It Might Get Loud, and it’s no surprise that it comes at the hand of Page, a rock god if there ever was such a thing and the not-so-secret star of the show. Full story »