A year's worth of Blu-ray reviews by yrs truly

During the past months of unending craziness, I haven’t been able to produce as many blog posts as I would’ve liked. I particularly hope to celebrate living icons of “high” and “low” culture, and not simply have this blog turn exclusively into a haven for deeply felt obits.

In that direction, I offer some self-promotion, consisting of links to 29 reviews I’ve written over the past year-plus. Each of them was a labor of love, in which I discussed the supplements on the DVD/Blu-ray, in addition to reviewing the film itself. All of them are located at the Disc Dish site, but I thought I’d spotlight them, as the range covered here is also the range I love to talk about on the Funhouse TV show and write about on this blog. And so...

Barbara Loden’s Wanda (below) got the Criterion treatment, and we find out in the supplements that the obnoxious leading male character was based on… her husband, Elia Kazan!

A portrait of producer Dan Curtis, Master of Dark Shadows, focused specifically on DS, because the producers had the rights to show scenes from that series.

Jackie Chan finally got the Criterion treatment with the release of Police Story and Police Story 2 in one package.

Agnes Varda’s “women’s lib” movie One Sings, The Other Doesn’t offers a look at a female friendship.

Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy (above) contains his last masterworks, which, when watched in sequence are both great melodramas and a pungent history of the “economic miracle” that occurred in Germany in the 1950s.

Rivette’s The Nun (1965) was a major subject of controversy upon its release in France. Today, its “blasphemy” is tame indeed, but it still offers Anna Karina’s finest performance outside of her work with Godard.

And speaking of Uncle Jean, his latest feature, The Image Book (below), is a montage of sights and sounds that, as always with his work, combines the fine arts with sheer pictorial beauty.

John Waters’ “Odorama” feature, Polyester, enters the ranks of the arthouse for certain with a Criterion release.

The director’s cut of Betty Blue (below) offers more of the film’s hot-blooded sexuality and surprising tender-heartedness.

Joan The Maid is Rivette’s epic (yet down-to-earth) treatment of an oft-told story, focusing on Joan of Arc’s battles as a soldier as much as her trial and burning at the stake.

Godard’s second feature, Le Petit Soldat, was another subject of controversy, which (when it was finally released, a few years after its production) offered international viewers their first glimpses of Anna Karina.

Teorema (above) is Pasolini’s much-imitated parable about a mysterious figure (Terence Stamp) who changes the life of an haute-bourgeois Italian family forever – by fucking them all!

The Point is an entertaining cartoon that is very much a product of its era, but boasts a timeless Harry Nilsson score.

Leave Her to Heaven is one of the sole great color noirs. Gene Tierney’s stunning beauty almost registers as a special effect.

The Cremator is a cult film from the Czech New Wave that grimly follows the titular fellow as he explores Nazi philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism, while killing members of his family….

The Criterion Collection's Scorsese Shorts finally collects all of the early works by the cine-obsessed filmmakers when he was a young and raw talent.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a documentary charting the filming of a doomed Sellers comedy that haunted its director, Peter Medak.

Serie Noire (below) is one of the best modern evocations of a hardboiled author, bar none. Alan Corneau’s singularly quiet and undeniably brilliant adaptation of Jim Thompson stars the late, great Patrick Dewaere and is simply low-key perfect.

Buster Keaton’s last feature where he was given full rein, The Cameraman, is a wonderful episodic time capsule with location sequences show in NYC and LA.

One of the odder “angry young man” films, Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (below) is one of the earlier Sixties/Seventies “the insane are the only truly sane ones” allegories.

Psychomagic, a Healing Art is the latest film from filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. It’s a documentary about his psychological (and often sex-related) healing sessions.

Those Who Deserve to Die is a serial killer drama that is a tribute to both Italian and American suspense films.

“Norman Mailer takes on the feminists” in the stunning and endlessly entertaining Pennebaker & Hegedus documentary about a debate among intellectuals (who at times behave like pro-wrestlers) titled Town Bloody Hall (below).

All I Desire is a wonderful Douglas Sirk melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck as a touring actress who returns to visit the family she left years before.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is Francesco Rosi’s blissfully location-shot recreation of the true story of a Marxist writer who was “imprisoned” by the fascists in a small North Italian town.

A showcase for its lead trio of actors, The Hit is one of those superb crime films that includes elements from another genre (in this case, the road movie) and reinvigorates the standard tale of the hitman at the end of the line.

An utterly sublime commentary on teen life and consumerism in the Sixties (among many other things), Lord Love a Duck is one of the films that will make you love Tuesday Weld (right).

And speaking of mixed-genre works, Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai is a terrific “urban samurai” film that blends hitman movie plot elements with a hiphop and jazz soundtrack and an overlay of martial arts morality and ethics.

A “dream film” from Cronenberg, Crash offers a meditation on the fusion between man and machine. Sex and car crash scenes alternate, as we travel through a world of crash-fetishists and bent-but-not-broken individuals.

More reviews of those little silver discs...

You will notice that the vast majority of these reviews are very positive in nature. For the record, I will note that I lean these days toward reviewing things that I suspect I will love or am curious to see. (I wrote for several decades about movies that were mere commercial pap.) When it comes to defining things I enjoy, we return to the Funhouse specialty: “high art to low trash… and back again.”

One of Brigitte Bardot’s most serious (and successful) performances was in suspense-master Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Verite (1960). The Criterion release includes much information on Clouzot’s career, and his heavy penchant for terrorizing cast members (including his wife Vera).

More gems from the Dick Cavett archive emerge. In new sets from S’more Entertainment called “Inside the Minds of…” are a selection of interviews he did with comedians on his “later” shows (on PBS, USA, and CNBC). 

The wonderful character study Mikey and Nicky (1976) might not be the sort of genre-inversion it’s touted as by film critics on the Criterion release of the film, but it’s still a wonderfully acted crime picture with a (literally) killer ending.

Another underrated gem from post-WWII France, Panique (1946) by Julien Duvivier is a powerful story of a man unjustly accused of a crime.

Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy (1989), from Icarus, is a sublime miniseries that explores the lasting influence of the ancient Greeks. It’s more linear and “normal” than most of Marker’s work, but it still has some beautiful moments and brilliant insights into the modern world (courtesy of a long-gone civilization). 

Fassbinder’s long-missing miniseries Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1972) finally got a release in the U.S. and while it is (again, that phrase) a lot more “normal” than his other work, when it focuses on a working class family’s struggles to get by, it is terrific (although a little more of Kurt Raab’s weirdness would’ve been beneficial). The Criterion release contains much background info on the series (including a discussion by participants on how it was cancelled after five shows, when it was supposed to run eight).

Star/co-scripter Chris Elliott and director/co-scripter Adam Resnick spend a good deal of the time putting down their film Cabin Boy (1994) in the supplements found in the new Kino Lorber release of the film. They’re wrong — the film might have been a personal failure for them, but it now has a well-earned cult and is far better than its initial, vicious reviews indicated.

Terrence Malick’s lyrical, abrasive, and mind-altering Tree of Life (2011) is found in two 
different versions in the new Criterion release of the film. One is the theatrical version, while the other is a re-edited version with 50 minutes of unseen footage.

Olivier Assayas’ Cold Water (1994) has a bravura party sequence utilizing a great number of early Seventies hits from American, British and European musicians. It’s a beautifully choreographed scene that all but dwarfs the rest of the film, which is certainly good but not as kinetic as the party sequence.

The exemplary Criterion box Dietrich and von Sternberg in Hollywood includes the six films that Marlene Dietrich made in America with her mentor and Svengali, the stunningly talented Josef von Sternberg. The box includes many extras that explore several issues, from the fashion-related (Marlene introducing men’s pants as a garment option for women) to the deadly serious (the backlash in post-war Germany that plagued her, because she supported the Allies in the war and not her Fatherland!).

Francois Ozon’s Double Lover (2017), from Cohen Media, is a taut thriller that becomes predictable in the third act but has the same ominous edge that was found in Ozon’s best suspense dramas (See the Sea, Criminal Lovers).

The Arrow box set Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years.Vol. 2. Border Crossings: The Crime and Action Movies contains five crime pictures that foreshadow Suzuki’s great Sixties mind-blowers, with taut storylines, fragmented visuals, and absolutely stunning visuals.

Another beautiful working-class parable from Aki Kaursimaki, The Other Side of Hope (2017) is a second (after his sublime Le Havre) tale of immigrants attempting to assimilate (and to remain) in Finland.

Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991), one of the finest films about the artistic process — and about the relationship between artist and model — comes back into print in the U.S., thanks to Cohen Media.

In the Seventies, Robert Altman had a run of stunning, startling films. Stunning because of their originality and innovation, startling because he leapt from genre to genre, reinventing each one as he went. Images (1972) was his take on the suspense thriller — it’s a dream film that blurs the character’s identities and probes the dreams and fantasies of its lead character (Susannah York).

Some of W.C. Fields’ classic Thirties pictures were reworkings of his silent features like It’s the Old Army Game (1926). This particular silent, released by Kino Lorber, has some gags he later reworked with dialogue and some that function perfectly as visual gags (including one involving a baby gagging on a diaper pin). All that, and the usual Fields adorable, virginal young woman character is played here by Louise Brooks!

Finally, Fassbinder fans can see one of the finest lead performances he ever gave (in a film he didn’t direct). Volker Schlondorff’s Baal (1969) keeps Brecht’s text but moves the action into the present and includes some very memorable imagery, most of it inhabited by the perpetually swaggering Fassbinder as the charismatic, degenerate antihero.

The Arrow box set Jean-Luc Godard + Jean-Pierre Gorin: Five Films, 1968-1971 fills in the gap in Uncle Jean’s DVD-ography by offering a set of all but one of his “Dziga-Vertov group”-era films, beautifully restored and put into perspective by great visual and print documents.

The 1967 anthology feature The Oldest Profession offers different filmmakers’ takes on prostitution, with the most notable inclusion being “Anticipation” by Godard. His last collaboration with Anna Karina, it is a post-Alphaville slice of poetic sci-fi. 

Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years, Vol. 1: Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies features five early films by Suzuki that are mostly conventional compared to his later cult films. There are small seeds of the later stylistic “fever” he displayed, though, and the films are very watchable melodramas. 

Eight Films by Jean Rouch, an invaluable box from Icarus, gives American viewers a crash course in the work of this fascinating ethnographic filmmaker whose films are not strict documentaries but are instead a fusion of documentary, fiction film, and outright fantasy, concocted by Rouch in tandem with his casts of African non-professional performers. The best film in the box is hands-down Petit a Petit (1971), a wonderful, plotted film about African businessmen on the loose in Paris trying to figure out how to build a giant skyscraper in their home country.

Pennebaker’s landmark 1967 rock doc Monterey Pop was re-released both in its theatrical version and in a big box set with more concert footage.

Melville’s much copied Le Samourai (1967) was re-released with additional supplements. The film is a masterpiece, possessing an influence that grows with every passing year.

After several decades, Fellini’s final film The Voice of the Moon (1990) finally got an official U.S. release by Arrow. The film may not be Il Maestro’s finest, but it still has beautiful moments and a touching lead performance by Robert Benigni.

The superb filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa made his “foreign language” debut with Daguerrotype (2016), shot in French (and released to streaming platforms by the wonderfully titled studio “Under the Milky Way”). The film is a suspense drama about a photographer’s assistant who falls in love with his boss’s model (who also happens to be his boss’s daughter).

Orson Welles’ later films are exemplary models of how to make movies on low budgets. One of the best “lessons” in this regard is his visually arresting adaptation of Othello, made over a three-year period in two different countries (Italy and Morocco) with various and sundry budget limitations and cast difficulties blighting the production. Welles still came up with a masterpiece (released in two different cuts, in both 1952 and ’55) that perfectly catches the tone of Shakespeare’s work.

Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) stands not only as a razor-sharp depiction of upper-middle class radicals but also foreshadowed the feeling of youthful rebellion that led to the May ’68 riots in Paris. The Kino Lorber re-release includes some fascinating supplements.

John Garfield gives a terrific performance in the noir drama The Breaking Point (1950), an adaptation of a Hemingway story. The film offers much evidence as to why Garfield was such a revered performer (especially by other actors) and the way in which noir dread crept into even the most esteemed literary adaptations.

I have a lot of trouble with Michael Hanneke’s cinema, but his work with Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher (2001) produced one of his best films and one of her best performances.

Albert Brooks succeeded with both critics and at the box office with his “yuppie road picture,” Lost in America (1985). The Criterion release contains an interview with Albert, which is honest (but fans of his comedy were hoping he would do an audio commentary for the picture).

Robert Bresson ended his career on a grim and beautifully innovative note with L’Argent (1983). The film is of a piece with his earlier work but also features a fascinating view of the modern world, which seems to indicate that Bresson had had his fill of mankind, and felt we cannot be truly redeemed. (And yet the film is one of the most engaging of his post-Sixties works.)

It’s great to see the works of the least-seen (in the U.S.) member of the French New Wave, get official U.S. DVD/Blu-ray releases. Arrow’s The Jacques Rivette Collection is a good sampler of his “mid-period work,” with Duelle (1976) being the best film in the collection.

What I write when I’m not writing here (part 1 of two)

Jean Seberg in Godard's segment of
The World's Greatest Swindlers

Every nook and cranny on the Internet exists for one thing. No, not porn – relentless self-promotion! Thus, I herewith offer a number of the reviews I’ve done for the Disc Dish site. The reviews are in-depth, filled with information gleaned in the watching and reading of supplemental materials, and (I hope) entertaining.

I haven’t done an entry on my work for DD since 2015, so this piece will be broken into two parts. Screw streaming – support the little silver disc industry! 

The anthology film The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers has been very hard to see over the last few decades. It includes two good episodes from Japanese and Italian directors, but is most notable for having a characteristically amoral entry from Claude Chabrol and Godard’s only reunion with Jean Seberg – a short in which she plays a journalist in Marrakesh.

The Criterion re-release of Ghost World includes old and new supplements. It also reminds us how good a film based on a comic book can be. 

The Kino release of Josef von Sternberg’s final film, Anatahan, contains the director’s re-edit of the film (including nudity) and supplements that discuss both Sternberg’s career and the difference between the two versions of the film.

I am a major fan of Francis Ford Coppola’s low-key character studies, and Rumble Fish is one of his most brilliantly stylized features.

Leos Carax’s sublime Lovers on the Bridge finally was issued in a deluxe edition on disc. 

Multiple Maniacs, John Waters’ second feature, received the Criterion treatment, with the no-budget 16mm film being restored into a pristine shape it never had in the first place.

Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends remains one of the filmmaker’s most important statements about the exploitation of a minority by people in that minority.

The seminal caper film, The Asphalt Jungle, joins the ranks of Criterion’s releases.

One of the best modern Westerns, Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, reappears in a deluxe edition.

The documentary Eat That Question is comprised entirely of interview footage with Frank Zappa (with a tiny bit of his music).

Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is that thing of rare radiance – a spoof of an era made while that era is still going on.

The film that made Luis Bunuel want to be a filmmaker, Fritz Lang’s Destiny, finally gets a prestige release on disc.

Terrence Malick’s The New World appeared on disc in a director’s cut that “balances” the segments of the film in a better way.

Malick's New World

Alain Resnais’ Muriel reveals his genius for shuffling time and memory.

One of the finest black comedies of all time, Dr. Strangelove, comes ready with new supplements and a host of the older ones.

Olivier Assayas has been showcasing the talents of Kristen Stewart in the last few years. In Clouds of Sils Maria, she joins Juliette Binoche for a character study concerning friendship between women of different ages. 

Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy groups together three of his best early films, including the epic-length but still small in scope classic Kings of the Road.

Bogart gave arguably his best performance in Nick Ray’s hard-hitting noir In a Lonely Place. 

Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, Sam Fuller’s delirious crime picture, finally gets a prestige release.

Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room offers stories within stories (and a sterling cast led by Charlotte Rampling and Udo Kier). 

Out 1 is one of the late Jacques Rivette’s masterworks, a 13-hour film that reflects the post-’68 mindset in France and offers one of the filmmaker’s best paranoid fantasies.

An underrated comic portrait of an era, Serial skewers self-help and new-age philosophies and movements.

Wim Wenders’ The American Friend is a masterful character study, allegory, and crime picture with two great lead performances by Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper.

Bruno Ganz in The American Friend

Burroughs: the Movie comes back into distribution, replete with outtakes.

The Mr. Warmth box set offers several Don Rickles specials and every episode of his sitcom CPO Sharkey.

Alain Resnais’ long-“missing”sci-fi love story Je t’aime, je t’aime finally receives a restoration and a U.S. release.

The superb box set comprised of episodes from the visionary PBS series The Great American Dream Machine reminds us how good and far-ranging PBS programming was in the Seventies.

Standup comedian and Lefty troublemaker Barry Crimmins is profiled in Bobcat Goldthwait’s funny and poignant Call Me Lucky.

A never-before-seen Frank Zappa concert film, Roxy: The Movie, finally saw a release nearly 40 years after it was shot. 

The American Dreamer is a portrait of Dennis Hopper in the period after Easy Rider, when he was one of the most sought-after filmmakers in America (and one of the craziest).

What I did this summer (and spring, and…): DVD reviews and articles

I have several blog posts in the offing, but since it's been so long since I put something up here, I wanted to spotlight the other writing I'm doing on the Net. The readership for this blog is most likely unaware that these reviews and articles are up – the Internet being (as I note repeatedly) that wood where many trees are falling and you can't hear a sound. Unless, that is, someone points out a tree coming down and yells “jeezis, will ya look at that!"

This is my attempt to make a little sound.

DVD REVIEWS:
The Eclipse/Criterion box of films made by the “grandma of French independent cinema” when she was living on the West Coast (Lions Love is a particularly freaky favorite), Agnes Varda in California.

Marco Ferreri's classic dark comedy about a quartet of haute bourgeois men who decide to eat themselves to death, La Grande Bouffe. With many new and amazing supplements.

Wim Wenders' documentary about a photographer friend, Salt of the Earth.

The DVD release of episodes from Joan Rivers' daytime talk-show (discussed here on this blog) as a box set. See Joan before she became caustic, watch late Sixties celebs talk about mundane topics, catch a glimpse of the “girl talk” daytime format intended for housewife viewers, in That Show With Joan Rivers.

The Criterion package that includes both big-screen versions of The Killers, with many terrific extras, including a student film by Tarkovsky (the most exact reproduction of the original Hemingway story).

The infinitely trippy Czech cult movie Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, with many wonderful supplements exploring the film's symbolism (coming of age, loss of virginity, the lecherous nature of the clergy – it's not that hard to figure out), plus a new alternative music soundtrack for the film.

Yves Montand is superb in Costa-Gavras' controversial The Confession, where the Leftist director explores the horrors of the Stalin regime via a “show trial.”

Jean-Pierre Melville's first film, and first masterwork, La Silence de la Mer.

Silent Ozu: Three Crime Dramas is a trio of silent features by the legendary Japanese director, focusing on thieves, gangsters, and their molls.

Cheesy, sleazy widescreen exploitation, The Beat Generation is a cash-in effort by producer Albert Zugsmith that at least has the sight of Vampira as a beatnik poet and Mamie Van Doren as a crooked chick in a sweater.

Resnais' last film The Life of Riley isn't as perfect as his next-to-last (You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet), but it still contains some beautiful visuals and lovely musings on romance, old age, and death.

Robert Montgomery's Ride a Pink Horse is a grim little noir that finally has received the DVD release it deserves.

Godard's “comeback film” Every Man For Himself makes its home-entertainment debut with a terrific Criterion package, spotlighting Uncle Jean when he consented to many on-camera interviews – and he even smiled!

Rivette's Le Pont du Nord also received its first U.S. home-entertainment release this year. The film is a great “late” Rivette that features both terrific location photography and a wonderfully paranoid scenario.

Ever wonder what goes through the mind of a man willingly trapped in his hometown? Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg offers a fantasia based on real events (and a bunch Guy made up) from that snowy burg.

The DVD re-release of Fassbinder's sublime The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant includes new documentaries and featurettes.

The relationship between softcore legend Joe Sarno and his wife Peggy is the focus of A Life in Dirty Movies. The film provides valuable background on Joe's career – some of it coming from a talking-head film historian who looks a lot like me.

Liliana Cavani's extremely controversial chronicle of l'amour tres fou, The Night Porter remains a subject of debate but, whatever your take on the plot, the performances and direction are flawless.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's TV miniseries adaptation of a popular novel Penance is a fascinating mix of melodrama, thriller, horror, satire, and a bitter critique of the Japanese notion of honor.

Finally bowing on DVD (do you sense a trend here?), Robert Altman's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean was Altman's first “theatrical film.” It contains Altman's trademark “gliding” camerawork and is a great showcase for its six-woman ensemble.

Billy Wilder's last great movie, Fedora is an exploration of the Garbo mythos in the form of a variation on Sunset Boulevard. The final plot twist is a good one, and William Holden makes a great mouthpiece for Wilder's embittered opinions about the “new Hollywood" of the Seventies (those “kids with beards”).

Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang got a DVD re-release that included both a restored print of the film and a full documentary on Carax.

The Python reunion is a strange affair, in which two of the ensemble seem to be having a great time and the other three gents are just along for the ride (and the paycheck). Monty Python Live (Mostly): One Down, Five to Go

Chris Marker's Level Five is his final feature. An essay about memory, the Battle of Okinawa, and Laura, among other things, it's an uneven affair... but uneven Marker is better than most folks' best.

John Ford's My Darling Clementine get the Criterion treatment with featurettes discussing Ford, Wyatt Earp, and the alternate version of the film.

Polanski's Venus in Fur is a minimal affair that is both kinky and intellectual. Mathieu Amalric (as a Polanski surrogate) and Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski's real-life wife) are both terrific. 

The Midnight Special box set is a mind-warping flashback to the Seventies when the Top 40 contained standard soft pop, hard rock, country, funk, “new wave,” and disco. This late-night TV show had all of the genres, with nearly all the performers playing live. 

The Betty Boop Essential Collection, Volume 4 finishes up Olive's carefully curated set of the non-public domain Boop cartoons from the Fleischer Studios. The pre-code entries in the series continue to be mind-blowingly weird (and oddly sexy).

INTERVIEWS:

I spoke to Armando Iannucci when he was doing press for Veep. The print version of the interview, found here, focuses mostly on that much-lauded HBO show and its amazing source (The Thick of It), but in the full interview (which will appear on the Funhouse TV show soon), I got him to talk about his older creations, including I'm Alan Partridge, The Armando Iannucci Shows, and the stunning The Day Today with Chris Morris. 

My interview with the wonderfully talented comedic filmmaker Roy Andersson appeared in print in a much-abbreviated version to promote a screening of his latest, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, in Buffalo.

Mike Leigh is considered notoriously “difficult” by the press (the British press in particular, it seems), but he was incredibly nice to me (albeit extremely intense and thoroughly focused, dissecting my questions as he answered them). The print version of the interview ran here.

FILM REVIEWS: 
A piece discussing the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, a master of showing alternate realities, and a man who (along with his wife) really enjoyed the thought of women in bondage. 

A review of the “high-concept”documentary Listen to Me Marlon. Brando's audio recordings are presented in a somewhat linear fashion (as linear as the thoughts of the great eccentric could ever be). The verdict: he was a pretty depressed human being.

Shameless self-promotion: more DVD reviews by yrs truly

I try to put up a blog entry each week, but sometimes I miss a week and then inevitably come up with a titanic post for the week after. In the meantime, I continue to do the Funhouse TV show (all details about that can be found at the official show site). I also do DVD reviews for the Disc Dish site.

I haven’t posted any of my reviews on this blog since late last year, so I thought I’d play “catch up” and put all of the 2014 reviews (thus far) into a blog post. [Note: it ordinarily takes about 10-15 seconds to load the DD site, but in the week I'm posting this there are a few server probs that mean it might take a minute or two to load the DD page in question — I'm always good with timing....] Onto the reviews:

David Lynch’s brilliant and disturbing debut feature, Eraserhead (1977)

Oliver Stone’s *insane* debut feature, Seizure (1973), starring Jonathan Frid

John Cassavetes’ last personal film, the exquisite mess Love Streams (1984)

Groucho, Harpo, Chico on the small screen in The Marx Brothers TV Collection

The Essential Jacques Demy featuring a half dozen of the musical visionary’s works

Billy Wilder’s quirky and imaginative The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Henry Morgan is a sarcastic hick visiting the big city in Richard Fleischer’s So This Is New York (1948) 

Georges Franju’s melding of “poetry and pulp,” Judex (1963)

Douglas Sirk’s visually sumptuous All That Heaven Allows (1955)

Howard Hawks’ seminal western Red River (1948)

Billy Wilder’s dark critique of the media, Ace in the Hole (1951)

A stunning slice of early Sixties character study, Il Sorpasso (1962), Dino Risi

A tribute to the great essayist by filmmaker Emiko Omori, To Chris Marker, An Unsent Letter (2012)

Douglas Sirk’s noir twist on Gaslight, Sleep, My Love (1948)

Errol Morris tackles Stephen Hawking’s theories in A Brief History of Time (1991)

The passionate and touching arthouse hit Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s cerebral thriller Trans-Europ-Express (1967)

Godard’s controversial Hail Mary (1985)

Kaurismaki’s beautifully small La Vie de Boheme (1992)

The political anthology Far From Vietnam (1967)

Altman’s masterwork, Nashville (1975)

Chris Marker’s cinema verite landmark, Le Joli Mai (1962)

A wonderful, thus far “missing” variety series gets the deluxe treatment: Here's Edie: the Edie Adams Television Collection, '62-'64

The Dean Martin Roasts: Complete Collection: yes, I watched all 54 roasts in this 25-disc set (over several weeks…)

Francois Ozon’s playfully reflexive In the House (2012)

Better than the last 29 years of SNL, it’s the Best of Fridays collection