With its mix of shocking violence and affecting drama, Brawl in Cell Block 99, out now on 4K UHD Blu-ray, pushes the prison movie genre to new heights.
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Eric Melin
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) returns to the artistic-cultural NYC world explored in Baumbach’s last two NYC dramedies, What is remarkable in this script is how much sympathy Baumbach generates for his characters, who in lesser hands would be one-dimensional brutes.
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Both Haneke and Huppert were clear on their intentions from the start, and this alignment produced a movie that holds up as one of the best arthouse films of the last 20 years, with a nearly unmatched quiet kind of intensity.
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La Poison is the reason I love Criterion. It’s a fresh POV from a filmmaker I knew next to nothing about, and it’s an angry, completely subversive movie about a married couple who’s so fed up with each other that they conspire to kill one another, unbeknownst to their spouse.
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‘Icarus’ is a thrilling, frighteningly relevant documentary that may go a long way toward explaining the danger of any state propaganda machine.
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Turn it Around: The Story of East Bay Punk’s real triumph is that it tells a cohesive story out of so many jagged parts, and does it with an energy that was reflective of that special moment in time.
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These features and this restoration of Michael Curtiz’s The Breaking Point make a great case for this overlooked film joining the discussion of classic-era Hollywood all-timers.
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Stalker, released originally in 1979, is a challenging piece of cinema. It’s a lengthy, talky quest for meaning, punctuated by long takes and huge moments of silence.
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Atomic Blonde’s script, adapted from a graphic novel, is too clever for its own good, with twists that are obvious from the get-go, and a whole lot of misplaced sympathy that its characters never earn.
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[Rating: Solid Rock Fist Up] Culture is always evolving. As the times change, so do attitudes. Sure, you can read all about the post-60s sexual revolution hangover, but what better way to experience this pivotal moment in time (or any, for that matter) than through something that was made in that moment? Something that gives […]
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Nicholas Ray would go on to make In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and most famously, A Rebel Without A Cause. The new Criterion Blu-ray of They Live by Night proves that his filmmaking was assured and iconoclastic right from the beginning.
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We already knew Ozu’s 1932 silent comedy ‘I Was Born, But…’ was a classic, but a new Criterion Blu-ray of that and his 1959 re-imagining ‘Good Morning’ may restore its reputation as well.
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Just like Fats Domino’s “Let’s Twist Again,” Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 can’t play the same familiar chords with lesser lyrics and expect the same results. It isn’t quite the revved-up rallying call for outcasts that the first one was, so this sequel is best approached with lower expectations.
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Made directly following Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, Rumble Fish has similar young adult coming-of-age source material, but Coppola’s approach to the material is very, very different. It’s out on Blu-ray from Criterion now.
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This Criterion Blu-ray from the new 2K restoration, and with all of it’s supplemental features, is the definitive version of the film. For anyone looking to add a single Hepburn/Tracy movie to their collection, this is the one.
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