A Place For Film: Episode 55 - Physical Media Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny. Blu-ray Reviews for November 2021

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Believe it or not, I’ve been doing these reviews for over a year at this point and it’s been lovely watching how much it's all grown. This originally started with me desperately wanting to review the Criterion Collection’s The Complete Films of Agnès Varda boxset and it has grown into something I couldn’t imagine. Over the past 12 months, this has gone from just the lovely folks over at Kino Lorber and the Criterion Collection to also working with other lovely folks over at Arrow Video, Fun City Editions, GKIDS, Code Red, MVD Entertainment, Synapse Films, and Cohen Film Collection to help bring awareness to the wide world of well-curated and pristinely-packed cinema you could experience from the comfort and safety of your home with no more than a TV and a Blu-ray player (no internet required). This started as a way to keep people engaged with repertory and arthouse titles while theaters were closed and tech companies continued to gobble up the scope of cinema, but it’s now evolved into blog discovery and being intentional and passionate about cinema I consume. It’s been great hearing all the feedback over the past 12 months and getting to hear from people who found this column by chance. I love doing it and I hope you guys still like listening to and reading it.

So what better way to celebrate a one-year anniversary than with the addition of two new distributors! From the UK but bearing “All Region” gifts comes Imprint Films with its releases of Basil Dearden’s penultimate film, The Assassination Bureau starring late greats Oliver Reed, Telly Savalas, and of course Diana Rigg, a romp about assassins who clearly don’t understand there are more efficient ways to kill a person than bombs (more on that later). They also have released a handsome boxset containing both the 1951 Anthony Asquith/Michael Redgrave and 1994 Mike Figgis/Albert Finney adaptations of Terrence Rattigan's The Browning Version. Also making their debut is the long-awaited and oft-asked-for Vinegar Syndrome! We're starting off with their exclusive release of the very exciting reconstruction of the nearly lost and soon-to-be-cult-favorite New York Ninja.

We also have our usual suspects with Kino Lorber giving us releases of director John G. Avildsen and composer Bill Conti’s unlikely but welcome follow-up to Rocky, Slow Dancing in the Big City starring unlikely romantic lead Paul Sorvino. John Huston’s Freud biopic starring Montgomery Clift and Susannah York makes a welcome appearance, which prompts me to once again think about what makes a biopic work artistically in the first place. There is also the season 1 release of Rod Serling’s horror-tinged Twilight Zone follow-up Night Gallery.

Arrow Video brings us two welcome releases for cinephiles who have their sights set on lesser-known Japanese genre cinema: Gamera director Noriaki Yuasa’s adaptation of Kazuo Umezu’s manga “Hebi shōjo (Snake Girl)” into a horror film aimed to traumatize children everywhere, The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch, and there’s also the genre-bending mash-up that is Shinji Somai’s Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, which somehow threads the needle between quiet coming-of-age drama, yakuza movie, and Japanese “idol movie.” Finally, we have my pick of the month from Fun City Editions with their recent release of Christopher Petit’s New German cinema-inspired and new wave-scored British road movie Radio On, a gem I hope won’t remain hidden for long.

After a year of doing this, I hope some of you have found something you’ve enjoyed that you would have otherwise missed or overlooked, and if you haven’t yet, I hope this month can change that.

You can read the rest of the written reviews on the IU Cinema Blog, here:

https://blogs.iu.edu/aplaceforfilm/