Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary feature takes his earlier The Act of Killing one step further. An Indonesian optometrist dares to interview death squad leaders that half a century before murdered a million people as part of an anti-communist genocide. The eye doctor’s own brother was one of the victims. What we see sheds light on a long-suppressed outrage,…

The bloody adventures of a swordswoman dedicated to murderous revenge provided Quentin Tarantino with a major inspiration. Director Toshiyo Fujita’s impeccable images make the gorgeous Meiko Kaji into an almost abstract superheroine in beautiful cultured dress and hairstyles — and soaked with sprayed blood. The Complete Lady Snowblood Lady Snowblood & Lady Snowblood: Love Song…

It’s the John Ford film you never heard of, not because it’s bad, but because it’s a little confused. Richard Greene, David Niven and an emotional George Sanders (!) dedicate their lives to clearing their father’s name of a smear by international arms smugglers! Their spirited companion Loretta Young behaves almost as if this were…

To commemorate the passing of the great Hungarian cinematographer we’re taking a look at some of his most iconic work, which also happens to include some of the great American films of all time. Be sure to click “submit” for your score!

Robert Wise’s taut noir suspenser about the Mafia takeover of a small city is like an underworld Invasion of the Body Snatchers. John Forsythe’s newsman slowly realizes that gambling corruption has infiltrated the business district, city hall, and even his close associates; he’s expected to become a crook too, or else. Great docudrama style aided by…

Stop! Don’t touch that dial…  If you like your atom-age propaganda straight up, MGM has the movie for you, an expensive 1946 docu-drama that became ‘the official story’ for the making of the bomb. The huge cast includes Brian Donlevy, Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Audrey Totter, Hume Cronyn, Hurd Hatfield, and Joseph Calleia. How trustworthy…

Fans that missed Twilight Time’s initial Blu-ray release of Ray Harryhausen’s Jules Verne spectacle get a second chance with this Encore Edition.  It includes an improved transfer and new extras, including an excellent audio commentary with Steven C. Smith, C. Courtney Joyner and Randall William Cook. The show still sends us, and Bernard Herrmann’s powerful music score…

It’s a TV movie graduated to feature status, with four imagination-challenged tales of terror. The script has lots of variety — a video game possessed by the devil, a truck possessed by the devil, and lastly, a rat possessed by the devil! But the roster of actors is attractive — Cristina Raines, Emilio Estevez, Lance…

Do you love movies about cute animals? The original pet-lion-in-Africa romp is actually a well balanced nature film about the separation between wild animals and those raised by humans. Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers winningly play the Adamsons, game wardens that dedicate themselves to the well-being of Elsa, the lioness they raise from infancy. Born…

The latest restoration of a German silent classic is F.W. Murnau’s lavishly mounted version of the Goethe tale, starring Emil Jannings as Mephisto. It’s an impressive drama but also has a sense of (Teutonic) humor here and there. Most every shot is a fantastic visuals, and the bigger scenes use visual designs worthy of fine…

RKO’s final in-house production is a good end-of-an-era film, a spirited and well-made musical comedy. Bright-eyed Jane Powell can’t stop accepting marriage proposals, from nerdy Tommy Noonan, dreamboat kisser Cliff Robertson and zillionare Keith Andes. She imagines her future with each man in musical terms, through production numbers staged by Gower Champion. The Girl Most…

It’s sweet, all right, not to mention sentimental and corny — as Adeline Schmidt, Irene Dunne leaves her father’s beer garden to sing in New York, where she falls prey to a predatory playboy. Set in nostalgic 1898, this Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical features several unfamiliar but marvelous songs. Dunne shows the film world the…

Frank Sinatra shines in a story of police corruption that tries to say it like it is — or like it was in 1968, just before the ratings system came in.  The well-intentioned, suspenseful story is burdened by odd censor choices,  Sinatra’s conservative self-image, and rudely retrograde attitudes toward gays. In a sparkling new transfer…

Germany’s Explosive Media company has a serious itch for American westerns, and they have a trio of new releases. One is a minor Hollywood classic with major graces, from the late 1950s. A second sees an American producer based in England filming in Italy with a rising international star, and for the third an established American star…

Tis the season for a quiz about Charles Dickens’ beloved Christmas tale! Don’t forget to click submit for your score!

(This is a review of the roadshow version of The Hateful Eight, which will be screening in true 70MM in about 50 theaters across the country during the first two weeks after the movie’s release on Christmas Day. The same roadshow version will also screen in other venues digitally rather than on film. Before the…

The latest Marvel franchise hero is an incredible shrinking secret agent with powers wholly unlike his fellow Avengers. Ex-con Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is motivated by sentimental family connection issues, and so is everyone else. The Sci-fi ideas come off very well via imaginative CGI effects and the 3-D is great, too. Ant-Man 3-D Blu-ray…

Bloody havoc reigns! Kinji Fukasaku’s no-holds-barred vision of ugly violence and uglier politics on the streets of Hiroshima is a five-film Yakuza epic that spans generations. The film amounts to an alternate history of postwar Japan, that puts an end to the glorification of the Yakuza code. The enormous cast includes Bunta Sugawara, Tetsuro Tanba,…

Meet Rita Tushingham, the cutest comic (and dramatic) actress of swinging London. This ’60s masterpiece applies director Richard Lester’s talent for comedy to a new kind of quirky, youthful sex farce. Shy boy Michael Crawford takes lessons on how to dominate women from Ray Brooks, when all he has to do to win cute Rita…

Douglas Sirk’s first American movie came out so well that PRC sold it to MGM, earning Sirk a promotion out of the Poverty Row studios. John Carradine is excellent — and underplays! — as the Hangman of Prague who moonlights as a depraved sex criminal. But the context in this wartime propaganda movie is serious…

Of the Big Three new wavers of German cinema—Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders– who “came of age” as it were in the ‘70s, when I was in college and my own stake in the movies was budding into something more learned and substantial than what it was when I first discovered my…

Crime, lust and vigilante lynchings in the wide-open city on the bay, back in the gold rush days. Miriam Hopkins, Edward G. Robinson and Joel McCrea form a spirited triangle as a sharp roulette dealer strings one man along and can’t prevent another from throwing away a fortune. Sam Goldwyn’s impressive production shows Howard Hawks…

Minimalist ‘Z’ monster movies really took off in the 1950s, earning good money on tiny outlays of time, money, and sometimes talent. Dan Milner’s directing is competent, to be kind, but the ‘nothing happens’ script is a sure-fire soporific — Roger Corman surely didn’t worry about the competition. The good news is Richard Harland Smith’s…

Curt McDowell and George Kuchar’s comedy epic of oversexed sensationalists running amuck while trapped in a storm-battered house goes beyond strange. It’s a legit experimental film but — gasp! — also 2.5 hours of hardcore porn and other forms of giddy depravity. A movie guaranteed to make conservative heads explode — read with caution, please!…

or, Savant picks The Most Impressive Discs of 2015   This is the actual view from Savant Central, looking due North. What a year!  I was able to take one very nice trip back East to see Washington D.C. for the first time, or at least as much as two days’ walking in the hot…

Despite its rampaging monster approach to the holiday season and the imposing, sort-of terrifying giant horned goat-man who provides its title, Krampus isn’t, at heart, an anti-Christmas picture– it has at least one bloodshot eye pitched toward seasonal classic status. The movie’s story is centered on a family at war with itself—semi-sophisticated suburbanites Adam Scott…