Neil Armstrong pulls a last-second eject before his malfunctioning lunar mobile crashes on to the runway below and disappears in a ball of flame. Apollo 14’s Alan Shepard takes out a club and starts playing golf on surface of the moon. One of the Hubble telescope’s discarded solar panels drifts away into abyss of space like a giant, shimmering manta ray. Highlights? Pick ‘em… Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 7% [?]
“Aaaaah! Aaa-aaa-aaa-aaaah! One day we will find, the Ciiities of Gold!” Today is that day. Two decades after dazzling pre-Akira audiences on the BBC, the great lost anime of the ‘80s emerges on a six-disc DVD set
Popularity: 8% [?]
“God help us!” The first words of Malcolm McDowall’s addictive DVD commentary say it all. Written by Gore Vidal (who disowned his screenplay), helmed by Salon Kitty
Popularity: 16% [?]
Take it straight up, no chaser: a strobing, surging shot of cine-adrenaline to be snorted straight through your eyeballs. Unafraid to burst blood-vessels in its own brain in the pursuit of higher, harder, faster thrills, the psychotically inventive Crank 2
Popularity: 13% [?]
1. Planet Earth
Shot on HD cameras and a £16 million budget, David Attenborough’s nature mega-doc might be Blu-ray’s most breathtaking visual experience: every colour, every hair, every tiny air-bubble and fish-scale leaps off the screen and hits your retinas like a drug.
2. Iron Man
Impossible to see where the CG starts and the live-action footage ends on Iron’s Man’s HD transfer. But it’s the lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio that really amazes: skip to Tony Stark’s first flight and feel your surround-sound ripple. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 16% [?]
Eyes wide open for six fascinating black bore-holes into David Lynch’s cinematic awakening. Dreams and reality, fears and desires, sex and death, innocence and adulthood… It’s all here. These short films
Popularity: 63% [?]
Goodbye cake and balloons. Hello suicide and paedogeddon. Probably the worst birthday party of the 20th century, Danish bad-boy Thomas Vinterberg’s riveting family-meltdown drama is also the first, truest and best Dogma 95 film ever made.
Exploding inside a country inn, it sees various spouses, relations and friends gathered to celebrate patriarch Helge’s 60th. But the veneer of civility shatters like glass as the families deepest, darkest secrets spew out onto the table. Chekhov, Ibsen and Bergman would have eaten it up. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 53% [?]
Or: how Japan learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Restored, recut and re-released with a full 40 extra minutes to celebrate a 50th birthday, Godzilla shrugs off its politically neutered US edit to stomp tall once more: a thirty-storey atomic metaphor as urgent, fraught and ambiguous as ever. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 76% [?]
“Never Give A Saga An Even Break!” hollers the tagline to Mel Brooks’ swipe at Hollywood’s most sacred genre. After succeeding by setting out to fail with The Producers
Popularity: 59% [?]
The same year Godard was cutting up cinema in A Bout De Souffle
Popularity: 40% [?]
Jonathan Crocker is a freelance journalist based in London. Having previously been a commissioning editor at Total Film, Men’s Health and Time Out, Jonathan also contributes to publications including i-D magazine, ShortList, Little White Lies, TheLondonPaper and Wired. He is available for commissions: contact here!
