The best DVDs and Blu-rays of 2015 (for a Sight and Sound web exclusive)

Posted on the BFI web site on January 14, 2016. — J.R.

Age is… Re:Voir Video

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Army Criterion Eclipse

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Jauja Cinema Guild

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Letter from Siberia (Blu-ray included in the Chris Marker Collection) Soda Film + Art

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Moana with Sound Kino Lorber

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Despite (or is it because of?) the disorderly quirks of commerce, ideology, and opportunity, we all occupy disparate time frames, so I’ve unapologetically cited, in alphabetical order, five imperishable films that I happened to encounter for the first time in 2015, all of them in digital editions worthy of their achievements.

Dwoskin’s last film – a satisfying conclusion to a remarkable career – comes from the same label that afforded me my first look at Marcel Hanoun’s remarkable 1966 L’authentique procés de Carl-Emmanuel Jung with English subtitles.

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Army is a wartime propaganda feature subverted into a pacifist lament, Jauja a haunting medieval western (or southern) time-bent into a luscious advance in Alonso’s art.

Letter from Siberia, even without the benefit of the French version promised on its jacket, is a delightful early essay film showing its author’s wit, literary gifts, and photojournalistic richness in optimal form, enhanced by a superb Roger Tailleur essay.

And Moana with sound is a seemingly unpromising but beautifully realized re-edition and further enrichment of the Flahertys’ early masterpiece, launched by their daughter Monica and restored by their great-grandson Sami van Ingen and Bruce Posner. The latter, even without English subtitles for the meticulously post-synced Samoan dialogue and songs (which might have unduly complicated the results), allows the splendor of the original to shine through.


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