DVDs
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Rebecca Eaton Talks 'Mystery' and the Return of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey
Lord Peter Wimsey solved his first murder in 1923, made his debut on live television in 1947 and his television series debut on Masterpiece Theatre in 1972, and has just bounded into the 21st century in an Acorn Media DVD of that 1972-1975 television series starring Ian Carmichael. "Masterpiece" Exe...
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Now and Then: Cary Grant, The Man from Dream City, Revisited (CLIPS)
My own fever dream of Cary Grant takes place between cities, sitting down for a Gibson with Eva Marie Saint on a moving train somewhere in Middle America. Headed "North by Northwest," he's at his sexiest then, temples just flecked with gray, tanned and almost ageless. He's not just the recipient of ...
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Now and Then: The Dardenne Brothers' Lost Boys
From the first minutes of "The Kid with a Bike," marked by an energetic shot of its young protagonist, Cyril, careening through a field and climbing over a fence, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's latest is an exercise in kinesis. It's not just that Cyril's always running: he's running away.
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Now and Then: 'Side by Side,' I'll Still Take Film Over Digital
Smart, wide-ranging, and informative, "Side by Side" may be a postcard from the future of movies, but it's still intoxicated by the past. Its dreamiest moment comes at the outset, a montage of clips from the first century of cinema: Eadweard Muybridge's horses to "Do the Right Thing."
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DVD Review: 'The Words' Has A Serious Case of Writer's Block
It would be easy to come away from "The Words" with the impression that writing is a stiff, musty line of work — all grand ballrooms, solemn readings, and blue-blooded accents, a veritable Titanic of pretensions. This would be a mistake. The only sinking ship here is the film itself.
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Blu-ray Review: Smoldering Dietrich is Von Sternberg's 'Blue Angel' in Kino Restoration
“The Blue Angel,” a crowning achievement of Weimar cinema and the most famous of the seven collaborations between director Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, is newly on Blu-ray from Kino. The finely restored transfer, with sharp picture quality and crisp sound highlighting Von Sternberg’s ea...
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Now and Then: 'Brazil,' Terry Gilliam's Dystopia — And Ours, Too
To my discredit, I had never seen "Brazil." It sat atop my pile of screeners for a few weeks, its length and reputation forbidding. Like all dystopian fictions, Terry Gilliam's 1985 epic is a prophecy of sorts, guesswork for a grim future. And it turned out he was right.
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DVD Review: 'Dark Crimes' from Chandler, Hammett & Woolrich in Tantalizing TCM Noir Box Set
On December 3, the TCM Vault Collection released a tantalizing box set of three film noirs, “The Glass Key,” “Phantom Lady” and “The Blue Dahlia,” all previously unavailable on Region 1 DVD. The connecting thread is crime fiction -- the first two films are based on novels by Dashiell Hammett and Cor...
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Rating 'Psycho,' Behind-the-Scenes 'Hitchcock' and the Universal Hitchcock Fifteen
I got over the awful HBO "The Girl," starring Toby Jones as Alfred Hitchcock and Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren, by watching the entire Dick Cavett Hitchcock interview. I had more fun with Thursday night's AFI FEST world premiere of Sacha Gervasi's light-hearted "Hitchcock," starring a superb ensembl...
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Trailers from Hell: 'The Prize' with Paul Newman
Joe Dante leads us through Cold War melodrama "The Prize" (1963), starring Paul Newman, Edward G. Robinson and Elke Sommer. Adapted by Ernest Lehman from the Irving Wallace potboiler set during the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm, Lehman borrows liberally from his own Hitchcock classic "North b...
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