One of Max Ophüls’ best American movies is this razor-sharp ‘domestic film noir’ with excellent acting and a premise that was probably too sordid-real for 1949: cheap crooks blackmail an ordinary housewife trying to protect her family. Joan Bennett confronts the crisis head-on, facing down James Mason’s unusually sympathetic ‘collector.’ The Reckless Moment Region free…
The Anthony Mann – James Stewart crowd-pleaser now comes to Region A Blu-ray. With its bright Technicolor hues, it’s the wagon train movie fans remember first after Red River. Stewart is a good guy with a dark background who tries to atone by helping some settlers. The thorn in his side is an unreformed former…
Mill Creek and Kit Parker package nine mid-range Columbia features from the 1940s and 1950s, not all of them strictly noir but all with dark themes — crime, creepy politics, etc. None have been on Blu-ray, and all but one are in fine condition. Noir Archive 9-Film Collection Address Unknown, Escape in the Fog, The…
With two major movie accolades in one year, Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the real Wonder Woman, bar none. Mimi Leder’s dramatic biography takes on a relatively small piece of Ms. Ginsburg’s life, but the simplifications aren’t a problem. It does have the feeling of an old-fashioned celebratory bio, with colorful characters and hiss-able…
Director Jan Němec made his name during the Czech New Wave of the 1960s, and later saw his career cut short when the ruling party decided to classify one of his films as ‘banned forever.’ This first feature is a striking chase story about two young men escaped from a Nazi prison train. It experiments…
Veteran William Wellman directed this pre-Code thriller that puts an average New York family at odds with a pack of ruthless gangsters. It’s a 1931 tale of drive-by shootings, witness intimidation and child kidnapping — just one year later, movies about child kidnappings were banned, after the tragedy of the Lindbergh baby. Walter Huston is…
Is it a film noir? This desert-set crime tale sees a rat (Ray Milland) escaping to Mexico with a bag of cash, forcing a hunting guide (Anthony Quinn) to show him the way and stealing his wife (Debra Paget) in the bargain. Remember what Godard said about only needing a girl and a gun to…
Dull vampire pix were once as ubiquitous as zombie pix are now, but when a good one came along we’d certainly take notice. The predatory Fran and Miriam are a wholly new twist on the ‘Wicked Lady’ highwayman theme — the picture transcends the softcore horror genre with class and style. Fringe director José Ramón…
Some show had to be the first — back in 1935, this was the first movie to be produced entirely in full 3 strip Technicolor. Just like any revolutionary filmic development, it came from outside the studio system, which says something about how Hollywood works — studios will spend millions of dollars to take advantage…
It’s expressive silent filmmaking at its best — Anthony Asquith vies with Alfred Hitchcock for most creative direction in silent-era England. Elissa Landi and Brian Aherne meet in the Tube but become entangled in a scheme of the jealous Cyril McLaglen. Restored just a few years back after being unavailable for generations, this is a…
Manhattan goes nuts as thousands of Beatles fans arrive to celebrate the arrival of the Mop Tops from Liverpool. Experts at wringing manic fun from crazy chaotic farces, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale make their first film to hit the screen one of their best, with brilliant craft and a fresh-faced cast of relative newcomers…
Michael Anderson directs a classy slice of ’60s spy-dom. In West Berlin, George Segal’s Quiller struggles through a near- existential battle with Neo-Nazi swine more soulless than his own cold-fish handlers. Harold Pinter supplies the circular dialogue, Alec Guinness the charming insincerity and Max von Sydow a devilish menace. Quiller is mesmerized by the seductive…
This obscure 1972 thriller features excellent performances by Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed, and marks the feature debut of the great director Michael Apted. The wartime home front drama takes a surprisingly precocious and sensitive view of a bizarre incident that probably happened in real life: to escape his military service, a reluctant soldier cross-dresses…
This bona fide classic may be, as Gregory Mank says, the best American horror picture of the 1940s. The teaming of Boris Karloff and Henry Daniell is sensational. Producer Val Lewton gives the players career-best characterizations and dialogue, and director Robert Wise adds tension and chills. Bela Lugosi is in for a supporting part. Icing…
Why do stories about resisting the Nazis seem so important right now? Here are two discs from different labels, with one subject. Both stories are set in Germany during the war, but the approaches are quite different. A political prisoner struggles to subsist in The Fiancée an East German classic from the part-educational DEFA Film…
The man who did what and then what? Robert D. Krzykowski’s first feature isn’t a throwaway joke, but an elegantly crafted and designed fantasy grounded in human values. Sam Elliott’s crusty sixty-something secret agent comes out of retirement to save the world again — will the slaying of another bizarre horror lay to rest disturbing…
It’s wacky, daffy and incredibly square, yet Frank Tashlin’s late career Doris Day romp has a certain gotta-watch interest factor: the male cast of clowns performs the sexist comedy well, and Ms. Day’s fantastic screen personality brightens everything. Space-age executive lothario Rod Taylor hires Doris just for romantic purposes, while Arthur Godfrey, John McGiver, Dom…
The work of a great, original, natural filmmaker, Wanda continues to confound viewers that don’t recognize honest human reality when they see it. A woman dispossessed, uprooted and adrift no longer has a self-definition, just a basic drive to subsist and find someone who values her. Morals? It’s hard enough just to survive. Director-actress Barbara…
It’s big, it buzzes, and it screams like a banshee. So why is the Mantis monster so ho-hum? Universal-International tried to squeak out another boffo big bug epic but 1957 screens were already crowded with grasshoppers and scorpions. The screenplay is derivative, and somebody allowed producer William Alland to throw in every stock shot that…
This is a big one, the restoration we long thought would never come. CineSavant tries to explain what makes Edgar G. Ulmer’s masterpiece uniquely memorable, how it works its Loser Noir magic, and why this particular restoration bodes well for a certain class of picture mired in murky rights issues. Meet Al Roberts, a hard…
Douglas Sirk took our heads off with this intense, thematically adult tale of love and obsession in a Depression-Era flying circus that’s the open air equivalent of the marathon dance craze — pilots die to thrill the crowd. The terrific-looking show provides career-best roles for some deserving actors: Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Jack Carson and…
Verily, Blu-ray 3-D is better than most theatrical 3-D! Paramount’s fourth and last 3-D production went out to theaters only in 2-D, so for all practical terms this Kino/3D Archive restoration is a depth-format premiere. Expect a kissing scene or two: lusty Fernando (¿Quién es más macho?) Lamas and demure Rhonda Fleming succumb to the…
With his exaggerated visuals, eye-popping color and frantic characterizations, Frank Tashlin has been promoted to a genuine ‘fifties icon. This freewheeling comedy hits on the Top Tashlin fetish subjects: Hollywood glitz, Madison Avenue neurosis, dynamic women, wimpy men and… and… bosoms, dammit. As the bubbly yet calculating sex symbol Rita Marlowe, Jayne Mansfield places career…
Sherlock Holmes fans have another good version of a favorite Holmes tale to savor, a late German silent film in full expressionist mode, set on an impressively moody English moor. One can see the influence of silent action serials and then-recent haunted house horror hits. And it is said that this is the first picture…
William Hurt, Christine Lahti and Elizabeth Perkins do excellent work in this superior drama which delivers an important, unforced life lesson. An emotionless hotshot surgeon gets a dose of his own medicine when he’s hit by a cancerous tumor, and is put through the same wringer that so humiliates his patients. What might be a…
Robert Siodmak’s first film noir is a visually expressive masterpiece in the lush romantic tradition that imposes a dreamlike mood on a nightmarish story. Ella Raines goes to extreme lengths to break the conspiracy that’s sending her boss to Death Row, aided by the Kafka-like indifference of modern Manhattanites. Franchot Tone is the man with…