This is a Christmas movie? The 1980s began early with this high-concept, edgy-but-silly urban fantasy dreamed up by Walter Hill when an original realistic concept was rejected: ads about ‘Armies of the Night’ glamorizing street gangs worried the old folk, while the exhibition rollout was disturbed by violence in theaters. Essentially one long foot chase…
This once-obscure item has accumulated a solid cult following. Allen Baron writes, directs and stars in a gritty on-the-streets tale of a hit man having difficulties lining up his latest score. The over-achieving tiny independent feature bursts with arresting storytelling and eye-opening visuals. It’s holiday time in the Big Apple, and the camera records the…
Does it Creak? Not at all. Paul Muni brings this revered biographical drama to life, even if it’s less about Zola and more about the notorious Dreyfus Affair, the kind of subject normally too touchy for Hollywood. Warners’ prestige offering nabbed a well earned Best Picture Oscar — everything connected to the crucial trial is…
Take a full-blown soap opera and add scenery to die for . . . statehood brings changes to the islands, and a major problem for the hereditary Howland empire, all of which involve (gasp) multiracialism. Fear not, the conflicts find a traditional, Production Code- approved resolution. Charlton Heston strains to humanize a role that plays…
Peter Bogdanovich’s crowning achievement gets the 4K nod from Criterion, with additional Blu-ray extras plus the entire belated sequel Texasville — in its color theatrical version or a B&W director’s revision. The oil boom has passed, and Anarene, Texas is dying out. Its isolated, bored teenagers are eager to test the rules. Bogdanovich faithfully transfers…
It’s the one and only original Hammer Sci-fi thriller that changed the genre, inspiring good filmmakers and copycats alike. Val Guest adapts Nigel Kneale’s teleplay with Yankee Brian Donlevy as a belligerent Professor Quatermass, the rocket project director and red-tape bulldozer. The movie is prime sci-fi gold, and genuinely disturbing: Richard Wordsworth is the courageous…
A new video remaster makes us want to ring bells — ClassicFlix’s improvement over earlier eyesore discs is like night and day. We can finally see the discretion and artistry with which Thornton Wilder’s stage classic was adapted for the screen. Sam Wood elicits a score of great performances, especially from Broadway star Martha Scott….
Take a trip to Los Angeles in the late 1950s . . . but to the low-rent district of Bunker Hill, where a transient Native American population pursues an aimless lifestyle on the nighttime streets. It’s a time machine to Angels Flight, the Grand Central Market and a ‘Bukowski-land’ of skid row bars. USC grad…
Elia Kazan and Harold Pinter’s classy adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel looks and plays better than ever, with a fine script that refuses to ‘fix’ what Fitzgerald wrote. Robert De Niro’s excellent Monroe Stahr is surrounded by a powerhouse cast: Jack Nicholson, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, Jeanne Moreau, Theresa Russell, Ingrid Boulting, Donald…
“I hate her! I hate dat qveen!” Despite being one of the most maladroit sci-fiers of the ’50s, color and ‘scope and Zsa Za Gabor’s hilarious accent make this Allied Artists offering a must-see head scratcher. Bad taste! Tacky art direction! Infantile sexist humor! The word on the street is that the Me Too movement…
How did two hot film students pass the time while waiting to become immortal as the writers of American Graffiti? Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck wrote, produced and directed this minor horror classic, that along with its zombies and ghouls delivers intelligent art-movie cinematics. Marianna Hill, Royal Dano, Michael Greer, Joy Bang, Anitra Ford and…
“Feed Me!” Female ghosts and man-eating plants! It’s another good disc of Roger Corman favorites, especially for collectors hungry for an improved presentation of Corman’s comedy classic The Little Shop of Horrors, the hilarious off-the-wall original. Also looking good is his semi-pirated ‘add-on’ entry to the Poe cycle THE TERROR, starring Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson…
In this racy MGM pre-Code, the stock market crash dumps society playgirl Joan Crawford into the working class. She toils at a newspaper but her brother consorts with bootleggers — and both of them are targeted by gangster Clark Gable. Sparks fly in Crawford & Gable’s first screen teaming, which has a bit of everything…
Robert Aldrich’s second hardboiled detective tale is filtered through Steve Shagan’s style of whining nostalgia. Cop Burt Reynolds wants to fix his problematic relationship with call girl Catherine Deneuve, but he’s caught up in an ugly case involving sex trafficking, corruption and a dead teen runaway. Eddie Albert and Ben Johnson provide different kinds of…
Terrence Malick and Néstor Almendros rewrote the rule books for imagery and narrative on this story of quiet desperation in the agrarian America of a bygone age. We discovered Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard; Linda Manz joined the ranks of cult names. Days of Heaven 4K 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray The Criterion…
‘The Fight on the Island’ Nine years before Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Jean-Louis Trintignant played another right-wing zealot dispatched on a murder mission. Filmed in Paris and Normandy, Alain Cavalier’s gem of a thriller depicts anti-democratic militant terror subversives in action in France, at the same time that the notorious OAS was active. Romy Schneider takes…
It says so in the song: when Barbarella and I get together the planets all stand still! Arrow and Paramount bring Roger Vadim’s intergalactic bande-dessinée to 4K, for the enjoyment of Home Theaters equipped for the high-resolution format. Jane Fonda’s fille de l’espace spreads Free Love to the ends of the Galaxy, while thwarting Milo…
Everybody likes this picture. James L. Brooks’ major hit movie, adapted from the novel by Larry McMurtry, charts the rocky relationship of a Texan mother and daughter. Audiences loved the clashing personalities and quirky interaction between stars Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and especially Jack Nicholson as the discipline-problem ex- astronaut next door. Name an award,…
Adventuresome crime generates high thrills in Michael Crichton’s entertaining heist picture, adapted from his own novel set in 1855. Charming crook Sean Connery, light-fingered ‘screwsman’ Donald Sutherland and saucy Lesley-Anne Down pull off a slick caper in the age of gaslight and Victorian elegance. The lavish production puts Connery through some incredible real-life stunts atop…
Have you heard The Word, NASA? The other name for Mars is Death. The nifty screenplay by Sci-fi scribe Jerome Bixby lends the horror chills a basic logic, when Marshall Thompson & Shawn Smith battle a Martian stowaway on board a homebound spaceship. This Kino disc of the monsterrific ’50s favorite improves the transfer and…
Hollywood’s first talkie version of the Nathaniel Hawthorne classic was also the final film of silent superstar Colleen Moore. The dramatization of the Puritan ABCs (what do the B & C stand for?) is also a post-Code downer, putting the shame firmly on Mame Hester Prynne even as it exposes the hypocrisy of colonial intolerance….
An MIA ‘film prodigal’ has been returned to the fold, thanks to this well-curated restoration and remaster. Long unavailable in good condition, we can finally enjoy Riccardo Freda’s Gothic masterpiece as it should be seen, in glowing color and with a choice of language tracks. The tagline “His candle of lust burnt brightest in the…
William Holden earned his Best Actor Oscar as J.J. Sefton, a POW who runs the rackets in the prisoners’ barracks, and whose cynical opportunism attracts the hatred of his fellow prisoners. Suspected as a traitor collaborating with the Germans, Sefton doesn’t hide his contempt for his comrades. Adapting this Broadway hit was a career-saver for…
This overlooked and orphaned drama presents Candice Bergen as an alienated newcomer to Chicago. James Caan contributes a carefully modulated performance, and Peter Boyle feels real in a part that we’d expect to be pitched for comedy. Writer Peter Hyams presents a dark tale of Woe in the City, director Herbert Ross emphasizes the gloom…
Sci-fi completists and diehard fans of ‘fifties TV fun will want to know about this remastered disc containing all 13 episodes of the short-lived 1959 TV series, starring Marshall Thompson as America’s ‘tom thumb in a suitcase’ superspy, and Arthur Franz as his full-sized secret agent partner. Vintage special effects see them battle oversized animals…
Tod Browning’s final fantastic film is . . . totally bonkers. Humans are reduced in size and dispatched like zombies to take revenge on a prison escapee’s enemies. It’s all to enable the escapee to reunite with his beloved daughter, so why not paralyze some chumps and condemn the puppet people to a strange living…