Writer-director Mickey Keating’s confident and chilling horror feature Offseason ($28.96 Blu-ray, $27.97 DVD, and streaming on Shudder) is set in a community called Lone Palm Beach. Lone Palm Beach is an isolated island off the coast of the Eastern United States, accessible by bridge, that jolts to life only during high tourist season. Its few year-round residents — all of them … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A bracing, anti-nativist love story; a ‘90s art-house classic of urban longing
Call it love in the time of nativism. Darkly comic and fretfully relevant, Bulgarian writer-director Ivaylo Hristov’s Fear (Film Movement, $24.95 DVD) exists on a pitch-black nexus between satire and documentary. It’s set in a seaside village along the Turkish border, where the locals are bracing for a brutal winter. Signs of life are scant, as fog blankets skeletal trees, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Dementia’ a brilliant, experimental plunge into psychosis
It’s safe to say there’s never been a film, before or since, quite like John Parker’s 1953 psychodrama Dementia (now on Blu-ray from Cohen Film Collection, $19.99). An uncanny marriage of avant-garde cinema, horror and noir, it was somehow both ahead of its time and, boldly, behind it: Parker shot it as a silent film, without intertitles, in an era when such an approach was … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A new DVD collection resurrects the paranoid Atomic Age
As a longtime devotee of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I expected to encounter a familiar brand of B-movie schlock with the new triple-feature DVD Drive-In Retro Classics (Corinth, $22.99). The cover art depicts a man gleefully shooting death rays from his eyes, and the titles — The Brain From Planet Arous, The Hideous Sun Demon — seem ripe for riffing. The biggest surprise … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Restored ‘La Dolce Vita’ laughs all the way to the apocalypse
There may be no better example of a film’s prologue forecasting its themes than the exhilarating aperitif that opens La Dolce Vita. A helicopter, its heavy cargo suspended from wires, delivers a statue of Christ to its final destination in St. Peter’s Square. Trailed by a second copter of tabloid reporters and photographers, the spectacle traverses an ancient Roman aqueduct, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A shattering colonialist neo-Western, and ennui on the French Riviera
The most innovative foreign-language films often are not the ones jostling for the five coveted slots on the Academy Award ballot. They’re the films with miniscule if any distribution, that drop on DVD or a streaming service with little fanfare. Memory House (Film Movement, $24.95 DVD, $3.99 digital rental), the stunning debut from Brazilian writer-director João Paulo … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Stanley Kwan’s beautiful, disruptive biopic “Center Stage”
As intimate as it is lavish, Stanley Kwan’s landmark 1991 biopic Center Stage has finally received the illustrious Blu-ray release it deserves, thanks to the tireless efforts of Film Movement and its specialty Classics imprint ($29.99). Like the screen icon it depicts, this transfer positively glows, shimmering with memory, criticism and the very foundations of cinema … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘The Vast of Night’ is a perfectly timed sound bath of adventure
The impact of the film industry on the coronavirus pandemic has been depressingly documented, from the indefinite postponement of movie shoots to the delayed release of studio pictures to the continued closures — some will be permanent — of cinemas. Audio-based art forms, on the other hand, are thriving. Offering the illusion of intimacy but the safety of distance, radio and … [Read more...]
The View From Home: More gems from Criterion
Like you, I’m stuck at home for what has begun to feel like an eternal, if comfort-filled, purgatory. But movies have been my escape from the dreadful and the humdrum. My recent adventures with the Criterion Channel app continued with six more eclectic features — five gems and one dud. La Vie de Boheme: When I reviewed Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre, in 2011, I must have skimped … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A treasure trove on TCM
As someone who is millennial-adjacent, I’ve watched as friends and colleagues younger than I — and some older folks too — cut the proverbial cord on the musty cable monopolies that satisfied so much of my entertainment diet over the decades. Roku boxes and Fire sticks are the new satellite dishes and Xfinity consoles. It may boast more channels and on-demand opportunities than … [Read more...]