“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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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’…

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…

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…

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…

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,…