Implausible Psycho: “We Need to Talk About Kevin”
Mark Fisher reviews Lynne Ramsay’s film adaptation of Lionel Schriver’s novel about teenage murder, We Need to Talk About Kevin
All posts tagged: Blu-ray/DVD Reviews
By Herself: “The Iron Lady”
Mark Fisher reviews The Iron Lady and discusses the politics of this biopic of a paradoxical Prime Minister.
Going Nowhere: “The Descendants” and “Young Adult”
Mark Fisher reviews Alexander Payne’s The Descendants and Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, two films about journeys that end in uncertainty rather than self-discovery.
Rare Westerns from the Archive
Edward Buscombe reviews The West, 1898–1938, the latest boxed set from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Todd Haynes’s “Poison” Reconsidered
Poison tells three tales about ostracism. In “Horror,” an experimental serum turns an overzealous scientist into a plague-carrier; this storyline is filmed in the style of trashy “psychotronic” B-movies such as Glen or Glenda and Carnival of Souls with a touch also of Samuel Fuller…
Three Endings
When he saw the clouds moving around the mountain like a wheel and had the cameraman take several shots of them, Abel Gance must have been ecstatic.
Dovzhenko: Folk Tale and Revolution
Like Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), Alexander Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora (1928) is an amazing early work that dropped out of sight for many years.
Vertov’s World
“Soviet cinema is currently experiencing an unforgettable turning point,” wrote Dziga Vertov in 1926, in an April 12 letter . . . Judging by the two short films, A Sixth Part of the World (1926) and The Eleventh Year (1928), Vertov was doing little more than stating the truth.
The H-Man vs Liquid Human
I remember seeing The H-ManThe H-Man on television one late evening in early adolescence; it was a silly specimen of an already cheesy 1950s genre, the “made in Japan” sci-fi/horror film . . . But a DVD explosion has caused The H-Man to mutate into a beautiful and genuinely harrowing new form:
Le Plaisir: “The Mask” and “The Model”
Max Ophuls’s Le Plaisir (1952) has been out of circulation for much too long. It has at last reemerged on DVD, a fine release from Criterion now joining Second Sight’s U.K. edition. Its appearance ends a deprivation and is an occasion of joy.