DVDs, 1/16.

"The Naked Prey burns with Darwinian fury: the struggle between Man and his pursuers is played out in the context of fierce, interspecies predation, much of it courtesy of stock footage far too rough for the Discovery Channel," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. Also reviewed: Eclipse's Postwar Kurosawa and: "Whereas Altman's [Nashville] endeared itself to East Coast intellectuals by portraying Southerners as mentally impaired pawns in a cynical capitalist scheme being played out far above their tousled heads, [Daryl Duke's] Payday - though not without its caricatures - takes a more levelheaded look at the country-western milieu."

"[T]he Nazi phenomenon was apparently almost cosmic in its limitless and deathless ability to re-manifest itself as jaw-dropping news, even 60 years later," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "One of the most original and philosophically fluent documentaries on the subject ever made, Rex Bloomstein's Kz (2005) casts a gimlet eye on not only the mass exterminations but the ways they are considered today — not in films, but on the ground." Also, Raúl Ruiz's Klimt is "a lush, ridiculous fantasy of an artsy, clichéd Mitteleuropa that never quite existed (brothels full of mustachioed women, a bulging-eyed Egon Schiele, played by Kinski scion Nikolai) peopled by symbolic personages (dream muse Saffron Burrows, nameless bureaucrat Stephen Dillane), all revolving around Klimt as if he were a walking martyr for misunderstood geniuses everywhere."

"It's striking when a movie says more, even indirectly, about the nature of modern commerce in 90 minutes of near-silent footage than you've heard from the clichés and homilies and pre-spun phrases of all the presidential debates so far," writes James Rocchi at the Huffington Post. The film: Manufactured Landscapes.

"What sets The Day After Trinity apart from most if not all documentaries on the nuclear age is the attitudes, the mannerisms and the odd behavior on display by all the participants, recording history by eyewitnesses before they die, setting itself up as a vital record to be studied not just cinematically but sociologically for the years ahead," writes Jonathan Lapper.

"How has Bourne become the only gargantuan Hollywood franchise that's impressed both mainstream and alternative presses (along with contrarian, smug bastards like myself)?" asks R Emmet Sweeney at IFC News.

"I don't generally recommend films on this blog (I think I've only done it only twice before) but Münchhausen is that rare classic fantasy film that deserves to be seen and discussed," writes Thom at Film of the Year.

"[E]ven at its most frustrating, Into Great Silence is hypnotic - and legitimately attuned to the spiritual - in a way few cinematic works are," writes Nick Schager.

Dragon Wars is "as silly as you'd expect, but maybe twice as much fun," writes James Van Maanen at Guru.

DVD roundups: Paul Clark (ScreenGrab), DVD Talk, Susan King (Los Angeles Times), Peter Martin (Cinematical) and James Rocchi (San Francisco Chronicle).

Posted by dwhudson at January 16, 2008 12:00 PM