DVD / Bluray Archives - FilmFisher

It’s a Wonderful Life (PG)

Scrooge’s nephew calls Christmas “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the […]
You Were Never Really Here (R)

Lynne Ramsay’s 2018 film You Were Never Really Here begins with a sigh — or perhaps more of a gasp. We’ve cut from a black screen to an image of Joaquin Phoenix’s character Joe, his head wrapped in a plastic bag, slowly breathing in and out. With each exhalation the bag inflates, allowing space, breathing […]
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (PG)

Half-Blood Prince is the first, and perhaps only, Harry Potter film to feel like it isn’t trying to be a good “Harry Potter film” and just does its best at being a good film. The seventh film has a similar tone, and Azkaban encapsulates what it is to be a Harry Potter film the best, but my point stands. In the sixth cinematic installment of the franchise, Harry Potter and his friends are ordinary British teens placed in extraordinary circumstances, but instead of focusing on the circumstances, the film chooses to focus on the teens – and is much better off because of it.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (PG)

In the evangelical circles of my childhood, Harry Potter was anathema; when I was allowed to read the books in high school, they still carried the sense of something forbidden about them, though by the time I reached college, J.K. Rowling was suddenly accorded the reverence due a long-lost member of the Inklings. Suffice it […]
Let the Right One In (R)

Early in Let the Right One In, a young bully asks his victim, “What are you looking at?” Soon we find the victim, a dispassionate boy named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), fantasizing about turning the question back on his tormentor. His rehearsed vengeance is overheard by the vampire Eli (Lina Leandersson), and well into her courtship […]
Interpreting ‘The Shape’ of Halloween (R)

Originally conceived as The Babysitter Murders, the plot for Halloween is actually about as streamlined as that title might suggest. It features several babysitters, a hulking man with a knife, and some murders. But in the hands of any director other than John Carpenter, we wouldn’t still be talking about Halloween forty years later. It is, in fact, one of […]
Barton Fink: The Inferno and the Hypocrite (R)

Writer’s block is hell. You sit, every member of your body frozen, your neurons refusing to fire, your fingers refusing to type — and all the while, the awful blankness of the empty page declines to cease its sneering taunt. You lose sleep, lose sanity; your mind becomes a barren desert, a dry and weary […]
Memento: Truth vs. Happiness (R)

After seeing Inception for the first time in the summer of 2010, Christopher Nolan quickly became my favorite director. Although my enthusiasm has waned over the years, as his films have grown less character driven and more spectacle oriented, I still have a certain fondness for earlier works like Memento.
The Dark Knight (PG-13)

It is easy to write about a bad film, but much harder to write about a good one. Pointing to areas that are lacking is easy, but when you cannot find fault in anything, what do you write about? This is, in part, a consequence of the medium: a good film cannot simply be put into words or else it would not be a good film, only a good story
American Beauty (R)

According to the book Thinking Fast and Slow, it doesn’t take much for us to think something is good. A psychologist ran a study at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University that placed Turkish words (or Turkish sounding words) in the newspapers of each school. For several weeks, words such as kadirga, saricik, biwonjni, nansoma, and iktitaf showed up on […]
Moonstruck (PG)

A romantic comedy starring Nicholas Cage and Cher has no business being this good. That tends to be the sentiment, anyhow. But it is this good, and so are they. Cher is lovely as a woman whose frank outlook on life can’t hide a romantic streak. Cage’s mania is expertly channeled, giving him exuberant ideals to proclaim […]
In the Mouth of Madness (R)

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending a horror triple feature at the Egyptian Theater that was a part of an ongoing series known as “New England Nightmares.” To be perfectly honest, New England has always been the perfect setting for ghost stories and horrifying haunts. It is a landscape where an original way […]
Bambi (G)

Bambi needs no explanation, no grand thesis or deep thematic explication. It can be understood immediately, not only at the cognitive and emotional levels, but at the most basic: from within the unconscious. It is a story about growing up and coming of age that can be understood by anyone immediately. It is a basic […]
A Nightmare on Elm Street (R)

Imagine, if you will, a perfect American suburb. You know the kind, probably only immortalized on the silver screen or through photography. All the houses are colonial style, possibly Victorian, with white picket fences and freshly mowed grass. The neighborhood’s safe enough for the kids to play without adult supervision, and everyone is familiar with who lives on their block. But scratch that seemingly perfect veneer, and there’s decay under the surface.
Brother Bear (G)

I’ll begin with the bold claim that Brother Bear is one of the finest animated films Disney has produced in the past quarter century. At least, it is one of their most underrated and unappreciated. Granted, I tend to favor a handful of Disney’s supposed flops over a number of their “canonical” hits. I tend to root for underdogs, and perhaps I’m too loyal to films that left a deep impression on me in my childhood.
The Passenger (PG-13)

“I used to be someone else, but I traded him in.” In Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy posits that although modern man understands the world around him better than ever, his failure to understand himself renders him desperate to escape himself. Percy cites modern fiction’s common use of amnesia as a plot device as […]
Werckmeister Harmonies (Not Rated)

“Space travel makes you realize just how small we really are. When you see Earth as a tiny blue speck in the infinite reaches of space, you have to wonder about the mysteries of creation. Surely we’re all part of some great design, no more or less important than anything else in the universe. Surely […]
X-Men: First Class (PG-13)

G.K. Chesterton’s essay “Vengeance” suggests that although modern law is highly refined, it can evolve into a system devoid of any passion and become a machine which unreflectively punishes people. “The evil in our modern law is not one of barbaric passions, but one of passionless routine. The trouble is not that a lawyer really […]
American Graffiti (PG)

American Graffiti is arguably George Lucas’ masterpiece, not necessarily because it’s any more or less culturally significant or cinematically innovative than Star Wars, but simply because it’s Lucas’s most personal film. Here is a piece of his life, adapted into an ensemble piece that explores his own personal sense of nostalgia in a surprisingly bittersweet and grounded way.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (PG-13)

What makes a film, or anything for that matter, good? Perhaps I should answer that in a different way, since the word “good” in the English language has two broad but distinct definitions – the first moral, the second beneficial. Both of these are valuable as qualities in filmmaking, but what I mean to ask specifically is how do we, from our various frames of reference, discern value in a particular film?