At the peak of the style called film noir are a few classics that approach perfection, and Jacques Tourneur’s supremely poetic film is certainly in the top ten. Daniel Mainwaring’s pulp novel has plenty of macabre twists but the adaptation benefits from the electric charge generated by Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Her fugitive is…

Two decades later, this daring documentary is still the only authoritative reportage on a near-taboo subject: the gross and gory graphic auto accident movies once shown to high schoolers with the idea of scaring them into driving more safely. Filmmaker Bret Wood has reconstructed and partly revised the docu, which tells the full story of…

Hud 1963 – 112 min. – 2.35:1 Criterion – 4K Blu-ray Starring Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Brandon de Wilde, Patricia Neal Written by Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr.  Directed by Martin Ritt Much of the glamour of Western movies lies in their lack of glamour. Often filmed in black and white against some of America’s…

Paul Morrissey wrote and directed this sprawling, comic/serious neighborhood saga that scrambles ethnic identities, lopsided honor codes and the twisted ‘normality’ of mob rule in the borough of Brooklyn. Do we like our hero Spike?  He’s an arrogant, entitled Italian-American, macho to the core. He impregnates both of his girlfriends, Maria Pitillo and Talisa Soto….

Robby the Robot is back, this time in 4K UHD. Arrow Video’s 4K restoration brings back the full early width of CinemaScope, along with re-created ‘Perspecta’ stereophonic sound. Hollywood’s one full-out attempt to depict an intergalactic Sci-fi future is a smashing success that relies on complex ideas as well as spaceships and monsters. It’s also…

Reviewer Denise Morrison is back with another silent movie on disc, or actually, two separate releases starring the huge silent star Gloria Swanson. One is hard to find and was mastered/restored from surviving 16mm prints; the other is beautifully preserved in original 35mm. Both were produced and directed by Allan Dwan. They’re actually older releases,…

We’ve rediscovered a new favorite from the Warner corral, a bright action comedy that raised spirits when America needed it most, fewer than 60 days after Pearl Harbor. It’s an all-star comic delight, acted stylishly by Humphrey Bogart and directed smartly by Vincent Sherman. With the congressional Isolationists finally backing down, Hollywood hit the fascists…

UK correspondent Lee Broughton returns with a review of Vincent Price’s final film for American-International Pictures. Behind-the-scenes tussles amongst its producers and a series of hasty re-writes found director Jim Clark delivering a film that employed the aesthetics of gothic horror alongside slasher film tropes in a sometimes slightly incongruent manner. The results may be…

The Bubble is back, new but somewhat the same: the 3-D Archive restores an original cut, extending the running time by 21 minutes. Arch Oboler’s 1966 feature introduced the impressive 3-D system called Space-Vision, which is still the main attraction. Michael Cole and Deborah Wally endure a Sci-fi ordeal that plays out in a crazy…

Back in 1984, England was terrorized by this special TV event. The apocalypse begins with trouble in Iraq. Maybe the last thing we need to see now is something this unsettling … yet Severin’s atom-age restoration gives this 1980s Cold War event movie a polish we can hardly believe. Besides being yet another deluxe Severin…

Here’s a picture from a decade ago that holds up well. It’s another accomplished performance from Denzel Washington, who showed nary a stumble in at least twenty good movies. His talented, intuitive pilot is Handed a crash emergency with no hope for survival, he averts total disaster through pure talent and intuition. But the reveal…

Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell light up the Portuguese colony, but on the studio backlot: mogul Howard Hughes hired the great Josef von Sternberg to direct, and then had three other directors reshoot half of the movie. It’s another promising RKO thriller compromised by crazy production practices. The stars still shine, and the WAC gives…

DEFA Fairy Tales 1961 – 1979 – 354 min. – 1.37:1, 1.78:1 Deaf Crocodile – Blu-ray Starring Doris Weikow, Blanche Kommerell, Julie Jurištová, Katrin Martin Written by Günter Kaltofen, Siegfried Hartmann, Margot Beichler Directed by Gottfried Kolditz,Egon Schlegel, Siegfried Hartmann Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Roberto Rodríguez’s Little Red Riding Hood (1960)…

Good luck comes to CineSavant: Silent movie film historian Denise Morrison will be writing special disc reviews for us. She’s long been associated with  The Kansas Silent Film Festival and knows her subject well. CineSavant needs more reviews for its silent film aficionados, so we hope we will be seeing many more… Her first contribution…

Are you ready to see what 4K resolution and contrast do to high-quality B&W cinematography?  David Lynch’s most humane and sympathetic film still makes our heads spin. Lynch extends and develops the visual nightmares of his experimental Eraserhead for this horror classic, a modern Freaks based on an actual historical personage. Stars Anthony Hopkins, John…

One of Tim Burton’s most creative pictures abandons his morbid-lite focus to find big fun in comic Sci-fi spectacle, a ‘Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad’ adaptation of a set of bubble gum cards.  It may not have been the movie-going flavor of the year in 1996, yet we’ll choose its affectionate satire over funereal gloom any…

The film adaptations of Jack Finney’s book The Body Snatchers score rather well — almost all of them are very good. For his foray into studio politics, filmmaker Abel Ferrara chose this highly commercial Sci-fi horror tale, and came up with an interesting variation on the main theme, with a low-key cast and effective, organic-looking…

James Hilton’s mystery romance takes audiences by surprise: IT’S GOOD. It might begin as a stack of cliché elements, but the development is engaging and the trick plot delivers an emotional kick, even on a third viewing. Greer Garson and Ronald Colman make a wholly entrancing screen couple, fighting a problem that will get anybody’s…

So you think life is tough where you are? … these three Italian crime tales teach a lesson beyond noir, that hope and hunger drive men to crime. Or does criminality just becomes part of life on its own?  Alberto Lattuada, Flavio Calzavara and Pietro Germi offer thrillers al’italiana … expect unsavory surroundings and immoral…

Raoul Walsh’s four-masted seagoing epic is an ambitious Technicolor production, a Hollywood film made in Europe. Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo bring C.S. Forester’s heroic characters to life, with able support from favorites like James Robertson Justice, Stanley Baker and Christopher Lee. The un-credited Ken Adam constructed full-sized sailing craft in the South of France….

Different is Good in this pleasant, sometimes silly rural fantasy in which talking animals solve a crime. No, no, no … it makes sense on its own level. Hugh Jackman is good to sheep, and there is no lack of suspects among his neighbors. But the fun is in the woolly personalities and how they…

We don’t miss every good opportunity at CineSavant — when reviewer Terry Morgan expressed interest in this picture it was a blessing. Carrie White’s story has seen several do-overs — this is the Brian De Palma original with Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, John Travolta, P.J. Soles and William Katt. It’s not…

André de Toth’s sordid crime tale is tops in all departments. Tough cop Sterling Hayden suspects parolee Gene Nelson of being in cahoots with the murderous bank robbers Ted de Corsia, Charles Bronson and Ned Young; Gene’s wife Nelson finds herself menaced both by Bronson and the ultimate psycho Timothy Carey. The direction emphasizes tense…

Blu-ray 3-D should never die — and they need to bring the players and monitors back!  The latest and most polished vintage 3-D presentation yet is The 3-D Archive’s painstaking remaster job on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s first movie in color and their only 3-D effort, a comedy with Damon Runyon gangsters, set mainly…

To put Sam Peckinpah’s directing in better perspective, completists ought to catch up with this independently produced oater, his first credited feature. Peckinpah was prevented from touching the screenplay, yet it has qualities we associate with his work. The shoot suffered from a fundamental clash of personalities, and the ‘auteur’ of the uneven result may…

Like so many collectors, special CineSavant reviewer ‘B’ has been waiting forever for a decent disc of Frank and Eleanor Perry’s hard-to-forget 1969 film about three restless, careless teenagers idly summering on Fire Island. Beautifully restored on Blu-ray by The Warner Archive, it is back in circulation as few of us have seen it, in…