CineSavant

Region B Blu-ray Columbia Noir #4 Powerhouse Indicator moves forward to their fourth fancy box of noirs from the studio of Harry Cohn, six pictures stretching from the postwar boom to the end of the original classic noir era. This time around we have some notable directors, and a nice selection of stars -- Dennis O'Keefe, George Murphy, Fred MacMurray, Kim...

Blu-ray Cold War Creatures: Four Films from Sam Katzman (Part 1) Yes, sometimes a producer could earn 'auteur' status making B pictures. A name that's never going to be uttered in the same breath as Val Lewton is Sam Katzman, who for the 1950s settled into a profitable tenure making Columbia program pictures. They pretty much stayed in the category of 'obvious junk' yet include a...

Blu-ray The Heroes of Telemark Any WW2 action adventure involving the Norwegian resistance is OK in my book, and this big-star saga about sabotage efforts to stop the Nazis' atom research is a natural -- much of what happens in the story is true. The show can boast marvelous locations and excellent action scenes but the script and characters aren't...

Blu-ray + Digital The Grifters Every once in a while a movie makes me think, 'this one's too good to review, just tell them to see it and they'll understand.' John Cusack is a penny-ante small stakes cheat, his girlfriend Annette Bening hooks on the side while seeking a partner for 'long cons,' and his mother is an operative for...

Blu-ray Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri Eccellenti) It's yet another masterpiece from the Italian director Francesco Rosi, adapting a fiction novel about a political murder conspiracy that is altogether too much of a good fit for the troubled Italy of 1975. Crime star Lino Ventura is the incorruptible detective investigating a series of killings of high-level judges, who begins to intuit that...

Blu-ray A Life at Stake It's low-rent Noir A Go-Go: Angela Lansbury is a double-crossing femme fatale in this independent cheapie with modest charms. You can't trust anyone these days, especially real estate developers with plans to collect YOUR life insurance. Lansbury is the seductive 'motivator' with a preference for late-night rendezvous in the high mountains, where everything is a...

4K Ultra HD Dune 4K Ignored, maligned and hammered out into an 'Alan Smithee' extended cut for TV, David Lynch's outstanding Sci-fi epic arrives on 4K Ultra HD, finally achieving the visual opulence on home video that it had in 70mm prints at the end of 1984. The fractured, de-Lynched storyline can be argued over, but the amazing design and...

Blu-ray Peter Ibbetson Surreal delirium in cinema!  Gary Cooper and Ann Harding are a tragic romantic pair, but even when separated by space, time and the law they manage to live a full life together as virtual dream lovers. The odd art film out in Henry Hathaway's career, this unabashed spiritualist fantasy was adopted by French surrealists as...

Region B Blu-ray Corruption Foreseeing a relaxation of censorship on the horizon, England's Titan Films filmed this mad surgery opus with far more gore and cruelty than was the norm in 1967-68, and their gambit paid off. Horror favorite Peter Cushing stars with Sue Lloyd, a pair nobody expected to show up in a shocker with such a high...

Blu-ray Union Pacific Cecil B. DeMille delivers a satisfying western epic starring Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Robert Preston, Brian Donlevy & Akim Tamiroff; the story of the building of a railroad is historically bogus but highly entertaining and action-filled. Joel McCrea is our favorite ethical frontier lawman; here he's a troubleshooter keeping crooks, Indians and proto-Bolsheviks from delaying...

Blu-ray Rancho Deluxe Another unexpected comic treasure from the mid '70s!  Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston make an irresistible pair of would-be outlaws in a tale of the modern West -- high-country Montana, actually -- where a gentleman rancher from New Jersey owns all the land and making an honest living is just too boring. Thomas McGuane's hilariously...

Blu-ray The Blind Beast (Moju) Yasuzo Masumura takes horror into kinky territory in an Edogawa Ranpo shocker about obsession, namely, mixing sex and death. Michio is the tactile-fixated blind sculptor who imprisons model Aki to serve as an ultimate objectified 'body' -- but she eventually joins him, taking the lead on a delirious suicidal journey of discovery. Probably once considered...

Region-Free Blu-ray Silver Screams Cinema It's a collection of 6 -- count 'em Six -- horror and sci-fi curiosities from the '40s and '50s, aimed straight at covetous fantasy film addicts. Wacky scripts, strange characterizations and poverty row production values are on view, but the fine transfers reveal professional cinematography and occasional impressive direction. The films are definitely of their...

Region B Blu-ray Encounter of the Spooky Kind Guest reviewer Lee Broughton returns with an assessment of Sammo Hung's groundbreaking Hong Kong hit wherein comedy, horror and martial arts elements are brought together in a wholly successful way. This show has it all: kung fu action, duelling mystics, hopping vampires, hungry zombies, haunted mirrors and a sympathetic everyman whose danger-fraught narrative trajectory is...

Blu-ray Ashes and Diamonds Andrzej Wajda's most celebrated film in the West is a serious thriller about doubt and corruption in a Poland 'liberated' by the Soviet Union. It has a  cerebral script and a hero with a hipster attitude befitting a window of relative freedom briefly given to Polish filmmakers. Touted as the James Dean of the Eastern...

Blu-ray F.P. 1 Doesn’t Answer "Es ist eine schwimmende Plattform!"  Here's something for committed Sci-fi followers, a lavish German production with big drama, big emotions, and impressive, ambitious special effects. Hans Albers makes sure his pal Paul Hartmann's artificial mid-Atlantic airport becomes reality, only to lose his new girlfriend Sybille Schmitz to him. The Murnau Foundation's superb restoration makes the...

Blu-ray Counterblast A review for a movie not on video disc. CineSavant bears down hard on a now-obscure UK thriller that proves a crossroads for several key themes of modern terror: Nazis, bacteriological warfare and paranoid conspiracies. '007'-- associated writer Jack Whittingham scripted a tale that connects old-school espionage to visionary super-crimes against humanity, the thriller genre...

Blu-ray Line of Demarcation Claude Chabrol's 'minor' wartime drama is one of the best movies of its kind I've seen. A French town under German rule lies on a river straddling occupied and Vichy territories, and becomes a hotbed of intrigues. Yes, there's resistance activity, but we also see that most people avoid involvement -- and some find ways...

Blu-ray Objective, Burma! Errol Flynn goes to war!  One of the last major direct-combat pictures to come out of Hollywood during the war, Raoul Walsh's finely-crafted ode to the jungle fighters in Burma lets loose a powerful, almost frightening blast of anti-Japanese rage. Errol Flynn earned his pay slugging it out through the swamps, George Tobias provides the...

Blu-ray Thunderbolt This 'dawn of sound' classic from Josef Sternberg is an important early entry in the gangster genre, a romanticized tale of urban crime with little violence but a full measure of romantic revenge. Star George Bancroft is the title underworld kingpin, who risks everything to hold his girlfriend Fay Wray the way he holds onto...

Blu-ray Step by Step More or less ignored for 75 years, this curious 'B' program picture now finds its way directly to a Warner Archive Blu-ray release. Cult actor Lawrence Tierney has an atypical 'swell guy' role as a Marine veteran thrust into a murder mystery and made the fall guy for nefarious foreign spies. Anne Jeffreys becomes his...

Blu-ray Master of the World One of Jules Verne's most popular sci-fi fantasies got the big screen treatment from American-International, which hopped on the Verne bandwagon that raked in big $$ for Disney and others. A production challenge given a minimum of resources, the colorful show is still admired for Vincent Price’s performance as Robur the Conqueror, a mad terrorist....

Ultra HD + Blu-ray The Bird with the Crystal Plumage 4K The newest addition to the stable of horror and sci-fi on Ultra HD is Dario Argento's debut feature, the game-changer that launched the full-blown giallo thriller. Argento takes a few twists from the Hitchcock playbook but otherwise shapes his whodunnit with a new, slick style of his own. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and design by...

Blu-ray La Piscine It's French!  It's hot!  Jacques Deray's most unusual film is an intimate, minimalist murder story that digs deep into the affairs of four very superficial people. Among the wealthy set are four pleasure seekers with a laissez faire take on relationships, that think they're above basic drives -- jealousy, possessiveness, resentment. The movie also makes...

Blu-ray Ziegfeld Follies Years in the making!  The glory of MGM on parade!  Enough studio resources to film twenty pictures were expended on this paean to showman Florenz Ziegfeld. It's really Metro Goldwyn Mayer's Technicolor valentine to itself, showing off the studio's enormous stable of musical talent, along with various of its comic performers. Arthur Freed and Louis...

Blu-ray Flight to Mars The Wade Williams Collection yields more '50s sci-fi, Monogram Pictures' ambitious space travel movie filmed in glorious green-challenged Cinecolor. Cameron Mitchell and Arthur Franz sign up for a semi-suicidal space expedition, but instead of murderous Bat-Rat-Spider-Crabs, waiting for them on Mars is the glamorous, mini-skirted Marguerite Chapman. It's core sci-fi fun from early in the...