MetroPulse Stories: DVD Reviews

'Scum' and 'Life Is Sweet' Serve Up Divergent Views of the British Working Class

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:56:00 -0000

Scum and Life Is Sweet, a pair of older British films out now in new video editions, offer two contrasting and indelible visions of that most endlessly gawkable aspect of British life—its working class.

Haskel Wexler Blurs Fact and Fiction in 'Medium Cool'

Wed, 29 May 2013 16:01:00 -0000

Intermittently out of circulation since its 1969 debut, Medium Cool returns in a typically luxe new Criterion DVD/Blu-ray edition, and, despite some of its dated aspects, it retains a provocativeness as bright and pungent as a fresh coat of paint.

Shane Carruth's Follows 'Primer' With the Perplexing But Rewarding 'Upstream Color'

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:11:00 -0000

That Upstream Color even exists represents both a triumph and a rebuke to the mainstream film-production system that couldn’t spring for a work this daring and, for all its polish, most likely inexpensive.

'Repo Man'’s Class Anger Still Seethes Almost 30 Years Later

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:38:00 -0000

Without putting too much weight or importance behind what a bunch of now-elderly former youths once wanted to express, one of the key things that keeps the spirit of punk alive, or at least on life support, is class anger. And class anger is one of the key things that animates writer/director Alex Cox’s 1984 Repo Man.

Film Critic and Documentarian Mark Cousins Explores a Very Personal 'Story of Film'

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:08:00 -0000

Most people who’ve been halfway paying attention know the story of film, or at least some version of it. Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, jerky silents, talkies, glossy Hollywood studios, the New Wave, the ’70s, Star Wars, indies, CGI, something like that. Whether gleaned from a college class or picked up along the way, it’s a serviceable outline, and one that thumbnails the rudiments of Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film (Music Box DVD and streaming) quite nicely. But in adapting his book of the same name, Cousins goes deeper, and, as one might expect for a video essay that spans 15 hour-long episodes, far, far wider.

Terence Malick’s 40-Year-Old 'Badlands' Well Suited for the 21st Century

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:52:00 -0000
Terrence Malick’s trademark lyricism was in full bloom in Badlands, his very first film, and many of his auteurial touches well established. But the Criterion Collection’s new DVD/Blu-ray issue reintroduces a film that’s far flintier and more fraught than Malick’s current rep suggests, and a film surprisingly well-suited to the 21st century.

Getting Lost With 'The Loneliest Planet' and 'Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow'

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:07:00 -0000
As writer/director Julia Loktev’s elliptical style and carefully parsed feed of information telegraph, the journey at the center of The Loneliest Planet (MPI DVD, download, and streaming) isn’t merely geographical, and the perils aren’t confined to getting lost.

Leos Carax Returns With the Baffling and Enigmatic 'Holy Motors'

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:58:00 -0000
Carax takes what may very well have started off as a hodgepodge of ideas and weaves them together into a tantalizingly cohesive whole, despite the constant puckish wrong-footing and tangents.

'Dredd' and Takashi Miike offer bloody upgrades

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:48:00 -0000
Dredd (Lionsgate) probably shouldn’t be any fun. It is an avowed attempt to undo the damage done to the vintage sci-fi comic’s rep by Judge Dredd, the hacktacular 1995 Sylvester Stallone vehicle, and it does so by doubling down on the dour.

'Detropia' and 'Five Broken Cameras' Offer Intimate Portraits of Communities in Decline and Conflict

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:50:00 -0000
There are more than 100,000 homes standing vacant in the city of Detroit, many of them fallen into what can only be characterized as ruin. Combined with equally vast tracts of crumbling industrial infrastructure, these acres of shambles have come to function as the epicenter of “ruin porn,” documented and promoted by photographers, gawked at on the Web by urban- and suburbanites the world over, and even occasionally toured in person by curious outsiders, like the two young Swiss tourists who show up in Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s new documentary Detropia (Docurama). While the woman who fills their order at a coffee shop is polite, it’s also clear that she regards their interest in Detroit’s “decay” as, well, less than polite. After all, she lives there, along with about 700,000 others, and Ewing and Grady’s film is as much about the people who constitute Detroit as it is about the city’s physical and economic wreckage.

'Compliance' and the Rediscovered 'Wake in Fright' Depict Life Under Extreme Conditions

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:48:00 -0000
Compliance (Magnolia) would be a 15-minute short without the not-uncommon quality that gives it its title. Based (alarmingly closely) on actual events, writer/director Craig Zobel’s new film aims to get at the get-along/go-along relationship we have with power, and the dangers of that dynamic.

'Looper' Seems Behind the Times, But 'Cosmopolis' Approaches Timelessness

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:49:00 -0000
Perhaps it’s a function of generation, but I remain fascinated by the short period during which Charlton Heston was Hollywood’s Man of the Future, its übermensch of dystopia. Maybe it was simply the success of The Planet of the Apes (1968) that steered studios and the crag-like old-school star mutually toward scripts such as The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973), but what emerged was a fairly durable triptych of films that also read as elegies for classic postwar Golden Age culture as it succumbed to nuclear madness, hippies, and libertinism. Nothing supports that idea more than the presence of the great trundling automaton that was Heston, a creature of red meat and Scotch who was out of place (onscreen, at least) in any time after 1965.

The Best Home Video of 2012

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 22:00:00 -0000
Our critic picks the best DVD, Blu-Ray, and streaming choices of the year.

Time-Travel Thriller 'Sound of My Voice' Hits the Wrong Notes

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 15:00:00 -0000
Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) are skeptical. They’ve heard about the ethereal blonde woman drawing followers to a suburban California basement, but they can’t believe she’s anything but a sham, a cult leader sucking in the gullible, the weak-minded, the secretly desperate. They plan to infiltrate the cult, secretly record the goings on, and expose it all to the world via a documentary. But of course, Sound of My Voice (20th Century Fox DVD, Blu-ray, streaming, and download) is itself a movie, right? And thus we know it’s likely that the mystery woman will make it harder on the interlopers than they expect, or that Peter and Lorna will make it harder on themselves.

A New Criterion Edition Sparks Reconsideration of 'Heaven’s Gate'

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:46:00 -0000
For a generation of filmgoers, the very title is synonymous with “bloated debacle.”

It’s the Right Time for a New Edition of Godard’s Biting, Class-Conscious Comedy 'Weekend'

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:52:00 -0000
If there was ever a time for Weekend to reappear, it’s our recessionary, Occupied era.

Lives of the Artists: Two New Docs Offer Insight Into the Creative Life

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 15:12:00 -0000
In many ways, Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present (Music Box DVD) is a film about watching a woman sit nonreactive, silent, motionless in front of a parade of strangers for hours, for weeks, for months. But Matthew Akers’ new documentary is also about the woman who is willing to attempt such a feat, and whose life of hardship and performance and rigor and will and personal growth prepared her to carry it through. In both respects, it is an engrossing experience that both combines and outstrips the usual fictional biopic and the self-serious artist doc.

The Criterion Collection Stretches the Boundaries of Classic Cinema

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 16:24:00 -0000
What makes a classic film a classic? Landing on some critic’s list? Currency among cinephiles over time? One possible definition is inclusion in the Criterion Collection, the movie-nerd benchmark for quality and erudition.

'Beyond the Black Rainbow' Is More Than Just a Stylish Tribute to ’80s Horror and Sci-Fi

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 15:06:00 -0000
The stark, chromatic décor and the pulsing synth score telegraph the days when future visions were transmitted via VHS cassette, or maybe expensive laserdisc. But then this isn’t quite like any 1983 that ever existed on film, much less anything resembling the actual early Reagan presidency. This is more a 1983 of the mind, and it is a singular place to spend two hours.

Two Different Approaches To Murder: 'The Snowtown Murders' and 'Kill List'

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 13:47:00 -0000
Poverty, broken windows, broken family structures, substance abuse—you know the story. As The Snowtown Murders unfolds, this based-on-actual-events tale takes an even more disturbing turn. Casual murder as a fact of life gets an altogether more facile rendering in Kill List.