MetroPulse Stories: DVD Reviews

'Higher Ground' Offers Sensitive Drama About Faith; 'The Woman' Serves Up Cheap Thrills

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:12:00 -0000

If you’re Meryl Streep, you get asked to play Margaret Thatcher. If you’re one of the tens of thousands of other actresses in Hollywood, you most often get asked to play a wife, a mom, a girlfriend, a best friend, a sister, a conquest, or just Dubiously Topless Woman No. 1.

'Essential Killing' and 'Hell and Back Again' Tackle a Tricky Subject: America's Wars in the Middle East

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:24:00 -0000

More reactionary American viewers will no doubt have a hard time with aspects of Essential Killing. Not only are a number of Americans/Westerners killed, but live Americans are typically portrayed as callous brutes fond of drugs and thudding bro metal—the kind of reductive vilifying that Islamic viewers of American films must be used to by now.

'Blackthorn' and 'Warrior' Revive Classic Hollywood Genres

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:56:00 -0000

The Western has been dying for more than 40 years, and maybe as a result, many of the best films in the genre in that time have an elegiac quality. Spanish writer/director Mateo Gil extends the long swan song with 2011’s Blackthorn by picking up at one of the spots where the Western began its decline: the freeze-frame shot of Paul Newman and Robert Redford facing a Bolivian Army fusillade at the end of 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Best of 2011: DVD

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:00:00 -0000

Our critic picks the best home video of the year.

Going Out on a Limb With 'The Future' and 'Tucker and Dale vs. Evil'

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:21:00 -0000

The Future is an intimate drama as well as a quirkfest. Miranda July captures the frustration of finding yourself in an ordinary life, and for all the film’s magic realism, the relationships feel real.

'Bellflower' and 'Putty Hill' Announce a New Generation of Indie Filmmakers

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:58:00 -0000

If you pay attention to the flood of little movies that spew forth from smaller distributors every year, sifting through the shameless exploitation, self-impressed indies, and genre rehashes, every now and then you spot something new. Not just newly released, but actually new, something that feels like a page is turning somewhere.

'Magic Trip' and 'Going Places': On the Road With Ken Kesey and Gerard Depardieu

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:43:00 -0000

Magic Trip manages the neat trick of offering a scrupulously coherent narrative of an unhinged time, while also visually exemplifying that deranged quality.

You Won’t Forget 'A Serbian Film' and 'The Island of Lost Souls,' No Matter How Hard You Try

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:39:00 -0000

It would be something of a comfort to be able to dismiss A Serbian Film as exploitation trash. But like recent outrage-cinema sensations Martyrs and The Human Centipede (First Sequence) before it, it’s a bit too smart and well-crafted for that.

Modern Horror: A Handy Guide to the Best 21st-Century Horror Movies You Probably Haven't Seen

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:57:00 -0000

If you like your monsters bare-chested and angsty, you’re in luck—Hollywood has defanged the vampire, neutered the werewolf, and served both up on a whiny silver platter. Those of us who would rather our monsters be, well, monstrous can have a hard time of it these days.

'Amer' and 'Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams' Give Shape to the Dark Side of Dreams

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:17:00 -0000

Projecting dreams and visions onscreen for mass consumption is a big part of the point of movies, period, and dreams—not to mention nightmares—are a standard device/lens for even the most prosaic cinema.

Three New Documentaries Provide Surprising Insight Into Their Subjects

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:56:00 -0000

As director Richard Press’ new documentary Bill Cunningham New York (Zeitgeist DVD) shows, turning the camera around on the photographer proves every bit as fascinating as the people he’s documented over the past 50 years.

Lee Chang-dong’s 'Poetry' and 'Secret Sunshine' Illustrate South Korea’s Quietly Intriguing Film Exports

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:45:00 -0000

South Korea boasts perhaps the most interesting film scene in the world right now, and part of the reason it’s so interesting is that, on the surface, it’s not that interesting.

Behind the Scenes: 'TrollHunter' and 'Road to Nowhere' Serve Up Fictional Accounts of Filmmaking

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:51:00 -0000

Things you may not know about Norway, if you are the average semiclueless American: First, it is quite gorgeous, in its spartan, Scandinavian way. Second, Norwegians have a thing about trolls, which function as half folkloric icon, half kitsch mascot. Third, the country has displayed a knack for accomplished, fun-loving genre flicks recently, first with 2009’s Nazi-zombie yarn Dead Snow, and now with André Øvredal’s TrollHunter (Magnet Releasing DVD and Blu-ray).

Stanley Kubrick's Artistic Precision Shows Up Fully Formed in 1956 Thriller 'The Killing'

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:24:00 -0000

The Criterion Collection recently re-released The Killing, Kubrick’s 1956 calling card, in typically pristine DVD and Blu-ray editions. It is a must-see, most especially if you only know Kubrick from his sprawling, glacial later work.

'Stake Land' and 'Cold Weather' Find New Life in Old Genres

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 15:25:00 -0000

It seems the only sort of horror more popular than the zombie-apocalypse flick these days is the vampire flick, and on its face, Stake Land (Dark Sky DVD and Blu-ray) looks a bit like a craven cash-grab combo platter of the two, with a side of The Road thrown in. Once writer/director Dan Mickle’s film gets going in earnest, however, it stakes out (ba-dum-tsst) its own patch of turf in the contempo gore-spattered landscape.

Death Stalks 'Uncle Boonmee' and 'The Sacrifice'

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:44:00 -0000

Uncle Boonmee fractures into multiple narratives, broken up into other times and other places and filmed in slightly different styles, united by a soul in common and by this cinematic account. It may not always be clear what’s going on, but what ultimately becomes scrutable is an overwhelming sense of the interconnectedness of not only Boonmee’s past lives, but also the lives of his family—of us all, really—close or distant, past and present, this world or another (not least through the medium of film itself).

'13 Assassins' and 'Tetsuo: Bullet Man' Explore the Limits of Genre Filmmaking

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:06:00 -0000

After years of pushing contemporary Japanese cinema into new realms of wrong with films such as Audition and Ichi the Killer, Takashi Miike reaches back to chanbara, the venerable samurai film that most Americans probably think of when they think of Japanese cinema.

'The Housemaid' Rises Above Its Erotic Thriller Conventions

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:05:00 -0000

The trailer for 2010 South Korean film The Housemaid (MPI DVD) makes it look like the kind of late-night Cinemax “erotic thriller” melodrama of which the world needs no more. But writer/director Im Sang-soon and his film have a lot more in mind than lurid titillation.

'70s Westerns 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' and 'Ulzana's Raid' Echo the Unease of the Vietnam War

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:43:00 -0000

In the 1970s, the Western was dying. The sociocultural revolutions of the ’60s had left the old white hat/black hat staple of the Hollywood cinema looking quaint, and even Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah couldn’t stave off sclerosis. But as it happens, the Western was one of the first routes by which filmmakers began to address one of those ’60s flashpoints—the Vietnam War—onscreen, years before it, too, became something of a staple. Two late-period Western classics recently made available again for home video not only provide ample six-gun kicks, they show how, once again, the movies are often about more than the stories themselves.

'Barry Lyndon' and 'Solaris' Highlight a Wave of New Releases That Reward Patience

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:48:00 -0000

Ever wonder why most movies are between an hour and a half and two hours long? Undoubtedly there’s a commercial element that keeps movie times in that ballpark: Once a film stretches toward the 150-minute mark or beyond, movie theaters have trouble scheduling enough showings in an evening to make back the rental fee. Some might say that 90 minutes is a “natural” length for most people to sit through even a good story. But there are films that make a virtue of stretching out, including some classic titles boasting new Blu-ray and/or DVD editions.