Red Angel (Special Edition) (Blu-ray) by Stuart Galbraith IV The best film of Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura, at least among the dozen or so top contenders I've seen, Red Angel (Akai tenshi, 1966) is a kind of female-centric Human Condition, director Masaki Kobayashi's massive three-film epic from Junpei Gomikawa's novel. Both are bleak, uncompromising war movies set on the Japan-colonized Manchuria. In The Human Condition the protagonist was a leftist labor camp supervisor while in Red Angel the heroine is a nurse at frontline military hospitals. In The Human Conidtion much of the focus was in the dehumanization of the Chinese by the racist captors, and later of the soldiers themselves, by their own comrades in arms. In Red Angel the focus shifts to the soldiers' brutality of women, both "comfort women" and, surprisingly, even the Japanese nurses, who are routinely raped. And, where in The Human Cond...Read the entire review »

The Ultimate Aang & Korra Blu-ray Collection (Avatar: The Last Airbender / The Legend of Korra) (Blu-ray) by Justin Remer The Collection: Paramount has released a new box set combining their previous complete-series Blu-ray sets for Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and its sequel, The Legend of Korra (2012-14). Presumably, this is to prime the marketplace for the live-action Avatar remake series that is filming now. The Ultimate Aang and Korra Blu-ray Collection is principally previously-released material, although a new folder has been slipped into the packaging that contains 8 collectible art cards and a new Blu-ray disc featuring two sizable featurettes looking back at the two series.DVD Talk already has numerous reviews of...Read the entire review »