The extras may be recycled, but Hitchcock’s view of fragile normalcy is seminal viewing.
This late-period Hitchcock deserves better packaging, but a masterpiece is still a masterpiece.
Peripheral amusements aside, this new Panther remains defanged and more shit-brown than pink.
Noted upon its original release for a documentary style readily linked to Italian neorealism, Vidas Secas now seems relentlessly subjective.
Extras may be as arid as the backlands, but Santos’s poetically stark journey toward awareness is an essential one.
This tepid feel-gooder follows a virtually identical arc of ethnic mistaken-identity comedy.
A new kind of cinema envisioned as the anti-Amadeus. Rock on.
Straub-Huillet’s professed aim was to use the 18th-century composer’s music “not as accompaniment but as esthetic material.”
What wonders the pungent nastiness of film noir could do to flavorless craftsmen.
Seven Men from Now is the first and, in many ways, the purest of the “Ranown” westerns, and the template for the ensuing films.
Not dark enough, but a Corner still worth a stroll.
As good an introduction to a modest master as you can imagine.
Peace may lie at the end of an umbilical cord, but these women are more interesting as anguished bitches than nurturing mamas.
Loving Couples executes subversive surgery on oppressive social orders only to switch to the more comfy affirmation that the universe belongs to mothers.
Theo Angelopoulos’s compositions modulate from lyrical to brutal.
Pensive, tender, unforgettable.
Doing justice to an essential film, this two-disc edition is a keeper for Mario Bava fans.
This grand film shares with Five Dolls for an August Moon and Bay of Blood a crystallization of Mario Bava’s worldview.
Scarcely earth-shattering, Sky High is still a better kiddie flick than Chicken Little.
It’s not for nothing that de Antonio in the end locates McCarthy’s fall as the ultimate loss of audience.