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…

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…

Yet another movie we dearly love, remastered in glowing 4K — a show that’s so much fun, who would want to poke about looking for faults?  No fear there … Bud Abbott and Lou Costello seem to love the monsters as much as we do, and put out the welcome mat for Lon Chaney’s Wolf…

Director John Carpenter applies himself to this solid attempt to (finally) nail down the H.P. Lovecraft ethos on film. The project and its script were actually initiated by its producer, Michael DeLuca. Thanks to our emotional connection with star Sam Neill, we stick with a horror hallucination nightmare that threatens to become its own in-joke….

Nightmare Alley 2021 – 1.85:1 – 150 Min. Criterion – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara Written by Guillermo del Toro, Kim Morgan Directed by Guillermo del Toro Guillermo del Toro makes a living finding the humanity in monsters and the monsters in men. A boy who grew up…

Errol Flynn is back in harness as an 18th century Scottish patriot who survives the Battle of Culloden only to fall in with pirates of the Caribbean. No, really — it’s from a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Flynn’s late career mini-epic tries to cover too much story and the direction isn’t distinguished, but Flynn…

A 4K remaster puts a high polish on Howard Hughes’ WW1 air war epic — an enormous personal project that allowed the playboy tycoon to indulge his obsessions for women, movies and especially aviation. The film’s air combat has never been equalled: some shots have upwards of 30 aircraft buzzing through the clouds at the…

The irreplaceable WAC brings forth another sterling HD remaster of a vintage crime thriller. Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan go head-to-head in this remake of Howard Hughes’ silent hit; the context is modern mob racketeering but the screenplay turns the conflict into an old-fashioned personal grudge match. Playboy producer Hughes threw the picture together and…

One of the creepiest and most elegant fright films ever made gets a much needed audiovisual overhaul in 4K: Ealing Studios assembles 5 classic horror tales inside a diabolically clever wraparound story, one that poses an impressive conceptual puzzle. Four English directors set the stage with a tidy little gathering for tea, and waste no…

Don’t congratulate Hollywood too quickly — would this honest and accurate story of American racism have been filmed if the author of its source story weren’t William Faulkner?  Juano Hernandez is a propertied black man who won’t back down or apologize when he’s accused of murder … in a town where a lynching could still…

Macabre fantasy!  Diving into these 100 year-old silent films is like being back in film school again, excited by ‘new’ film ideas. Henrik Galeen was a prime exponent of German Expressionism, and these Uber-classics show the style at its refined best.  The Student of Prague is one of the top films ever about selling one’s…

Beware of hidden panels above your bed!  The best of the silent ‘old dark house’ thrillers comes to 4K in a new remaster with a beautiful new music score. Laura La Plante is inheriting a vast fortune, but a pop-eyed monster with a clawed hand is eliminating the other relatives come to hear a reading…

Gaumont’s restoration brings back a trio of French-language thrillers by the under-appreciated actor-director Robert Hossein. Two are Euro-noir takes on steamy pulp fiction crime stories costarring the dreamy Marina Vlady; the third is a fatalistic political western made years before the Italians got into the act. Each has a hard edge and at least one…

This remake of a gangster classic barely 15 years old adds CinemaScope, Warnercolor and a selection of method-y actors — and it copies some scenes shot-for-shot. Jack Palance is mostly scary as the ‘new’ Roy Earle, and Shelley Winters less vulnerable as his new love. Also good crime-time fun are Lon Chaney Jr., Earl Holliman,…

Hollywood Legends of Horror Collection Warner Archive – Blu ray 1932-1939 – 1.33:1 Starring Lionel Atwill, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Humphrey Bogart  Written by Robert Tasker, Irene Kuhn, Guy Endore, John L. Balderston Directed by Michael Curtiz, Tod Browning, Charles Brabin, Karl Freund, Vincent Sherman Need help with your Halloween hangover? Here’s a…

Nominated for 9 Academy Awards, Paramount’s blockbuster adaptation of the ‘hot’ Ernest Hemingway novel was given a grand Road Show release, then cut by over half an hour for general audiences. Poor studio curatorship left the biggest picture of its day in a restoration limbo. This new disc works with the existing UCLA Archive restoration. A…

Science fiction goes psychedelic, with an audiovisual light show that far outstrips 1960s efforts with oil smears and surreal imagery. Maverick director Ken Russell was the man for the job, interpreting a powerhouse script by Paddy Chayefsky through a well-chosen young cast: William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid. We think it works like…

Is this the most violent crime film of the pre-Code era?  It takes an extreme Law ‘n’ Order position, one that downplays the need for Civil Rights while glamorizing brute vigilantism. Police chief Walter Huston takes the law into his own hands, while his detective brother Wallace Ford screws things up by getting all warm…

Whoa — this Halloween, horror fans are up to their severed necks in fancy restorations of Hammer’s first Gothic horror film, the world wide smash that singlehandedly revived the genre and made stars of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. This Baron Frankenstein lies, kills and profanes the dead in his quest for god-like power; he’s…

Hammer special editions are the craze in 2025, and another fine disc label gets in on the action with a vintage title directed by Terence Fisher, with the sumptuous Hammer Technicolor look provided by cameraman Jack Asher. Anton Diffring murders to maintain an indefinite, if shaky, state of immortality; Hazel Court is the beauty who…

Peter Hyams both wrote and directed this lavish ‘space hardware’ movie, set in an off-world mining colony of the future. The show looks good, but what saves it is the committed performance of star Sean Connery, who remains a class act all the way. Peter Boyle and James Sikking flesh out underwritten characters, in a…

In a strange house, strange people await a new spiritual life … or will it be a new imprisonment?  Orson Welles’ Cassavius may be dying, but his will holds the secret lair called Malpertuis under a strange spell. A young man is offered the job of ‘new keeper’ for what might be a strange menagerie…

A philosophical animated film about animals in peril?  This thoughtfully conceived, beautifully-crafted winner for Best Animated Film gives us something new in a genre dominated by safe family fare with jokes and songs: a rumination on the life struggle in an unstable world. Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis builds a fascinating fantasy environment, in which a…

It’s part film noir, part haunted house movie and a 100% atmospheric triumph for director Bernard Vorhaus and cameraman John Alton. Eagle-Lion’s spooky tale of a spiritualist conning a widow and her daring younger sister works up a nice charge of suspense. Turhan Bey stars as the smooth soothsayer, and Lynn Bari and Cathy O’Donnell…

The Snow Queen: Treasures of Soviet Animation Vol 2 Deaf Crocodile – Blu ray 1957 – 1.33:1 Starring Yanina Zhejmo, Anna Komolova  Written by Nikolai Erdman, Lev Atamanov Directed by Lev Atamanov The Magnificent Ambersons, Blade Runner, Once Upon a Time in America, each a member of an unlucky fraternity: films disfigured by studio interference—never…

It was the impossible, intolerable taboo horror of its day … does it still shock as it once did, or are audiences now too jaded to appreciate its brilliance?  George Franju & Eugen Schüfftan ride the divide between clinical brutality and dreamy surrealism.  Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli and Edith Scob brought horror up to date…