AVS › Reviews › Blu-ray Movies

Blu-ray Movies

Manufacturer

Repo Man (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Repo Man (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

A quintessential cult film of the 1980s, Alex Cox's singular sci-fi comedy stars the always captivating Harry Dean Stanton (Paris, Texas) as a weathered repo man in desolate downtown Los Angeles, and Emilio Estevez (The Breakfast Club) as the nihilistic middle-class punk he takes under his wing. The job becomes more than either of them bargained for when they get involved in reclaiming a...

Badlands (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Badlands (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Badlands announced the arrival of a major talent: Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven). His impressionistic take on the notorious Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate killing spree of the late 1950s uses a serial-killer narrative as a springboard for an oblique teenage romance, lovingly and idiosyncratically enacted by Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now) and Sissy Spacek (Carrie). The film also...

On the Waterfront (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

On the Waterfront (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Marlon Brando (The Godfather) gives the performance of his career as the tough prizefighter-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy in this masterpiece of urban poetry, a raggedly emotional tale of individual failure and institutional corruption. On the Waterfront charts Terry’s deepening moral crisis as he must choose whether to remain loyal to the mob-connected union boss Johnny Friendly (12...

Brazil (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Brazil (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

In the dystopic masterpiece Brazil, Jonathan Pryce (Glengarry Glen Ross) plays a daydreaming everyman who finds himself caught in the soul-crushing gears of a nightmarish bureaucracy. This cautionary tale by Terry Gilliam (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), one of the great films of the 1980s, now ranks alongside antitotalitarian works by the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt...

A Night to Remember (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

A Night to Remember (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

On April 14, 1912, just before midnight, the unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg. In less than three hours, it had plunged to the bottom of the sea, taking with it more than 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers. In his unforgettable rendering of Walter Lord’s book of the same name, A Night to Remember, the acclaimed British director Roy Ward Baker (Don’t Bother to Knock) depicts with...

The Samurai Trilogy (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

The Samurai Trilogy (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

The Samurai Trilogy, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki (The Rickshaw Man) and starring the inimitable Toshiro Mifune (Seven Samurai), was one of Japan’s most successful exports of the 1950s, a rousing, emotionally gripping tale of combat and self-discovery. Based on a novel that’s often called Japan’s Gone with the Wind, this sweeping saga fictionalizes the life of the legendary...

The Game

The Game

Enormously wealthy and emotionally remote investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (Traffic’s Michael Douglas) receives a strange gift from his ne’er-do-well younger brother (Milk’s Sean Penn) on his forty-eighth birthday: a voucher for a game that, if he agrees to play it, will change his life. Thus begins a trip down a rabbit hole that is puzzling, terrifying, and exhilarating...

Tiny Furniture (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Tiny Furniture (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Lena Dunham got her start making YouTube videos, but she emerged as a major talent thanks to the breakthrough success of this exceptionally sharp comedy, which garnered the twenty-four-year-old writer-director-actor comparisons to the likes of Woody Allen. The filmmaker herself plays Aura, a recent college graduate who returns to New York and moves back in with her mother and sister (played by...

The Royal Tenenbaums (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

The Royal Tenenbaums (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Royal Tenenbaum (Unforgiven’s Gene Hackman) and his wife, Etheline (Prizzi’s Honor’s Anjelica Huston) had three children—Chas, Margot, and Richie—and then they separated. Chas (Meet the Parents’ Ben Stiller) started buying real estate in his early teens and seemed to have an almost preternatural understanding of international finance. Margot (Shakespeare in...

Anatomy of a Murder (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Anatomy of a Murder (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

A virtuoso James Stewart (Vertigo) plays a small-town Michigan lawyer who takes on a difficult case: that of a young Army lieutenant (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’s Ben Gazzara) accused of murdering the local tavern owner who he believes raped his wife (Days of Wine and Roses’ Lee Remick). This gripping, envelope-pushing courtroom potboiler, the most popular film from Hollywood...

AVS › Reviews › Blu-ray Movies