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New Release Reviews

Blu-Ray Review: Smooth Talk (Criterion)

The sad news of Treat Williams’s recent death seems particularly poignant ahead of the Criterion Blu-ray release of Smooth Talk, which saw the actor play one of his more menacing roles as Arnold Friend opposite Laura Dern’s teen-tearaway Connie Wyatt.   The film, directed by Joyce Chopra and based on Joyce Carol Oates’s short story […]

Categories
New Release Reviews

Blu-Ray Review: In Cold Blood (Criterion)

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was a huge hit when it was first released in 1966 – further establishing the writer’s celebrity status and creating a new literary term, the nonfiction novel, due to the book’s basis on factual events told in a novelistic style. In Cold Blood details the 1959 murders of the Clutter […]

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Lost Classic Reviews

Lost Classic: Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959)

The moment the title card is smashed to pieces and the famous samba and bossa nova sounds burst through, ushering in a sea of colour and movement, is both a physical shattering and a symbolic one. This playful and powerfully energetic film is not faithfully translating the classic Orpheus story to Brazil, it’s reimagining it in the heat, sweat and delirium of carnival, completely to its […]