Displaying items by tag: Kaleidescape

To kick off a new week today, we have some interesting release news and a new disc review to share as well. Let’s get to the latter first...

Tim has offered his thoughts on Michele Soavi’s The Church (1989) in 4K Ultra HD from our friends at Severin Films.

More reviews are forthcoming this week, so be sure to stay tuned for them.

Also today here at The Bits, we’ve expanded our Patreon poll about Lionsgate 4K catalog Steelbooks to our Twitter/X page with just a day and a half left. The question is: Lionsgate Home Entertainment is developing a new line of 4K Ultra HD catalog Steelbooks, including many titles released previously as Best Buy exclusives, and they’d like your opinion: Would you prefer the covers to 1) feature newly-created custom artwork, or 2) the film’s original poster artwork? You can vote right now here on Patreon or here on Twitter/X and please take a moment to do so before the polls end on Wednesday. Thank you!

Now then, the big release news today is that Criterion has just announced its July 2024 slate of Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD titles, and this batch has some real gems as well as a couple of surprises. [Read on here...]

Wednesday afternoon here at The Bits brings new disc reviews and more release news as well...

First, Tim has posted his thoughts on Michael Felsher’s excellent new documentary After Effects: Memories of Pittsburgh Filmmaking, now available on Limited Edition Blu-ray from his own new label, Red Shirt Video. Sounds like it’s a pretty terrific release so do check it out.

By the way, after you enjoy that, here’s a link to an interview I did way back in 2005 (on the original Bits website) with writer/director John Harrison about Effects and his work with Romero and other Pittsburgh filmmakers. (Just pardon the messy formatting.)

Also this afternoon, Stephen has posted reviews of William Beaudine’s The Old Fashioned Way (1934) on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Studio Classics, as well as Sarah Smith, Jean-Philippe Vine, and Octavio E. Rodriguez’s Ron’s Gone Wrong in 4K Ultra HD from 20th Century Studios.

More reviews are forthcoming in the days ahead, including several that I’m working on, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for them. [Read on here...]

We’re starting things off today with a new Blu-ray review, this one of John Gilling’s The Flesh and the Fiends (1960) starring Peter Cushing, now available from Kino Lorber Studio Classics. Dennis has posted his thoughts on the film and the disc for you today, so do give it a look.

Meanwhile, in announcement news this afternoon, Kino Lorber has announced its August slate of Blu-ray and DVD releases, which is set to include the following...

Look for Salome Chasnoff’s Code of the Freaks (2020 – Blu-ray and DVD) and Justin Pemberton’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2019 – Blu-ray and DVD) on 8/4, Anne Sweitsky’s Sonja: The White Swan (2018 – Blu-ray and DVD), Halina Dyrschka’s Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (2019 – Blu-ray and DVD – for Zeitgeist Films), Sasie Sealy’s Lucky Grandma (2019 – Blu-ray and DVD – for Good Deed Entertainment), and Paul Aaron’s A Different Story (1978 – Blu-ray – for Scorpion Films) on 8/11, Atom Egoyan’s Guest of Honor (2018 – Blu-ray and DVD), Forbidden Fruit: Volume 6 – She Should’a Said No/Devil’s Sleep (1949 – Blu-ray – for Kino Classics), and Lucio Fulci’s Conquest (1983 – Blu-ray – for Code Red) on 8/18, and The Reginald Denny Collection (includes The Reckless Age, Skinner’s Dress Suit, and What Happened to Jones? – 1924/26 – Blu-ray and DVD – for Kino Classics), Martha Kehoe & Joan Tosoni’s Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind (2019 – DVD – for Greenwich), Simon Amstel’s Benjamin (2019 – DVD – for Artsploitation Films), Nicholas Leytner’s The Tobacconist (2019 – Blu-ray and DVD – for Menemsha Films), and Larry Yust’s Trick Baby (1972 – Blu-ray – for Scorpion Films) on 8/25. [Read on here...]

One of the most interesting aspects of having served as the editor of The Digital Bits website for over twenty years now, is that I’ve had a front row seat to some pretty dramatic changes in the home video industry.

At 53, I’m old enough to remember watching movies on black-and-white televisions—square analog displays that required the viewer to adjust a pair of “rabbit ear” antenna to get a decent picture. Like some of you, I saw the advent of cable television and the arrival of VHS and Betamax videotape—a technology the film industry fought tooth-and-nail to kill until its profit potential finally became obvious.

And of course, as a longtime film enthusiast, I’m someone who strongly embraced the Laserdisc format back when it was the only option for watching movies in their original widescreen aspect ratios at home.

I founded The Digital Bits in late 1997 (it actually began as an industry newsletter shared by email in late ’96) in part because I knew that DVD would be a hit. Having worked at a record store a decade earlier, when Compact Discs took the music world by storm, it was obvious to me that consumers would embrace the idea of movies on a disc that was—to them—essentially identical to the CDs they already loved. [Read on here...]

All right, we’ve got a couple things to report today...

First up, NBCUniversal’s Fandango service is going to purchase Vudu from Walmart, according to reports in the trades today (see this link at Variety). This is interesting and it doesn’t surprise me. I expect there will be lots of consolidation in the Digital space in the months and years ahead, and I also expect every major studio to try and grow their own footprint in the digital space or to team up with others who have. And of course the Digital category includes not just streaming/subscription services but transactional purchases too. So it makes a lot of sense.

Also today, I’ve been invited—and have just begun—to check out the high-end digital movie service Kaleidescape. I’ll have more on that experience here at The Digital Bits in a few weeks, after I’ve really given it a thorough test and tryout. [Read on here...]