Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu-Ray Review

On the evening of September 15th 2011, I left my apartment in West Los Angeles to camp out for the Blu-Ray release of all six Star Wars (1977-2005) films.  I hadn't stood in line for Star Wars since a cold day in April when, at age 16, I dressed warmly in a Green Bay Packers jacket and waited outside of the Northshore cinema in southeastern Wisconsin to buy tickets for The Phantom Menace (1999).  When that day in May finally came, I walked away from Phantom Menace - like many others - with disappointment.  I had moderate expectations for the Blu-Ray and clung to a childlike hope that my disappointment would be reversed by the high-definition glory of seeing three of my favorite films on my home theater.  Was my new hope redeemed or did I walk away poisoned with bitter anger?  Continue reading to find out! 

Citizen Kane (1941): 70 Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition

I've been dreading the task of writing a review of Orson Welles's masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941).  For years, I've avoided writing about it.  I've done so by favoring other Welles pictures when it comes to reviews (The Immortal Story, Touch of Evil) simply because the scholarship produced by André Bazin, Peter Bogdanovich, Pauline Kael, Laura Mulvey, James Naremore, and Jonathan Rosenbaum (amongst others!) leaves me with little to say.  It's a great film and far greater writers and thinkers than I have spent the past decades discovering its secrets and disclosing them to cinephiles and potential cinephiles.  That said, this review will be more focused on the features on the new 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition Blu-Ray than the film itself.  If you really want to learn about Citizen Kane, read one of those books.  If you know nothing about Kane and want a quick gloss, this is for you.  

The Killing (1956): Criterion Collection

Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) is not my favorite work by the visionary director. In fact, the film probably wouldn’t even make it onto a list of my top five Kubrick films. Yet, with a career that included such amazing films as Paths of Glory (1957), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980), that’s not an indication that The Killing is a film of poor quality but an indication that Kubrick’s body of work comes the closest to cinematic perfection than any director I can think of. Thus, while The Killing may not by Kubrick’s strongest, that doesn’t keep it from earning a ranking of my top five noirs.