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…
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…
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…
Wonder of wonders — restored to HD, Warners’ ode to high art generates big magic through Shakepeare’s giddy romantic comedy. Newcomer Olivia de Havilland romps with Dick Powell, Ross Alexander and Jean Muir, while James Cagney, Joe E. Brown, Frank McHugh and Co. clown it up like happy idiots. Backed by the music of Mendelssohn,…
Jack Nicholson’s second breakthrough film and the first to show his dramatic range is Bob Rafelson and Carole Eastman’s portrait of an unsettled drifter. Bobby Dupea is described by Criterion as an alienated & irresponsible cad — but one caught between a heritage in the arts and a trailer park working man’s life. It’s a…
Severin Slays with disc virtuosity … by reaching into the BBC archives for a 4K remaster of Peter Watkins’ searing ‘documentary’ of nuclear war in England’s County Kent. With minimal resources and maximum creativity, Watkins’ atomic horrorshow was deemed excellent yet was banned from the airwaves, starting a censorship controversy that still hasn’t cooled down….
For his third feature film Fred Zinnemann scored big with a grim story of Nazi terror that finally took note of the Concentration Camps, if not the full immensity of their horror. Spencer Tracy’s everyman fugitive one of seven escapees, and the people he meets and things he sees would send any war industry worker…
Sony surprises us with another fine 4K upgrade for an unheralded classic in the Columbia library. It’s a shipwreck survival tale that challenges ship’s officer Tyrone Power with a series of impossible decisions. The most important is a heartbreaker: everyone will drown if the 9-person lifeboat continues to carry the 26 people presently clinging to…
This early starring feature for Jean-Paul Belmondo co-stars him with Christine Kaufmann in an episodic crime tale. One friend tries to spring another from prison, while contending with gangsters on his home turf. It’s uneven but has many excellent scenes, especially a midsection filmed in le taule. Also starring Michel Constantine and Béatrice Altariba, and…
Pacifism goes Panavision and color in Richard Attenborough’s first directorial effort, a musical epic of the tragedy of World War One. The mirth and magic — and despair — comes from songs sung in the trenches, that were given alternate, irreverent lyrics by the soldiers themselves. An endless cast of English stars appear, in good…
Dan Duryea’s slimy killer fesses up to a cold-blooded murder, but insists that the victim’s wife Patricia Owens hired him to do it! This cheap English production is only fitfully competent but we were fascinated anyway … it provides more context to the story of a big film producer run out of Hollywood by the…
Harryhausen comes at last to 4K Ultra HD! We hoped that the improved scan would bring out more to see in the master animator’s brightest film, and our initial response is a big Yes. The video remastering people at Sony have done a good job, taking advantage of the newer format’s improvements while retaining the…
The creative part of this international genre hybrid was assembling its dynamite all-star cast. The concept is unbeatable: what kid doesn’t want to see Toshiro Mifune as a samurai, fighting to redeem his honor in the Old West? He tangles with outlaws Charles Bronson and Alain Delon, with Honeychile Ryder Ursula Andress thrown in for…
Alain Resnais’ historical drama of the notorious l’affaire Stavisky is one of his most accessible movies. Producer-star Jean-Paul Belmondo was fascinated by the story of a swindler who conned half of France in the early 1930s, igniting a scandal that almost brought down the government. His Serge Stavisky projects the charisma of a grand conman,…
The movie ratings system experienced a rough beginning. Studios got the notion that America wanted R-rated product, which led to a number of mainstream movies that played like grindhouse smut. A main offender example is Roger Vadim’s unfunny soft-core murder comedy with big stars Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson. With its twisted fantasy of underaged…
This Blu-ray re-premieres a notable Joan Crawford picture that’s been all but unseeable since 1936. It’s romance and murder the way the Rich do it: Crawford’s swank socialite falls in love with the ideal mate played by Robert Montgomery, but she can’t shake a foreign lover who would rather blow up a scandal than give…