• News

• All

Jul 24, 2017 By Austin Trunick

The summer months are halfway through. Hopefully you’re occupying these hot July weekends with picnics, camping, beach trips, and other seasonally-appropriate activities. Or, you’re beating the heat and taking advantage of another one of our favorite hot-weather activities: hunkering down in the air-conditioned indoors until the sun goes down and the temperature drops below 90, working your way through a stack of DVDs or whittling down your streaming watchlist.

Here at Under the Radar, we’ve been dedicating more time than ever to covering some of the best new Blu-rays and DVDs to hit shelves. You can check out our amped-up coverage in our growing Blu-ray/DVD reviews section, which updates throughout the week. If you still hold your physical media dear, we encourage you to check back often. For those on a time crunch, we present to you our pick for this month’s most essential home video release.

Arriving in a long, long-awaited edition from The Criterion Collection, Stalker was the final Soviet film by the great Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky. In the 38 years since it release, Tarkovsky’s masterpiece has lacked a release that did the film’s striking visuals justice. Criterion’s newly-restored edition gives cinema fans their best opportunity to see the movie as it was meant to be seen – perhaps their first chance, if they aren’t fortunate enough to live near a good repertory arthouse theater.

Our film staffer, Jason Wilson, had the following to say about Criterion’s treatment of Tarkovsky’s masterpiece:

For years, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker has seemed like an inevitable addition to the Criterion Collection library. It lacked a proper release that was easily accessible (I first saw it on a fuzzy YouTube transfer) and Criterion had already released several of Tarkovsky’s films. So it’s about time a decent restoration has become available ... But it’s more than a decent restoration, it’s a near-pristine one. For a film so dependent on its visual storytelling, anything short of stunning would have been a disappointment.

Click here to read his full review of Criterion spine number 888, Stalker.

Other notable recent releases include Arrow Video’s reappraisal of the 2001 cult j-horror film Pulse, Ben Wheatley’s chaotic action-comedy Free Fire, a box set containing three newly-restored films by Roberto Rossellini, a classic Al Green documentary, the underseen Gregory Peck thriller Night People, and Shout! Factory’s six pack of Peter Sellers’ Pink Panther movies.