Notizie

The supposed demise of physical media has been well covered and long lamented, with each passing year bringing reports of yet another nail in the coffin of the once flourishing DVD and Blu-ray market. Fall 2023 brought a double whammy of bad news: Netflix shipped its final discs to customers before closing up its DVD department for good, and a month later, Best Buy announced that it would be phasing out the sale of physical media. Yet, while DVDs are no longer the massive revenue generator for studios that they were throughout the first decade of the 2000s, it has never been a better time to be a physical media enthusiast. Thanks to independent labels like Criterion, Kino Lorber, Shout! Factory, Arrow, Imprint, Indicator, and many others, every month sees the release of well over a dozen exceptional titles, often lovingly restored and with indispensable scholarly extras.

That we’re living...

This episode of The Black Sheep was Written and Narrated by Andrew Hatfield, Edited by Brandon Nally, Produced by Lance Vlcek and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

The creature feature just isn’t explored enough anymore. Jaws was a monster of a success story and ended up having three sequels on its own and had a slew of imitators. 1980 would give us, in my humble opinion, one of the better ones with Alligator starring Robert Forster. It was successful too, making 6 and a half million on a 1.5-million-dollar budget. I know that’s not crazy money, but it was a hit and had a fun pedigree with it that remains very popular today. Its one of the movies that keeps selling well with new and old fans and so it recently got put on 4K. There weren’t as many creature flicks through the rest of the...

Stars: Clive Standen, Bruce Willis, Theo Rossi, Thomas Jane, Jackie Moore, Mike Tyson, Maddie Nichols, Derek Russo, Kurt Aue, Randy Gonzalez, Lauren Buglioli, Jesse O’Neill, Cabot Basden | Written and Directed by Jared Cohn

Who doesn’t love a good revenge/vigilante movie? Death Wish, Rolling Thunder, The Exterminator, Vigilante, Walking the Edge... All classics of the genre made in a period some would call the “peak” of the genre in the late 70s/early 80s and all set a high standard for any film that followed. And there have been a Lot of similar films over the years. A lot. Including a remake of Death Wish from director Eli Roth that featured Bruce Willis in the headline role and it’s Willis’ name that used to sell Vendetta too. Though like a lot of his latter-day films prior to the shocking news of his illness and his retirement from acting,...

The only way to start talking about Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again is to first search for the words to describe how the film appears on screen. For the most part, a black rectangle appears over a matte – a shifting series of still images of the Binghamton University campus, where Ray was a professor for part of the film’s production – and that rectangle in turn houses multiple cinematic superimpositions. Those competing images come in 8, 16, and 35mm formats and are not always well defined in relation to each other, as they often collide, overlap, and shift positions. There is a rough texture to the visuals with everything slightly washed out with a bluish tint, but still amazingly vivid, especially the skin of the film’s subjects. And sometimes the images explode into seas of color, made possible through Ray’s use of a video synthesizer, with waves of green,...