Director: Marty Gross
Cast: Tamao Yoshida, Minosuke Yoshida, Kanjuro Kiritake, Oritaya Takemoto, Enza Tsuruzawa,
Plot: An adaptation of “The Courier for Hell” (“Meido no Hikyaku”) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725).
Discovering a Japanese master: Tai Katô
Despite a career spanning from the 1930s to the mid-’80s, I hadn’t even heard of Tai Katô until a recent flurry of disk releases from Radiance in England and Film Movement in the States, yet he produced significant work in some of my […]
Horrors old and new
Horror is a flexible genre, capable of using science fiction, history, adventure, action and terrible real-life events to touch on existential questions as well as provide escape with a frisson of pleasurable fear. Three recent releases span a […]
Late winter/early spring Arrow viewing, part two
Some recent Arrow releases provide an opportunity to revisit a few familiar movies and – perhaps – reevaluate them. Each of them presents some problems, but Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (2000), Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects […]
Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (1986): Criterion Blu-ray review
Criterion have released an excellent two-disk edition of Claude Berri’s adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s epic tragedy of idealism brought down by greed and petty rivalries in early 20th Century rural Provence. New 4K restorations of Jean […]
Late winter/early spring Arrow viewing, part one
Recent Arrow disks offer an alien invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Invasion [2007]), stylish horror (Rampo Noir [2005]), a classic western (Don Siegel’s The Shootist [1976]) and a note-perfect homage to ’70s low-budget […]
Peak paranoia: two classics on Blu-ray
Two key films from the era of peak paranoia, the late-’60s and early ’70s, are given exemplary disk releases – Theordore J. Flicker’s darkly comic The President’s Analst (1967) on Blu-ray from Imprint and Francis […]
Culling the collection
In beginning the process of reducing the size of my movie collection, trading in disks at my favourite local store, I’ve paradoxically added some new collector editions of other movies thanks to the generous credit I’ve […]
Dipping another toe into the online stream, part two
My recent streaming seems to lean heavily into horror, with a few animated movies to lighten the […]
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953): Criterion Blu-ray review
Criterion’s new dual-format 4K UHD/Blu-ray release of The Wages of Fear (1953) presents an opportunity to revisit Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic and examine just why it troubled its U.S. distributor and some critics with its […]
Dipping another toe into the online stream, part one
My plunge into streaming has been more rewarding than not, catching up with a slew of recent action movies as well as a variety of older movies I missed decades ago, or remember from television screenings back in the […]