DVDs, 12/23.

"Outside of most neighborhoods in most American and European metropoli, you can hardly throw an Orwell paperback without hitting and infuriating a narrow-minded fundamentalist," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC, "and I suppose how you measure the attack-mode nuts of David Volach's My Father My Lord (2007) and Özer Kiziltan's Takva: A Man's Fear of God (2006) depends on how strenuously you feel the press of 'extreme tradition' (my phrase!) in your own life. The movies seem from a New Yorker's perspective to go gently, though with firm conviction, for the throat, while in Israel's Haredic communities, and in Turkey's Muslim enclaves, the films might inspire fiery damnations aplenty. Or none at all."

Death Proof is now out in an "extended and unrated" Blu-ray edition and, for the New York Times, Dave Kehr takes a look: "Tarantino resists easy ideological readings, confounding politics with visual pleasure (how beautiful these high-speed chases and slow-motion collisions are) and confounding pleasure with revulsion (and how appalling the consequences, particularly when enhanced, as they are in the unrated version, by some horribly graphic special effects). Zoë - the name of the character as well as of the performer - may represent an ideal of female empowerment, but she's also a domineering figure of male fantasy, right out of a Russ Meyer movie (the 1965 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, to be exact)."

"The movies that came in the immediate temporal wake of Michael Powell's '59 [Peeping Tom] and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, which continuously tested/took advantage of the shifting mores and increasingly permissive production standards of their time, retain a particular, shall we say, charm," writes Glenn Kenny in his "Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report" for the Auteurs' Notebook. "So it is with Twisted Nerve, a 1968 effort from British filmmaking team Roy and John Boulting."

For Interview, Jason Jude Chan watches the latest round of Blu-ray releases from Criterion; as for The Third Man, "Criterion's transfer approaches the beauty of bygone celluloid - its jaw-dropping richness is like luxurious whole milk after a life of the skimmed stuff." More from Matt Noller in Slant.

Michael Tully offers an overview of Wholphin No. 7 at Hammer to Nail.

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker, DVD Talk, Mark Kermode (Observer) and PopMatters.

Posted by dwhudson at December 23, 2008 9:06 AM