The recently departed Japanese director Seijun Suzuki has had a resurgence of late in the world of British home distribution. Though a couple of his more famous films – like pop art classic Tokyo Drifter – got put out with middling transfers by small companies in the early aughts, the last few years have seen labels like Eureka’s Masters of Cinema, and, particularly, Arrow Video, raid the man’s archives for some remastered pleasures…
Tag Archives: Blu-ray
The Firm (Alan Clarke, 1989)
Since his untimely death in 1990 at the age of 54, Alan Clarke has been something of a perennially underrated figure in the landscape of British cinema history, perhaps partially because the majority of his work was made for television. Thanks to the efforts of a massive restoration project, the BFI has made the complete collection of Clarke’s BBC output available via Blu-ray box-set, with 1989’s The Firm, perhaps the most famous of this lot outside of Scum, also getting a separate release of its own…
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Guy Ritchie, 2015)
It’s been nearly 20 years since 60s TV spy show Mission: Impossible made the leap to the big screen, largely abandoning the source material’s Cold War trappings for more contemporary concerns. As the fifth M:I film hit cinemas this year, another 60s spy property finally gets a modern adaptation, albeit in period-piece pastiche mode with era contexts firmly intact…
Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki, 1963)
In 1968, Japanese director Seijun Suzuki saw his long-standing contract with the Nikkatsu studio terminated for repeatedly turning routine potboiler scripts he was given into increasingly surreal, visually uninhibited gangster movies, such as avant-garde masterworks Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter. 1963’s Youth of the Beast rarely reaches quite the same fantastic heights of kaleidoscopic imagery, but within it the seeds of Suzuki’s later, greater madness were sown…
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