CineSavant

Blu-ray The Human Comedy It's ground zero for MGM 'tradition of quality' wholesomeness -- and a great picture about wartime emotions, even if the sentiment meter is set 10 degrees in the red. I don't know of a better Mickey Rooney performance -- the drama may dip into bathos, but he never does. The story is by William Saroyan...

Blu-ray Star Trek The Original Series 60th Anniversary The mighty Star Trek franchise is still a big deal in fan circles, which will make this 60th Anniversary disc set a desirable item for the curious. Six decades later, Roddenberry's idealistic space odyssey presents a winning stack of attitudes, some progressive and other dated. It doesn't matter, as we still love the personality dynamics...

4K Ultra HD + Region B Blu-ray The Hot Spot 4K UHD Dennis Hopper's Texas neo-noir is a sultry sizzler, long on atmosphere and rather poky in the pace department. Ladies' man Don Johnson drifts into a Texas burg and commences romancing both Jennifer Connelly and Virginia Madsen. But who is seducing whom and for what underhanded reason?  Throw in a bank robbery and a couple of...

4K Ultra HD Troy 4K They say You Can't Go Homer again, but it's no problem making a slam-bang fantasy Iliad tuned to the star chemistry of Brad Pitt and the new (in 2003) ability to fill the screen with thousands of Greeks battling with sword 'n' shield. David Benioff's script is intelligent and the dialogue isn't bad; Pitt swings...

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray The Saragossa Manuscript 4K Is it surreal, or psychedelic?  The source novel dates from 1813. This mind-blowing exercise in narrative puzzle-making is a classic with unique qualities, and its Polish director Wojciech Has is a genius. Investigating a strange book found on a Spanish battlefield, soldier Zbigniew Cybulski is plunged into a fantasy vs reality labyrinth that darn near...

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Out of the Past 4K UHD At the peak of the style called film noir are a few classics that approach perfection, and Jacques Tourneur's supremely poetic film is certainly in the top ten. Daniel Mainwaring's pulp novel has plenty of macabre twists but the adaptation benefits from the electric charge generated by Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Her fugitive is...

Hell’s Highway The True Story of Highway Safety Films Two decades later, this daring documentary is still the only authoritative reportage on a near-taboo subject: the gross and gory graphic auto accident movies once shown to high schoolers with the idea of scaring them into driving more safely. Filmmaker Bret Wood has reconstructed and partly revised the docu, which tells the full story of...

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Spike of Bensonhurst 4K UHD Paul Morrissey wrote and directed this sprawling, comic/serious neighborhood saga that scrambles ethnic identities, lopsided honor codes and the twisted 'normality' of mob rule in the borough of Brooklyn. Do we like our hero Spike?  He's an arrogant, entitled Italian-American, macho to the core. He impregnates both of his girlfriends, Maria Pitillo and Talisa Soto....

4K Ultra HD Forbidden Planet 4K UHD Robby the Robot is back, this time in 4K UHD. Arrow Video's 4K restoration brings back the full early width of CinemaScope, along with re-created 'Perspecta' stereophonic sound. Hollywood's one full-out attempt to depict an intergalactic Sci-fi future is a smashing success that relies on complex ideas as well as spaceships and monsters. It's also...

Blu-ray All Through the Night We've rediscovered a new favorite from the Warner corral, a bright action comedy that raised spirits when America needed it most, fewer than 60 days after Pearl Harbor. It's an all-star comic delight, acted stylishly by Humphrey Bogart and directed smartly by Vincent Sherman. With the congressional Isolationists finally backing down, Hollywood hit the fascists...

Region B Blu-ray Madhouse UK correspondent Lee Broughton returns with a review of Vincent Price's final film for American-International Pictures. Behind-the-scenes tussles amongst its producers and a series of hasty re-writes found director Jim Clark delivering a film that employed the aesthetics of gothic horror alongside slasher film tropes in a sometimes slightly incongruent manner. The results may be...

3-D Blu-ray The Bubble 3-D restored uncut The Bubble is back, new but somewhat the same: the 3-D Archive restores an original cut, extending the running time by 21 minutes. Arch Oboler's 1966 feature introduced the impressive 3-D system called Space-Vision, which is still the main attraction. Michael Cole and Deborah Wally endure a Sci-fi ordeal that plays out in a crazy...

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Threads 4K 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...

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Flight 4K 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...

Blu-ray Macao 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...

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray The Elephant Man 4K UHD 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...

4K Ultra HD + Digital code Mars Attacks! 4K UHD 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...

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Body Snatchers 4K UHD 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...

Blu-ray Random Harvest 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...

Region B Blu-ray World Noir Volume 5 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...

Blu-ray Captain Horatio Hornblower 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.

Blu-ray The Sheep Detectives 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...

Blu-ray Crime Wave 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...

3-D Blu-ray Money From Home 3-D 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...

Blu-ray The Deadly Companions 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...

Blu-ray A Midsummer Night’s Dream 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,...