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Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure  — 4K

by Glenn Erickson

Tim Burton’s debut feature elaborates on the alternate-universe world of Pee-Wee Herman, the alter-ego creation of comedian Paul Reubens. A non-conformist original with a good heart, Pee-Wee’s DNA could have come from a TV kiddie show host. He’s an infantile / streetwise child prodigy with lofty values: he believes in fair play, inclusivity and special…

Twilight Zone: The Movie

by Glenn Erickson

Steven Spielberg’s celebration of Rod Serling’s legendary TV show delivers mind-bending fantasy and horror, and maybe slips a bit when reaching for poignant charm and moral preaching. The stories aren’t all winners, but they build to two of the best omnibus entries of all time, Joe Dante’s It’s a Good Life and George Miller’s Nightmare…

Sirius  (Szíriusz)

by Glenn Erickson

Dennis Bartok and Craig Rogers’s Deaf Crocodile Films keeps coming up with surprises from Eastern Europe. This Hungarian fantasy throws us for a loop — it’s a time travel story using an actual mechanical time machine, but filmed way back in 1942, in the middle of WW2 when the country was fighting alongside the Nazis….

Illustrious Corpses

by Glenn Erickson

Watergate prompted Hollywood to launch a wave of paranoid thrillers about vast conspiracies, but Italian filmmakers long before presented the status quo as corrupt from the inside out. Director Francesco Rosi’s adaptation of a fiction novel skips the escapist thrills. Incorruptible detective Lino Ventura intuits that his superiors don’t want him to solve a series…

Alfred Hitchcock Presents  The Legacy Collection

by Glenn Erickson

The best suspense TV of the 1950s has been released again, in a monster set with dozens of discs … and its just the kind of thing that collectors need when streaming options are nil. Hitchcock, Joan Harrison, and Norman Lloyd combined Hollywood experience, good taste and a wicked sense of humor to make murder…

Scars of Dracula  –4K

by Glenn Erickson

Any 4K Hammer release gets special attention; this one has Christopher Lee as Dracula so will spike the radar of collector completists. Its reputation is not high, but it does predate the company’s woeful attempts to update the franchise in a contemporary setting. Kino & StudioCanal’s presentation can’t be faulted — the 4K remaster flatters…

The Pink Panther

by Glenn Erickson

This solid hit generated numerous sequels, a truckload of cartoons and a key character for Peter Sellers, who slipped into the movie at almost the very last second. David Niven, Robert Wagner and Capucine carry the slapstick comedy, while the newcomer Claudia Cardinale made a fantastic American debut. Everyone had the original soundtrack album. Blake…

On Borrowed Time

by Glenn Erickson

For the sensitive, this high-toned tale of Death trapped in a tree can be an emotional sledgehammer, with enough weeping and wailing for ten sad stories. To avoid being transported to the great beyond, Lionel Barrymore uses a magic tree to neutralize Mr. Brink — Death Himself. But that means that nobody dies anywhere, leaving…

Laurel & Hardy/ The Definitive Restorations Volume 2 (1929-1935)

by Charlie Largent

Laurel & Hardy/ The Definitive Restorations Volume 2 (1929-1935) 1929-1935 – 1.33:1 Kit Parker Films – Blu-ray Starring Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson Written by Leo McCarey, Stan Laurel Directed by James Parrot, Charley Rogers Laurel and Hardy were a team so beloved they could unite even this country—it’s no small irony that they…

The Beggar’s Opera

by Glenn Erickson

It’s a movie musical ripe for rediscovery … a film version of a classic ballad opera from 1728, a satirical lampoon of ‘noble highwayman’ tales. Laurence Olivier is Macheath, a rogue repeatedly rescued by the women that love him; with society so corrupt, Macheath’s stylish thievery feels heroic. Some of the vintage songs and lyrics…

His Girl Friday  — 4K  +  The Front Page

by Glenn Erickson

When the ‘talkies’ arrived, Broadway’s smartest wordsmiths wasted no time mining Hollywood gold. Hecht and MacArthur’s cynical newspaper saga defined a brassy new American style; a decade later, Howard Hawks’ ‘gender spin’ on the material became an equal comedy classic. Criterion reprises their newspaper classic double bill, bumping one of the features up to 4K…

Dead of Night  Region A — 4K

by Glenn Erickson

The StudioCanal restoration of one of the creepiest and most elegant fright films ever made comes to Region A on 4K Ultra HD: five classic horror tales, filmed by four of Ealing Studios’ best directors. The tale’s insane elliptical framing story captures the uncanny quality of a nightmare; Georges Auric’s music score sets the viewer…

David Byrne’s American Utopia   — 4K

by Glenn Erickson

“Maybe we can make some sense.” David Byrne & Spike Lee’s joyous concert film is just as energizing as Stop Making Sense; it offers a theme of peace, inclusivity and social justice, and ponders the personal challenge of finding one’s way in the chaos of modern living. The songs are a mix of new pieces,…

Law & Order  The Complete Original Series

by Glenn Erickson

Among monster boxes this one takes the prize: 104 DVD discs, holding twenty years of a series that’s been in constant TV rotation for (cough) 35 years. They’re all here — Jerry Orbach, Sam Waterston, S. Epatha Merkerson and Benjamin Bratt. I imagine this is prime gift box bait, and an opportunity for casual fans…

Red Planet

by Glenn Erickson

This decent space adventure might have been a hit, if another Mars-themed movie hadn’t bombed a few months before. Cocky astronauts journey to what is supposed to be a partly terraformed Mars, only to experience mission snafus that make survival unlikely. The plot complications cherry-picked from the best of sci-fi are mostly exciting; the actors…

The Miracle  — 1959

by Glenn Erickson

Advertised like an action spectacle, Irving Rapper’s religious epic is about a novice nun who spends most of the film on a wild romantic spree — men, dancing, bullfights — before a glorious finale with a show of reverence. Carroll Baker is the ‘spirited’ novitiate and Roger Moore the gallant officer she loves. This prime…

Columbia Noir #7:  Made in Britain

by Glenn Erickson

Noir goes English, with U.S. studios looking for bargains and American talent looking for acting opportunities and tax breaks.  These Columbia releases show English actors on the rise as well. Ken Hughes, Mark Robson and Terence Fisher direct Arlene Dahl, Richard Widmark, Faith Domergue and Victor Mature, opposite Mai Zetterling, Elizabeth Sellars, Eunice Gayson, Herbert…

Kansas City Confidential

by Glenn Erickson

Phil Karlson’s nervous noir throws tough guy John Payne into the middle of a Pulp Fiction tangle, crashing the meet-up of four thieves who have used him as a patsy in a million dollar bank heist. The script served as a partial blueprint for Quentin Tarantino, what with criminal colleagues that don’t know each other’s…

I Know Where I’m Going!   — 4K

by Glenn Erickson

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s imaginative romance is so good, it justifies a lifetime spent seeking out obscure movies. When bad weather stalls a headstrong young woman’s journey to be wed one island short of her goal, she is compelled to reassess everything she wants for her life. Wendy Hiller’s determination to make the smart…

Silent Adventure: Grass + Chang

by Glenn Erickson

Milestone Film and Video re-premieres a double bill of landmark silent-era documentaries filmed in far-off lands by the dauntless adventurers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. Grass takes us on a spectacular trek with Irani nomads on a migration in search of greener pastures. Chang investigates life in rural Thailand, with an emphasis on…

Alec Guinness Masterpiece Collection  — 4K

by Glenn Erickson

He’s Sidney Stratton, Henry Holland, Professor Marcus and a full eight members of the lofty D’Ascoyne family — it’s the best of Alec Guinness’s comedy showcases. The chameleon actor first seen in David Lean classics graduated directly into the class-act comedies of Ealing Studios, working with witty filmmakers that made the words ‘droll and understated’…

The House with Laughing Windows – 4K

by Glenn Erickson

It’s an Italo horror with a surprising agenda … the central theme is sadism and torture, but the approach is a slow-going mystery without the expected exploitative diversions. A backwater Italian town would like to forget some bad wartime history as well as some unpleasant business about a murderous mad artist; a visiting art expert…

“Él”  — 4K

by Glenn Erickson

Luis Buñuel’s most personal drama billboards a ‘strange obsession’ yet ends up expressing the full injustice of polite society’s sexual status quo. A pillar of the community marries but finds his skewed notion of a romantic ideal betrayed from the start. Paranoid machismo and toxic jealousy is an entryway to full-on mania. The surreal is…

A Summer Place

by Glenn Erickson

Look at She, she’s Sandra Dee!  1959’s most sexed-up soap drama came with beautiful actors, Technicolor scenery and a music tune that the radio wouldn’t stop playing. In a ‘Place’ not too far from Peyton, is it always summer?  The sordid fun includes frigidity, class snobbery, divorce, alcoholism, teen sex drive, teen sex angst, teen…

Burden of Dreams   — 4K

by Glenn Erickson

Is that Werner S. Herzog, for Sisyphus?  What filmmaker goes out of his way to make his work impossibly difficult?  Werner Herzog did just that on Fitzcarraldo and filmmaker Les Blank documented the entire frustrating, risky process, which included the insane engineering feat of hauling an enormous steamboat over a hill. Herzog chose to shoot…

The Diabolical Dr. Z

by Lee Broughton

Nothing says ‘holiday time’ quite like jolly Jess Franco, so we asked UK correspondent Lee Broughton to cover of one of the mad Spaniard’s early films. This one features both medical horror and cold, calculated revenge. A coherent narrative, a stylish look and some reasonable technical qualities might surprise viewers familiar only with Franco’s later…