CineSavant

4K Ultra HD + Digital The Godfather Trilogy 4K The most prestigious franchise in the Paramount corral hasn't dimmed in esteem or popularity despite its somewhat lesser third installment. The whole trilogy was given an impressive restoration by Robert A. Harris, and this new remastered 4K set retains that very good work. Francis Coppola can't be faulted for not wanting to revive the old...

Blu-ray The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm The big-scale Cinerama fantasy once thought unrecoverable is back -- a terrific restoration brings us George Pal's ode to fairy tales, filmed on Bavarian locations with an international cast. Laurence Harvey and Karl Boehm are the brothers that compiled the famed tales of princesses, witches, magic spells and fiery dragons. Their idealized biography is interspersed...

What Color is Green Hell? There’s nothing so good as being able to consult people who know more than we do, who deal in facts and can back up their assertions with proof. The excellent new Blu-ray for Monster from Green Hell has a nifty color sequence at the end which raised a lot of questions and wrong guesses. Thanks...

Blu-ray The Devil Strikes at Night It's the most impressive 'new' movie we've seen this year: Robert Siodmak's 1957 political thriller fictionalizes a true mass murder case in 1943 Berlin -- one that a high-ranking Nazi wants to justify the extermination of 'undesirables' for the furtherance of Aryan white supremacy. The snapshot of home-front Berlin is fascinating, and also the depiction...

Blu-ray Lies & Deceit: Five Films by Claude Chabrol Claude Chabrol was the most prolific of the New Wave directors. He didn't only do murder thrillers; this fine selection of Chabrols from the ten year period 1985-1994 begins with a pair of detective tales but moves on to a masterful adaptation of a great book and two engrossing experiments, one of them picking up...

Blu-ray Monster from Green Hell Fondly remembered as a permanent resident on all-night movie channels, this patchwork concoction has just enough 'good stuff' to qualify as a fun monster show. Jim Davis's stock-footage safari arrives just in time to be irrelevant to the fate of the title monsters; some good actors are along for what amounts to a picnic in...

Blu-ray Expresso Bongo Showbiz in Soho is artificial, gaudy and vulgar, but Laurence Harvey's slick promoter-con man thinks he can cheat at the pop music game. Cliff Richard is his new discovery, a teen crooner who digs the bongo drums. Wolf Mankowitz's portrait of talent, glitz, and double-dealing in music and TV showbiz also stars Sylvia Syms as...

4K Ultra-HD An American Werewolf in London 4K The smash hit monster-gore popcorn flick comes to 4K Ultra HD two years and four months after a deluxe Blu-ray, so we do a pointed comparison for purchase-crazy fans that want official sanction for their madness. Happily, you don't need to be full-moon looney to go for the 4K: David Naughton and Griffin Dunne's descent...

Blu-ray Shake Hands with The Devil Fierce Irish rebels go head-to-head with Brit occupation forces, and James Cagney is first on the barricades. Michael Anderson's thriller about terror violence in 1921 Dublin has suspense, beautiful cinematography in real Irish locations, and a standout cast: Don Murray, Glynis Johns, Dana Wynter, Michael Redgrave, Cyril Cusack and Sybil Thorndike -- plus added-value players...

Blu-ray Delta Space Mission It's an animated outer space adventure from Romania, made in the Cold War era but minus political messages. Old-school cel animation techniques conjure colorful futuristic visions, thanks to beautiful background art and a spacey '80s synth music score. The Bucharest artists bring a novel point of view, populating alien planets with weird flora and fauna,...

Blu-ray Love Affair (1939) "This picture is perfect, end of review." That may not be 100% true, but Leo McCarey's unabashed leap into romantic Nirvana really hasn't been bettered, although his color & 'scope remake is very good. Never was smart adult dialogue this winning -- Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer's cinematic courtship is a highlight of the Big...

Region Free Blu-ray A Time for Dying It's the final theatrical western of the legendary director Budd Boetticher, and he also wrote the screenplay!   Ace cinematographer Lucien Ballard was behind the camera, and Audie Murphy produced and plays Jesse James!  This disc release is a gift to die-hard western fans that want to see everything, but the film itself remains a...

Blu-ray Written on the Wind "I'm filthy -- period!"  With an ideal cast -- Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone -- director Douglas Sirk tells a tale with everything the '50s wouldn't allow -- lust, nymphomania, impotence, the works. It's perhaps Sirk's most accomplished, self-contained masterpiece -- a glamorous soap with absorbing characters caught in a cycle...

Blu-ray Village of the Giants Bert I. Gordon's career groove of shrinking and bloating various animals and people bottoms out in this trashy drive-in groaner: it's colorful but nigh-unwatchable. The exploitation target is sci-fi and the teen musical, with incompatible helpings of pre-teen 'cutes' and girlie show jiggle for the raincoat crowd. The show apparently did well, but I heard...

Blu-ray + DVD Repeat Performance Who Shot Barney?  Or should we say, who is going to shoot Barney?  Chalk up another excellent Noir Rescue by The Film Noir Foundation, the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Flicker Alley: Joan Leslie is a Broadway star in a group of 'difficult' actors, writers, lovers and cheats, trying to prevent a 'repeat' cycle...

Separate Region-Free Blu-ray Releases Classic Mexican Horrors La Llorona and El Fantasma del Convento: conceived as Mexican horror fables for Mexican audiences, these expressionist gems tap indigenous cultural riches and brooding Catholic guilt. The fable of 'The Wailing Woman' is told in a three-part story starting with la conquista; the spooky 'Phantom of the Monastery' is a moral tale cautioning against carnal...

Cinema of Discovery Julien Duvivier in the 1920s If discovering brilliant filmmakers appeals, it's difficult to to better than this five-disc, nine-feature labor of recovery and restoration from Lobster films. Julien Duvivier is well known for a couple of pictures, one of which screened not so long ago on Eddie Muller's TCM film noir show. But seeing his silent masterpieces may change your...

Blu-ray Edge of Darkness Righteous propaganda fuels the patriotic fire: Lewis Milestone and Robert Rossen's blood-soaked ode to Norwegian resistance goes way over the top. These Norsemen and Norsewomen take up arms to fight their Nazi occupiers tooth and nail. Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan star; some of Hollywood's best partake of the rah-rah celebration of suicidal vengeance: Walter...

Blu-ray Kitten with a Whip Showbiz dynamo Ann-Margret tries on 'teenage hellion' for size. She terrorizes the straight, impossibly patient John Forsythe, sending him on a weekend ordeal with razor-wielding hooligans. He can kiss both his marriage and his political ambitions goodbye: who will believe David when Jody claims he took advantage of her?  Douglas Heyes' sordid suspense thriller has...

All-region Blu-ray The Devil’s Men Devil worshippers are running amuck in Greece, haven't you heard?  This Greek-English horror show stars Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance, so it can claim a built-in fan interest factor whether it's good or bad. It's fun to check out just to see what these stars got themselves into for a paycheck, back when Hammer was...

Blu-ray The Unknown Man of Shandigor It's something completely different . . . a genuine obscurity, a Swiss spy fantasy from the 1960s with major appeal to fans keen on (not in this order) art cinema, Fritz Lang, superspy romps, surreal silent serials, Eurocult actors, and visuals with a New Wave-ish flair. Teams of assassins vie for an atom secret held...

Blu-ray Gold Diggers of 1933 Busby Berkeley's musical comedy extravaganza not only gets away with a social message, it makes one of the best cultural statements ever about the Great Depression. Social upheaval suddenly being a real thing these days, we understand. The story is a romantic backstage musical but The Wolf at the Door is present in the dialogue,...

Blu-ray The Capture It's a manhunt South of the Border -- Niven Busch's drama has violence and murder but is really a novelistic character study that goes against the typical rules of Hollywood. Lew Ayres tries to atone for mistakenly killing a man, by coming to the aid of the victim's widow. But he doesn't realize that Teresa...

Blu-ray The Brain Eaters They're after you, and your wives and children!  This Corman/VeSota/Ed Nelson shocker with the excellent poster is a Robert Heinlein knockoff that can't quite sustain the paranoid pitch of other 'parasitic possession' sci-fi horror epics. One of the cheapest of the drive-in cheapies, it remains a must-see title just for the audacity of its ad...

Blu-ray Black Magic Orson Welles in fine form! This lavishly produced costume drama, beautifully cast and directed, was filmed on location in gorgeous Italian palazzos, churches and villas. Welles is cast to type as the literally mesmerizing mountebank Cagliostro, who aids Madame du Barry in a scheme to seize the throne of France. Welles almost certainly 'helped' the...

Blu-ray Stage Fright (1950) Alfred Hitchcock puts Jane Wyman in harm's way, as she tries to rescue her unworthy boyfriend Richard Todd from a murder charge. Is Jane proving her love, or are both of them being manipulated by a scheming actress, Marlene Dietrich?  This is the movie in which Hitch inflicts a 'frump complex' on Ms. Wyman --...