4K UHD Review: In the Heat of the Night (Criterion Collection)
Directed by Norman Jewison (Moonstruck, The Hurricane), In the Heat of the Night won five Oscars in 1967: Best Picture, Best Actor (Rod Steiger), Best Screenplay (Stirling Silliphant), Best Editing (Hal Ashby), and Best Sound. Nearly sixty years later, the film is still a powerful moral drama and fascinating character study. The story begins when […]
The Pawnbroker (Blu-ray)
For most filmgoers, Rod Steiger’s most memorable role is that of police Chief Bill Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night released in 1967, for which he won an Oscar. Even so, Steiger’s best—and most nuanced—performance came three years earlier, in The Pawnbroker. Directed by Sidney Lumet, it was one of the first films […]
In the Heat of the Night (Blu-ray)
Directed by Norman Jewison (Moonstruck, The Hurricane), In the Heat of the Night won five Oscars in 1967: Best Picture, Best Actor (Rod Steiger), Best Screenplay (Stirling Silliphant), Best Editing (Hal Ashby), and Best Sound. Nearly fifty years later, the film is still a powerful moral drama and a fascinating character study. The story begins […]
Blu-ray Review: The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell
Based on a true story, this Otto Preminger courtroom drama recreates the court-martial of World War I hero Brigadier General Billy Mitchell (Gary Cooper). In 1925, in an effort to gain support for the use of air power, Mitchell gave a statement to the press insinuating that the War department was not only incompetent, but […]
Blu-ray Review: Jubal (Criterion Collection)
A psychological western with Shakespearean tensions, Jubal is a nearly forgotten film that despite obvious differences deserves comparison to the simultaneous works of Howard Hawks and John Ford when considering mastery of the western genre. The film’s director, Delmer Daves, was a gifted artist who had a deep understanding of human emotion and its complexities. […]
Blu-ray Review: Doctor Zhivago
Fresh of the success of Lawrence of Arabia, British director David Lean tackled another epic; Doctor Zhivago based on the Nobel Prize winning novel by Boris Pasternak. After what he viewed as the action-adventure tone of Lawrence of Arabia, Lean wanted to make a grand, yet more romantic film to balance things out. Producer Carlo […]