columbia

Coming December 8th

A Frank Capra film. 1939. Beautifully shot in black & white by Joseph Walker. I've been asked if I'm prejudiced against older films to which HDR has been added, and I'm not. It generally works fine, if not on projectors. I've worked hard for aeons to get my projectors and panels to play...

A hugely popular film upon release in 1996, Columbia has released Cameron Crowe's Jerry Maguire in a special 24th Anniversary 4k UHD presentation, as part of the Columbia Collection boxed set. And it's beautiful. The film holds up wonderfully. Color, densities, black levels (further supported...

It's a little known fact that while Ben Kingsley was lauded for his portrayal of Gandhi in Sir Richard Attenborough's epic, he was not the first choice for the lead. Back in mid-1980, with no known Indian actors capable of taking on the role from an international marketing perspective, numerous...

One of my all-time favorite films. It's a bit like one of those wines, that's extremely high quality, and easy to drink. Everything about this film is perfect, which has made it a fan favorite. The new 4k UHD from Columbia, has taken Penny Marshall's (we could use her in our midst right now)...

The new 4k release of David Lean's epic, Lawrence of Arabia, has seen four versions, and a myriad of home video itinerations, going back to praxinoscope days. Now released in the new Columbia six film boxed set, it has seemingly reached home video nirvana. Everything that one might wish for is...

Continue reading...

Continue reading...

If you liked the original Zombieland, which came out a decade ago, you may also find Double Tap fun, although there's much here that's repetitive and overall, of lesser quality. Is it an unnecessary sequel? I'm not certain, but it's still a way to spend 100 minutes toward mindless fun. The...

I see that Columbia MOD well be releasing Bell Book And Candle on Blu-ray . Likewise Universal MOD will be releasing Kitten With A whip on Blu-ray . Does anyone know if Columbia , and Universal will be selling "factory pressed " blu-rays , or recordables? They seem to be selling in the $25 to...

There was a time, as a late teen, before I learned to speak fillum, that I might confuse, or conjoin George Cukor's wonderful 1938 romantic comedy Holiday, with Leo McCarey's wonderful The Awful Truth, produced the year previous. Both star Cary Grant, while Awful feature him with Irene Dunn...

For those who may be unaware of Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker, be advised that you'll not be witnessing something that will be receiving the proprietary Dove label. And while there is a place for Hallmark films, it's not one of those, either. You should also be aware, going in, that any...

Behold a Pale Horse has always seemed to be a bit of an oddity to me. Directed by Fred Zinnemann, one of the three that David Lean used to refer to lovingly as "the three foreigners," in a style so tepid to be almost without style, and with a minimal tale to tell. Partly having the appearance...

One could easily be led to believe, by viewing the new 4k of Edward Zwick's 1989 Glory, that the folks at Columbia have a secret sauce, enabling them to perfectly capture the appearance of an OCN Print to one of those tiny discs, we call Blu-ray. It's perfect. Especially, projected, the...

The Natural, has Robert Redford as famed baseball player Roy Hobbs (1904-1983). Probably my favorite baseball film, and right up there with Field of Dreams, with its magisterial, heroic, etherial view of history and the sport, partially based upon the novel by Bernard Malamud, with more than a...

Continue reading...

I've always loved this film, but have never seen it in the quality offered by Twilight Time, from Columbia's latest video master. To my mind, it's always seemed to be film by Frank Capra, as channeled through John Ford. It has so many attributes of both filmmakers, that it's difficult to see...

Stanley Kramer's Oklahoma Crude is a difficult film to categorize. Possibly a dramedy, but not precisely. It occurs in 1913, the year of the filmmaker's birth, and concerns a young woman set on success toward her own oil rig. But big business arrives, and it isn't a good situation. We have...

The Admirable Crichton, released in the Colonies in 1957 as Paradise Lagoon is a class comedy. Think Upstairs, Downstairs meets Lord of the Flies, the original Blue Lagoon and Gilligan's Island. It's a sweet British production that I'd only seen once before, and it looked nothing like Twilight...

For those seeking to corner the market and collect every vampire film, or at least every vampire production featuring Bela Lugosi, Scream Factory has made the task easier, with their release of the 1943 Columbia film, The Return of the Vampire. In typically Columbia fashion, it's a quality...

Obsession is what one gets, when two superb filmmakers (Brian De Palma & Paul Schrader) have an obsession. A slightly different take on Hitchcock's Vertigo. And a fun ride. Based upon a new master, provided by Columbia, one should presume going in, that the quality will be superb. And it is...

Denzel Washington returns, as Robert McCall, a gent that you don't want to piss off, in Antoine Fuqua's The Equalizer2, a fun, violent, escapist entertainment of retribution. Photographed with different flavors of Arri Alexas, and completed as DI, the resultant 4k Blu-ray mit HDR is a high-end...

Scream Factory has given us two Columbia releases - both genre films - and they're both glorious on Blu-ray, typical of Columbia product. Urban Legend is a 1998 college age kids in jeopardy production, with all of the normal accoutrements. Sleepwalkers arrived 6 years earlier, directed by Mick...

New discoverers of Richard Lester's Robin and Marian, a paean to aging in the middle ages, will find more than a bit of resemblance to Tony Harvey's wonderful The Lion in Winter, which came eight years previous. Listen to the score of Robin, and you'll find the textures of John Barry's work in...

John Ford directed 27 films in the 1930s. 11 in the 1940s, but there was a war that interceded. His government output was superb. 15 in the 1950s, by which time he had hit his sixties. The 1960s had 7 films released, with Young Cassidy, taken over by Jack Cardiff. While there are many great...

We're instituting a new rating line today, as I've been noting more of late, that catalog titles are receiving more than just a new image harvest, or uncompressed audio. With their new 4k of Air Force One, a hugely entertaining two decade old political thriller, from Wolfgang Petersen, Columbia...

In one of the more confusing bits of history for a theatrical release, the UK entity Powerhouse is releasing for R1, Jacques Tourneur's Night and Curse of the Demon, in UK and US release cuts, along with multiple aspect ratios. One was never supposed to see the Demon in this film, but we do...

Robert Harris submitted a new blog post A few words about...™ Shampoo -- in Blu-ray Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

Daniel Petrie's 1961, A Raisin in the Sun, is brilliant cinema. I tried to see it theatrically when I was a teen, but missed the final ten minutes or so, as their was a racial altercation in the theater, and police were called in. I actually didn't finally see the entire film until the '80s in...

As Michael Bay's initial directorial feature effort, Bad Boys wasn't a bad place to begin. Stylish, fast-paced, beautifully photographed (in Toronto dressed as Miami). The initial tale is led by two comic actors, who wise-crack their way through a couple of hours of violence and mayhem...