Platoon: 25th Anniversary
May 24, 2011
While Platoon (1986) was certainly not the first film about the Vietnam War, it was one of the first to focus on the average foot soldier in an honest and authentic way. Oliver Stone’s film really put you in the jungle with these guys as only someone...
William & Kate: The Movie
May 3, 2011
In November 2010, Prince William, second in line to the English throne behind his father, the Prince of Wales, and son of the laudable sadly deceased Princess Diana, announced his engagement to Catherine Middleton. They met when both were undergraduates...
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence: Criterion Collection
September 28, 2010
Nagisa Oshima’s film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) was based on Laurens van der Post’s mostly autobiographical 1963 novel The Seed and the Sower about a British military officer and a poorly treated prisoner-of-war set in the lush Javanese tropics...
Star Trek: Motion Picture Trilogy
May 26, 2009
To coincide with J.J. Abrams rebooting of the Star Trek franchise, Paramount has re-released Star Trek II through IV in a box set with brand new extras that are geared towards new fans generated from the latest film. These three films were already given...
Chungking Express: Criterion Collection
November 24, 2008
Chungking Express (1994) is a film obsessed with time. Not only are its characters consciously aware of and thinking about time passing, but the film itself plays around with the slowing down and speeding up of time. The camera lingers on close-ups of...
Gojira: Deluxe Collector’s Edition
August 30, 2006
As Steve Ryfle’s excellent liner notes point out, Godzilla is more than just some guy in a cheesy rubber suit terrorizing badly dubbed Japanese actors and stomping miniatures, but the original film, made in 1954, is actually a tragedy of epic proportions,...
Amazing Stories: The Complete First Season
August 1, 2006
At the height of his mid-1980s fame, Steven Spielberg parlayed his clout to convince Universal Studios to back a weekly anthology show on network television that would be called Amazing Stories (named from the pulp fiction magazine of the same name) and...
The Transformers: Super-God Masterforce
July 31, 2006
It’s Transformers, but definitely not how you’d remember it. In 1987 the Americans decided they didn’t want to make the cartoon anymore and ditched it after 3 episodes into Season 4. The Japanese were not ready to let this show die....
Platoon: 20th Anniversary Edition
May 30, 2006
While Platoon (1986) was certainly not the first film about the Vietnam War, it was one of the first to focus on the average foot soldier in an honest and authentic way. Oliver Stone’s film really put you in the jungle with these guys as only someone...
The Bad Sleep Well
March 2, 2006
The Bad Sleep Well (1960) marked the debut of filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s independent production company. He had grown tired of making samurai films for the studio and wanted to do something different. The subject matter of his new movie – corporate...