This excellent true story of political bribery in Tennessee has a genuine heroine at its center. Sissy Spacek plays a governor’s aide set up to grease pardons for violent offenders, who blows the whistle in her own defense. Jeff Daniels is the fixer running the scheme; attorney and future Senator Fred Thompson became a film…
Take a trip to the ’50s roots of French crime cinema, now redubbed ‘French noir.’ Obsessed with American cars and movies, Jean-Pierre Melville nevertheless brings original flavor and philosophy to his first thriller. ‘Bob the Gambler’ is a friend to all in the Paris underworld and a gent when it comes to women. But he’s…
Want to follow Spencer Tracy in search of the elusive Northwest Passage? Not in this movie! Taken from American history and treated like gospel, Kenneth Roberts’ story gives us Spencer Tracy as a colonial ‘special forces’ Major whose troop marches hundred of miles to wipe out an Indian encampment near the Canadian border … it’s…
Once again an Iranian film yields an experience found nowhere else. Houman Seyedi’s allegory of exploiters and the exploited never takes a false step, building in tension as it goes. Festival critics praised the performance of Mohsen Tanabandeh as an Everyman laborer driven to a radical extremes. The well-made picture plays with elements we expect…
Jean-Luc Godard’s pop Sci-fi masterpiece jumps to 4K … and the splendid 2023 remaster on the 4K disc finally nails Raoul Coutard’s gritty-beautiful B&W cinematography. Agent Lemmy Caution rockets through intersidereal space to fight the computer Alpha 60 in Dr. Nosferatu’s ‘Capital of Pain’ … and to help Natacha Von Braun re-learn the word ‘love.’…
We wanted to cover a Universal product from the late ’60s, and this one has stars we like — Rod Taylor, Claudia Cardinale, Harry Guardino and a lot of angles to discuss — the TV-movie production values, the Techniscope format short cut. Kino’s disc comes with a good commentary from Steve Mitchell & Steven Jay…
Jack Nicholson’s loose, wooly, not-particularly-well-organized western comedy is often quite funny, especially in the early stages. With a half-dozen capable funny men given little to do — John Belushi, for one — the movie is ultimately saved by its leading lady. The marvelous, 100% charming Mary Steenburgen helps the film earn its label ‘romantic comedy,’…
Practically disowned by Columbia when new, Orson Welles’ baroque noir thriller is now regarded as one of the studio’s top achievements, and Sony has released it as a solo 4K attraction. Starring Welles’ ex-wife Rita Hayworth and a raft of eccentric players in strikingly effective roles, the film fronts a pretzel-twisted storyline that takes multiple…
General Eisenhower reportedly praised this movie as best representing the real experience of American foot soldiers; director William Wellman’s cast gives it believability and the writers stick close to the de-glamorized plain reporting of war correspondent Ernie Pyle. The real combat footage intercuts well; the sentiment is heartbreakingly direct. Burgess Meredith is excellent and budding…
Cecil B. De Mille and David Lean get the glory for historical epics on a giant scale, but Bernardo Bertolucci’s saga of an empire overturned equals them in sweep and spectacle. The complex era on view would seem a political minefield, yet the production received full cooperation from the Red Chinese. The digital restoration presents…
Jean-Pierre Melville’s sleekest, most stylish crime meller makes the jump to 4K — Alain Delon’s Jef Costello is the hired gun trying to sidestep a double cross, in a genre dream of rainy Parisian streets and chrome nightclub interiors. The title perhaps refers to Jef’s impossibly rigid personal code of underworld conduct. Made almost 60…
Raro Video reissues Michael Reeves & Paul Maslansky’s semi-comic horror romp, the one that engaged Barbara Steele for one very long day of very good work. Corman expats Charles Griffith and Mel Welles got involved as well. The good news is that this release augments its two new interviews with key archive extras, including a…
Wim Wenders makes 3-D movies like no others … this investigation of the life and work of the controversial artist Anselm Kiefer may be the most sophisticated use ever of stereoscopic cinema. The rough beauty of Kiefer’s work is reflected in Wenders’ filmmaking choices — he doesn’t just report on his subject, he merges with…
Some titles get remembered as Firsts: The Great Train Robbery, The Jazz Singer, Becky Sharp, This Is Cinerama, The Robe and this little game-changer from the scrappy independent Arch Oboler. The very first feature-length 3-Dimensional drama in color ignited a super-fad that blew through Hollywood and burned out in less than two years. Forget Hungry…
This subtly surreal noir thriller from the mystery pen of Cornell Woolrich is so ‘dreamlike,’ it barely makes sense! Penniless drifter Robert Cummings enters the weird circle of shady operator Steve Cochran, and falls for the serenely seductive Michèle Morgan … with creepy Peter Lorre smirking from the sidelines. Murky doings in Florida and Havana…
Criterion comes through with the spectacular special edition hinted at by Alex Cox back in 2022… Sam Peckinpah’s final western sees the light of day in three versions, two of them remastered to a glowing 4K Ultra HD. Sam’s shooting-gallery rumination on loyalty and betrayal in a corrupt New Mexico is an unending parade of…
“I’m Reptilicus!” “No, I’m Reptilicus!” That inspirational scene is not to be found in either version of this monster-on-the-loose epic — but a flying monster is, along with the bizarre Tillicus song. The last movie anybody expected in a deluxe 4K remaster, this Danish farrago takes on a special charm. Included for the first time…
Paul Schrader, Richard Gere and the studio way of packaging movies hit the jackpot with this tale of an ultra-glamorous professional ladies’ man up to his neck in trouble. On-call gigolo Julian Kay has attained a lavish lifestyle that requires discretion and privacy — things that vanish when he becomes a person of interest in…
Paramount gives us a stand-alone release of its newest remaster of George Pal’s visionary, ambitious and amusingly dated Sci-fi epic followup to his smash hit Destination Moon. It’s the classic fantasy, first considered for Cecil B. De Mille, of a ‘space ark’ built to spare a tiny group of humans from a cataclysmic End of…
Kino’s 19th ‘Dark Side of Cinema’ mega-series — now 57 individual films and counting — presents three more solid noir entertainments from good directors and top stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Lizabeth Scott, and Charlton Heston in his first Hollywood feature. The lineup: Dark City, No Man of Her Own and Beware, My…
This chiller would have given Franz Kafka nightmares! The most sophisticated & influential Sci-fi film of the 1950s uses few special effects yet blows away audiences unprepared for its creep-out insights into personal insecurity and paranoia. This new 4K upgrade remaster offers its intended camera aspect ratio, plus the ‘Superscope’ reformat imposed on its original…
Peter Weir’s tale of a mysterious disappearance in 1900 is even more disturbing than his The Last Wave: the ‘New Australian’ movement must have needed an ethereal art picture to balance more exploitative fare. ‘Unexplainable’ doesn’t get more weird than this: four school girls and a teacher vanish without a trace near the base of…
Fred Zinnemann’s dark thriller gives us Robert Ryan as a gun-toting killer, with Van Heflin’s respected family man his intended victim. But who is the villain? Murky morality enters via the aftermath of a heinous wartime crime. What are the limits of personal responsibility in extreme circumstances? Does the movie imply that American prosperity is…
Independent filmmakers attract attention by using a Kubrick semi-classic as a movie-within-a-movie! Blaine Novak’s tale of love on a movie set mirrors the jeopardy of the story being filmed: the leading lady’s gangster boyfriend bankrolls the movie only to see her attracted to someone else. Stars Victoria Tennant, Peter Coyote and Richard Romanus take the…
Ida Lupino shows ’em how a real movie star takes possession of the screen in Raoul Walsh’s excellent romantic drama set among night clubs in Long Beach. The war is over and Lupino’s Petey Brown can’t stop drifting, looking for the right man. A chance trip to visit her siblings entangles her in their personal…
Mexican showbiz from the wrong side of the tracks: it’s big, it’s vulgar, it’s overcooked: but it’s highly effective cinema with sensational authentic music, terrific images and a vivacious star to promote. Cuban fireball Ninón Sevilla dances up a storm for her star vehicle, reportedly insisting on Mexico’s best behind the camera: director Emilio Fernández…