celluloid consommé

Anthony Waller’s 1995 thriller is no longer hard to find thanks to Arrow’s excellent release. Box art image courtesy of MVD Entertainment Group. The 1990s were a freewheeling time for murder mystery suspense thrillers (including the interchangeability of this particular four-word genre label). Many films during this time aimed to either weaponize overt sexuality, imitate as closely as possible the kernels of ideas and aesthetics of DePalma and/or Hitchcock, or try the same with the Verhoeven model (see:  Basic Instinct ) and try for as over-the-top as possible. This brought extremely mixed results of course, as there are reasons why there are exactly one Verhoeven, one DePalma, and one Hitchcock. So many of these similarly-minded films wanted to be the above so bad that they lost valuable personality in the pursuit, or took on other qualities entirely that weren’t necessarily in its original intent. But  Mute Witness  doesn’t feel like one of those films, despite how loud...

Paul Schrader’s ’80s trendsetter gets a fabulous 4K disc from Arrow Video. Box art image courtesy of MVD Entertainment Group. In 1980, director Paul Schrader pays homage to his favorite European filmmakers: Godard, Bresson, and Bertolucci chief among them. Schrader even enlists Ferdinando Scarfiotti as visual consultant on  American Gigolo,  injecting a European feel to a film that is set staunchly in LA during the advent of the 1980s. Schrader populates his film with a myriad of Italian stylistic influences: Giorgio Moroder’s immortal score overlays vibrant European attitudes on Los Angeles’s barren social landscape, men’s fashion explodes into the American world through Armani’s designs (which have only snowballed from  Gigolo’s  release), and the wide open spaces designed by Scarfiotti translate a spatial discourse into the influence Julian Kaye wields and navigates at the height of his privilege. It may essentially be a re-focused and re-contextualized  Conf...