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…
Originally made for Public Television, R.O. Blechman’s adaptation of Stravinsky’s theater piece combines a score of animation techniques within the illustrator’s eccentric, expressive personal style. A soldier returning from war makes a deal with the Devil, trading his violin for a book that tells the future. The message is ‘You can’t go home again’ with…
This in-the-wilds thriller about Sardinian shepherds that become outlaws is an almost perfect movie experience, and truer to Italian neorealist theory than the accepted classics. Director Vittorio De Seta filmed on location with almost no crew, using actual shepherds for actors — and comes back with a masterpiece hailed by film festivals as the best…
Morricone fans and students of music will discover a real treat in Giuseppe Tornatore’s exhaustive, comprehensive epic documentary of All Things Ennio. With Il Maestro’s full cooperation, we get a life history and direct coverage of his greatest accomplishments, and the ‘musique concrète’ ethic that inspired things like coyote screams in ‘The Good, The Bad…
No, it’s not a new disc … CineSavant updates an older review to take in Warner’s 2018 4K edition — mainly to wax enthusiastic about the long-gone thrill of Road Show moviegoing. We have the story of when (and where) Stanley Kubrick trimmed the movie by a reel, in its first week of release in…
David Lynch’s dark vision of vice and cruelty beneath a quiet rural town solidified his rep as The Most Out-There big-studio director. Kyle Maclachlan’s curious Jeffrey can relate to Laura Dern’s sweet teenager, but he’s also drawn to Isabella Rossellini’s disturbed victim of sexual tyranny. With his tank of amyl nitrite gas, Dennis Hopper’s Frank…
Old-school Hollywood romance is back in force. This pre-Code dazzler by Frank Borzage is one of the best, emotionally valid despite its dated gender assumptions. The innocent Loretta Young adores Spencer Tracy’s charming lout — their meet-cute finds them homeless and helpless in a Manhattan shanty town at the bottom of the Depression. The new…
This masterpiece qualifies as a ‘period neo-noir’ despite being produced before the noir craze found traction. The murder of a city commissioner reveals a dark, greedy chapter in the history of Our City of the Angels. Robert Evans’ studio production found a perfect roster of collaborators for Robert Towne’s screenplay. Romantic and suspenseful, it’s a…
The most accessible of the pictures director Edward Dmytryk made during his brief political exile in England is this tight ‘perfect crime’ murder thriller. A jealous husband plots to do away with his wife’s lover — keeping him alive in a ‘Hidden Room’ (the American release title) until he’s sure Scotland Yard has lost the…
A previously scarce John Sayles films surfaces in a beautiful widescreen edition. Cynicism and frustration pits a town against itself, in a story of civic trouble that echoes Bruce Springsteen’s laments for America’s crumbling cities. Builder Tony Lo Bianco is in hock to the Mob, and can’t pretend he’s not part of the corruption; activist…