DVD/Blu-Ray

The Return Of The Living Dead DVD Review

Very few successful writers of box office successes could veer so wildly off track without damaging their reputations but Dan O’Bannon does just that. The Alien screenwriter takes a breath from serious sci-fi horror to enjoy a low budget rampage with zombies in The Return of the Living Dead, one of those 80’s horrors that [...]
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Farewell To The King DVD Review

Having co-written the magnificent Apocalypse Now (1979) with Francis Ford Coppola, the expectations are understandably high for John Milius. Sumptuously detailed and penetrating, some may never have tried to write anything ever again. Milius chose instead to revisit Apocalypse Now in a way but ended up with Farewell to the King, a ripple in the former’s [...]
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Shadows DVD Review

Shadows, John Cassavetes‘ debut feature film, is as jazz as its characters and creator. It’s hep, it’s cool; it evokes New York like the work of Woody Allen and the Beat era like the writings of Kerouac. At its centre are Bennie (Ben Carruthers) and Hugh (Hugh Hurd), brothers and musicians in a jazz ensemble, [...]
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Two Dickens’ Classics – Nicholas Nickleby and Curiosity Shop DVD Review

With Charles Dickens making yet another pit stop at the cinema next year, as Ralph Fiennes renders the private life of the literary legend in the Invisible Women, the time seems ripe to issue a short but focused injection into the DVD market. In celebrating the bicentenary of the writer himself, Studio Canal are set [...]
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Four Horsemen DVD Review

Amid all the discussion and furore about the current economic crisis there are a few clear voices. Amongst the allocation of blame, the political one-liners and the prescriptions to return the economy to its previous equilibrium there are some determined to find the root cause of the crisis and cut it out. In Four Horsemen [...]
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Wuthering Heights DVD Review

Similar to Honour of the Knights (Quixotic), Albert Serra’s stripped, sparse 2006 adaptation of Don Quixote, Andrea Arnold’s third feature film brings to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights a rough’n’ready handheld agitato that aspires to the elemental. Like Serra, whose film utilised Catalan dialogue and unknown performers to challenge built-in expectations of adapting the literary canon, [...]
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