At times beautifully horrific and horribly beautiful, Godfrey Reggio’s 1983 visual fantasia ’Koyaanisqatsi’ transformed clouds into raging rivers, skyscrapers into lunar altars and rush-hour humanity into sausage links. MGM Home Entertainment’s [...]
Us Yanks can be grateful to the year 1964 for two reasons: the Beatles made their first US appearance and ’Devil Doll’ bowed on movie and drive-in screens. For us connoisseurs of hokey 1960s British cinema, Image Entertainment’s new DVD edition of [...]
Released in 1987, Kathryn Bigelow’s "Near Dark" fused two movie mythologies – vampires and cowboys – and created a brooding horror film with faces bathed in dust as well as blood. Fifteen years after its theatrical release, the film [...]
"Hedwig and the Angry Inch, " a flamboyant, touching rock musical in the vein of "The Rocky Horror Show," is the brainchild of actor/writer John Cameron Mitchell. What started as an improv character became an off-Broadway hit, [...]
"Burden of Dreams" may have been the title to the 1982 documentary about German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s journey into the Amazon to shoot his epic adventure "Fitzcarraldo, " but the moniker also handily applies to the misfit [...]
Ever since the silents, Hollywood has been in love with itself. From Charlie Chaplin to Billy Wilder to Robert Altman, the movies occasionally, but not irregularly, pointed its cameras inward for that "insider’s glimpse" of the cogs and gears [...]
When "Apocalypse Now" first appeared in August 1979, the film industry had just come to grips with the "blockbuster mentality" fostered by the wild successes of such popcorn pictures as "Star Wars," "Jaws," [...]
Barely recognized as a bona-fide genre among film cogniscenti, a few Russian filmmakers devoted their entire careers to bringing classic fairy and folk tales to the silver screen. Produced from the earliest days of cinema, the resulting films have an air [...]
As DVD matures and finds more players in more home, the list of "must-have" titles continues to shrink. Just in the past few weeks, standards like "Snow White, " "Citizen Kane," and the first "Star Wars" (not the [...]
I never understood how some people willingly swallow images of spaceships careening around the cosmos or unquestioningly accept talking pigs but groan unbearably when someone spontaneously bursts into song. What caused the demise of the movie musical or [...]
