Jim Hemphill, Author at DVD Review & High Definition

Nightcrawler

March 9, 2015 // 0 Comments

Viewers who complain that today’s Hollywood pales by comparison to that of the 1970s would be well served to check out writer-director Dan Gilroy’s “Nightcrawler,” a kind of mash-up of “Taxi Driver” and “Network” that also goes off in its [...]

Sands of Iwo Jima / Woman They Almost Lynched

January 21, 2015 // 0 Comments

Allan Dwan started directing movies in 1911 and continued until 1961, racking up somewhere around 400 credits in fifty years. Yet today he’s more or less forgotten, in spite of efforts by disciples like Peter Bogdanovich and film scholar Frederic [...]

Heaven & Earth

January 7, 2015 // 0 Comments

One of the finest films by one of America’s greatest directors finally gets the high-definition treatment it deserves on Twilight Time’s exquisite new Blu-ray release of Oliver Stone’s “Heaven & Earth.” A profoundly philosophical and [...]

As Above, So Below

January 5, 2015 // 0 Comments

“As Above, So Below” is an inventive and genuinely frightening horror film that is almost entirely undermined by its adherence to the increasingly tiresome conventions of the “found footage” subgenre. It tells the story of a group of explorers [...]

Safe

December 18, 2014 // 0 Comments

One of the seminal films of the post-sex, lies and videotape American independent film movement finally gets the treatment it deserves on Criterion’s new special edition of Todd Haynes’s “Safe.” The story of an upper class suburban woman [...]

Jersey Boys

December 15, 2014 // 0 Comments

Clint Eastwood’s “Jersey Boys” is a fascinating companion piece to an earlier Eastwood film with which it might not seem, at first glance, to have much in common: his 1995 romance “The Bridges of Madison County.” The films aren’t [...]

I Am Ali

December 1, 2014 // 0 Comments

Few icons of 20th-century American culture were covered more extensively by the media than boxer Muhammad Ali, which poses both advantages and problems for anyone setting out to make a film about him. On the plus side, the amount of available footage is [...]

Tammy

November 14, 2014 // 0 Comments

Rarely have the words “Extended Cut” on a Blu-ray sleeve filled me with more dread than when I saw them plastered across the top of the packaging for “Tammy,” a witless comedy that felt excruciatingly long in its original 97-minute [...]

Iceman

November 10, 2014 // 0 Comments

The Hong Kong action epic “Iceman” is both exhaustive and exhausting, a movie that moves from urban gunplay and historical fantasy to lowbrow scatological humor, romantic comedy, and sociopolitical commentary – often in a space of less than five or [...]