The Movie
Milestone Films' great Daughter of Dawn Blu-ray release should be of interest to those who read American history, watch silent cinema, or are interested in the possibilities of the Western genre. Norbert Myle's obscure silent Western from 1920 recounts a love triangle between Indigenous people from the Kiowa and Comanche tribes of the Southern Plains and is most notable for being the only film with an all Native American cast and for being the only silent Western in which the Native American characters are played by real Native people. Milestone has transferred the meticulously restored Oklahoma Historical Society print to Blu-ray in an edition of the film that underlines its romantic epic aspirations and its unique mode of representation.

The Movies
Forbidden Hollywood Volume 10 has five great movies from the pre-code early sound era, before censorship laws were uniformly imposed on all films released by the major studios. Warner Brothers Archive Collection's newest volume of pre-code films are nicely restored and give a good representation of the permissible transgressions allowed during the period when Hollywood was not overseen by censoring entities. Most films in the set worked well to create interesting visual elements when immobile early sound equipment hindered camera placement and movement. Then-forbidden topics about death, sex and morality in general are treated with a kind of sublime naivete that only Hollywood silent films and early talkies can achieve.

The Movie
Inexplicable surrealism and sharp social, sexual and political commentary intermingle in One 7 Movie's nice DVD transfer of Sergio Citti's debut film Ostia (1970). Curiously, the title for the American DVD release of Ostia is A Violent Life, which is the title of an Italian crime film from 1962 based on a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the notorious filmmaker, poet, and journalist who wrote the script for Ostia. Pasolini's own confrontational films were drawn equally from his Catholic belief system and Communist ideology. Ostia will appeal to those who wish to dig deeper into Pasolini's body of work because the film has remained relatively obscure in the US.

Ostia/A Violent Life was filmed in the real-life Roman slum where Pasolini was murdered five years after the film was released and opens with two Anarchist/petty criminal brothers, Bandiera (Laurent Terzieff) and Rabbino (Franc...Read the entire review

The Movie
Dixieland uses the Star-Crossed Lovers motif to explore the lives of people who dwell in the criminal underworld and struggle to find a place of their own in a world that doesn't easily forgive ex-cons. The day he's released from prison, Kermit (Chris Zylka) is immediately drawn back into the criminal element when he is asked to make a run for local drug dealers. Only hours after being released, he meets Rachel (Riley Keough), who takes up stripping to help pay her mother's medical bills. Kermit agrees to make a drug run that will put enough money in his pocket to help Rachel and her mother. Dixieland's narrative is driven by Rachel and Kermit's relationship, which is sparked by an intense attraction between the two and hinges upon the notion that people who have broken the law can be redeemed by performing good acts.

Dixieland opens with documentary-style interview footage of the...Read the entire review

The Movie
Twentieth Century Fox Cinema Archives has released Blue Denim (1959) on DVD, an entertaining melodrama about Janet and Arthur (Carol Lynley and Brandon De Wilde, respectively), two teenagers who decide to get an abortion after Janet gets pregnant. The disc has a nice transfer that shows off the film's anamorphic widescreen frame and well-balanced black and white tones. The film dances around the very word abortion, but the direction it takes its characters is to the point and surprisingly without sentimentality.

Arthur Bartley and Janet Willard are two teenagers who grew up together in the comfort of the kind of idyllic community that seems only possible in 1950s domestic dramas. After having known each other through childhood innocence, Arthur and Janet "go steady," a result of which is Janet's subsequent pregnancy. The true dilemma for both kids occurs in the form of their inabi...Read the entire review

The Movie
It was turning into a bad week for marriages here at DVD Talk when I had to suffer through the Duck Dynasty Wedding Special that was released last January. Duck Dynasty's wedding spectacular only reminded me that whatever the ceremony is supposed to represent, it devolved into a meaningless television spectacle. However, the week was finally redeemed by Meet the Patels, a comic faux documentary that dealt with an IndianAmerican man's transition into the world of arranged marriages within Indian culture.

Meet the Patels is by siblings Geeta and Raj V. Patel, and it deals with Raj's navigation into the dating world via an arranged marriage system from his parents' home country of India. With help from his mom and dad, Raj sets out on a series of dates with Indian girls who may become his potential wife. Raj's journey shows his disillusionment with American-style dating, despite the ...Read the entire review

The Show
There isn't much to say about the new Duck Dynasty Wedding Special DVD that cannot already be said about the lies inflicted by reality TV in general. The special contained everything I expected from a staged, fake-documentary show about a Southern family that affects a kind of faux-redneck/working class lifestyle, at the expense of a major TV network. The Wedding Special is overstuffed with insufferable schmaltz and the overly materialistic, generic ritual of non-religious American weddings. The sense of love and commitment that the young couple at the center of the special may feel towards each other are drowned by the grandeur of their nuptials.

Willie Luke, the bearded patriarch of a duck whistle empire and one of the interchangeable camo-wearing ZZ Top cover band members that consist of the Luke family, is marrying off his effete 19-year-old son to a girl of the same age. Inter...Read the entire review

The Movie
Punk's Dead: SLC Punk 2 is a failed coming-of-age story and Odyssey-inspired tale about a mopey goth kid who goes on a road trip with two mohawked and spiked friends and accomplishes nothing in the way of achieving an objective or growing as a character. The three principle characters have a tangential connection to the better-developed characters of the first SLC Punk film. One of the movie's biggest weaknesses centers around the absence of most of the ensemble that made the first movie far more engaging.

Where the first SLC Punk movie (1998) possessed an authentic feel for the era of early '80s hardcore punk and its outcast denizens, SLC Punk 2'S characters are so mired in the commodification of the subcultures they use to outline their identities that there is nothing at stake. Their identification with a seemingly non-mainstream youth culture as an expression of disenfranchis...Read the entire review

The Show
HBO'S True Detective Season 2, based on many of the reviews that appeared after the show premiered on HBO in 2015, didn't live up to the "literary qualities" of season one, a buzz term that shows up in several articles about the show. As one of the few reviewers to watch season 2 without the ability to draw a comparison to the first season, it can be said that the True Detective 2 DVD has some nice visuals, but it's driven by a mystery that isn't particularly intriguing. The only "literary qualities" present in True Detective are derived from poorly written, hackneyed crime fiction.

Season 2 of True Detective is notable for its atmospheric soundtrack by T. Bone Burrnett, and its washed-out golden sleaze look. However, its grim, relentlessly dismal tone makes the show a challenge to sit through. True Detective season 2 is centered around three law enforcement officers from different...Read the entire review

The Movie
The Decent One juxtaposes archival footage of Nazi atrocities with the personal letters of Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Nazis' "Final Solution," and tries to put a human face on one of the most evil people of the 20th century, for reasons that the film never explains or develops. Aside from showing the banality of everyday evil, the film's methods prove to have no meaningful effect when it comes to exploring the deeds of Himmler or the Nazis generally. However, as a documentary, the film is still effective in showing that even people who strive to be good family members, members of their community, and followers of their society's beliefs, are capable of doing horrible things. The film tries to shock us by setting th...Read the entire review

The Movie
Robert Wise's 1958 film I Want to Live!, beautifully restored by Kino Lorber for its recent DVD release, tells the supposedly true story of Barbara Graham (an emotionally incendiary Susan Hayward), a prostitute who may have been wrongfully convicted of the murder of an elderly woman in Los Angeles. The film is less notable for the veracity surrounding the facts of Barbara's life and trial than it is for the way it uses noir style to reach a heightened version of the truth. There is an emotional truth that the film achieves through its dreamy style and its critique of the world that Barbara occupies, and that ultimately judges her.

Barbara dwells in a seedy underworld occupied by druggies, fellow prostitutes, jazz musician...Read the entire review

The Movie
Director Quentin Tarantino apparently experienced a political awakening, when he recently appeared at a Black Lives Matter march in New York City, where he and many others protested the killings of African Americans by police officers. Tarantino, the director of countless racially-tinged revenge fantasies since the beginning of the New Millennium, would be the last person you'd expect to grow a political conscience, especially since his films lack any depth beyond their surface level cleverness and lack also an awareness of the larger world that informs his N-word laden films. While promoting his revenge fantasy Django Unchained in 2013, Tarantino incorrectly bemoaned the portrayal of Native Americans and other non-whites in the Westerns of John Ford, taking special aim at The Searchers. Tarantino derided Ford for treating the Indian characters in his films as one-dimensional savage...Read the entire review

The Movie
The Nightmare is noteworthy for being perhaps the only documentary to explore the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, a half-conscious state in which people who are trapped within its grip experience nightmarish sensations that involve the nearly complete inability to move one's body, constricted breathing, and scarily, the presence of what the interviewees in the film describes as three-dimensional shadow beings. The film is visually arresting in the way that many great films that explore subconscious states are, like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and many experimental short films that have been made over the decades.

The film strikes a personal note for me because I have experienced sleep paralysis in my youth, and many of the experiences...Read the entire review

The Movie

The Movie
Recent Confederate flag proponents who decry its removal from the South Carolina State House should take note of Samuel Fuller's underrated Western masterpiece Run of the Arrow, newly available for the first time on DVD. O'Meara, a Confederate soldier played by Rod Steiger, loses all sense of identity and purpose after the South is defeated in the Civil War, and he decides to head to the "Far West" to join the Sioux tribe, who live on land not yet claimed by the U.S. Fuller's hard-hitting adventure film stresses that O'Meara is a sore loser who cannot accept losing a way of life and an institution- slavery- that aren't reflective of the true realities of diversity in America. In this way, Fuller's Western, released in 1957, is a forward-looking piece of art that, in it's own crudely appealing way, stresses the importance of acceptance of all cultures in the United States.

<...Read the entire review

The Movie
Wartime office satire Zero Motivation can be summed up by a character in the film who misquotes Franz Kafka at an office party where she is being promoted: "The chains that bind mankind are made of office paperwork" The film has a great feel for the absurdities of bureaucratic entanglement in a story about two female friends who are customarily drafted to serve two years in the Israeli Army, where they are banished to a claustrophobic human resources office where boredom and in-fighting are the norm.

The film is noteworthy for the apolitical stance it takes regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In place of typical combat film archetypes, Zero Motivation captures the boredom of office work on a military base seen through the eyes of a group of women who are mired in the senseless, often funny, red tape that goes with keeping an office running. It's like a war mo...Read the entire review

The Movie
Every Secret Thing would be a much worse movie if it weren't for director Amy Berg's ability to draw out her characters through her own peculiar social observances. The film is an unimaginative police procedural filled with plot holes, but its actors work hard to create an otherwise believable world that is more interesting than the story they're trapped in. The best part of Every Secret Thing is Danielle Mcdonald's performance as an outcast wracked by the effects of being locked away for contributing to the death of an infant, years earlier. After spending seven years incarcerated as a juvenile, we meet 18 year old Alice, obese, insecure, and eerily aloof in a way that the film never fully develops.

Alice is closer to a more realistic version of the sort of infantile adults that Melissa McCarthy has played in films like Bridesmaids and Tammy. Alice is...Read the entire review

The Movie
A representative scene from Clouds of Sils Maria shows Val (Kristen Stewart), the 20-ish personal assistant to aging screen and stage star Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), defending the schlocky sci-fi film starring bratty young Lindsay Lohan clone Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moritz), who will be acting with Maria in the revival of a play that launched her career twenty years ago.

During the scene, Maria scoffs at Ellis' performance in the sci-fi film within the film, and then laughs incredulously when Val tries to praise Ellis' ability as a performer to reach deep within herself to act for a mainstream film that Maria regards as beneath her own serious artistic pedigree. Maria's sudden outburst of laughter is the only genuine, spontaneous moment in Clouds of Sils Maria.

Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.comwww.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/69229 Tue, 07 Jul 2015 01:39:04 UTC Highly Recommended

The MovieThe border between the U.S. and Mexico casts those who try to cross it into a purgatory between two worlds that are, in many ways, vastly different. The borderland is where people wander and are never seen or heard from again. They may leave behind a foot print, a shred of clothing caught on a branch, a crushed water bottle on the ground. Some are migrants who try to escape purgatory by climbing over one of its high walls, in the hopes of finding a better life on the other side. Some are trapped in this purgatory because they've become hopeless casualties of the War on Drugs. They languish in the in-between and use narcotics to numb the pain of being stuck. Minutemen, garbage collectors, social activists, and border patrol agents are like guards at the gates of this purgatory. The vastness of the limbo between both countries is explored in Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.comwww.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/67742 Fri, 03 Jul 2015 17:28:31 UTC Skip It

The Movie
Peter Flannery and Martin Brandt's muddled historical drama New Worlds, a TV miniseries from England, is making its DVD review in the U.S. on the heels of star Jamie Dornan's Fifty Shades of Grey popularity. New Worlds can also exploit the popularity of HBO's Game of Thrones because of the show's attempts at epic cinematic filmmaking and its bloody violence, which New Worlds supersedes in place of the history lesson it purports to give its audience. But take away the action sequences, of which there aren't nearly enough, and viewers are left with a visually lush, detailed pseudo-historical epic that lapses into long moments of dullness.

New Worlds is billed as a kind of sequel to 2008's The Devil's Whore, which...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.comwww.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/69122 Sun, 28 Jun 2015 17:23:03 UTC Skip It

The movie

Class of Nuke Em High II: Subhumanoid Meltdown was made at the very end of the exploitation era, which is part of the reason the film feels so horribly dated. Before the referential, ironic appropriation of the eploitation/B-movie style became more popular in the mid-1990s, Class of Nuke Em High II: Subhumanoid Meltdown was already referencing the 'styles' and mistakes of exploitation, but slipped up by not parodying them as much as simply repeating them as stylistic choices. As seedy, fly-by-night companies that turned out B movies gradually faded away, Troma kept making the kinds of gross horror flicks and softcore porn that were popular during the golden age of exploitation, and used techniques and themes that were rendered bought-out and co-opted when Hollywood began to use exploitation styles of filmmaking by giving A-list budgets to B-grade scripts. Class of Nu...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.comwww.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/69056 Sat, 20 Jun 2015 00:38:25 UTC Recommended

The Movie

William S. Burroughs in the Dreamachine is Jon Aes-Nihil's experimental documentary about iconic Beat author William S. Burroughs' experiences using a stroboscopic device, known as the dreamachine, which simulates the electric pulses of the human brain to elicit hallucinations and dream-like imagery while the user's eyes are closed. Narrator Dr. David Woodard explains that Burroughs used the dream machine for inspiration as a writer. People familiar with Burroughs' writing style may understand the seemingly fragmented, sometimes incomprehensible style of the film, while those unfamiliar with the cut and paste nature of the author's work may be put off by its non-narrative structure and lo-fi aesthetic.

The film, shot on color and black and white video between 1996 and 1997, and using still images, switches locations between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Burroughs'...Read the entire review

]]> Miscellaneous http://www.dvdtalk.comwww.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/68984 Fri, 12 Jun 2015 18:09:44 UTC Skip It

Lisa Lampanelli: Back to the Drawing Board

Insult comic Lisa Lampanelli's newest standup special, Back to the Drawing Board, premiering June 26th on Epix, shows a decline in her comedic style because she's lost the self-deprecating edge that made her racist and homophobic jokes palatable. In her best comedy special, 2007's Dirty Girl, Lampanelli satirically spewed hatred in a style that pointed out the absurdities of racial and sexual orientation stereotypes while drawing the insults back to her own somewhat awkward appearance and general disposition.

Her new special, and its press notes, focus on her recent hundred-pound weight loss and new makeover. Consequently, her many attempts at pointing out the achievement of her conventionally attractive appearance throughout Bac...Read the entire review

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