CineSavant

Blu-ray What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? George Seaton's literal feel-good comedy is the flipside of the pandemic film Contagion: a powerful virus 'cures' grumpiness and bad vibes, encouraging a kind of Urban Utopia. The picture has nothing more to say than 'have a nice day,' yet these days it's difficult to argue with any positive sentiment. George Peppard and Mary Tyler Moore...

Blu-ray I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes Gotta love that title!  Producer Walter Mirisch's small-scale Monogram noir was once assumed lost, but now it's making its home video debut on Blu-ray. A luckless young entertainer finds himself neck deep in murder trouble, when an unbreakable string of circumstantial evidence points directly at him. As the date of his execution nears, the only...

Blu-ray O.S.S. Hollywood acknowledges the existence of America's proto- C.I.A. intelligence agency with this espionage tale of Yanks working with the resistance in occupied France. It's basic cloak 'n' dagger action, with intrepid Alan Ladd and the daring Geraldine Fitzgerald risking life and limb to plant plastic explosive bombs. The details are fairly interesting: Ladd outwits the...

Blu-ray In Harm’s Way Hollywood's last big all-star war epic in Black & White?  Otto Preminger took a happy film company to Hawaii for this enormous saga about the Naval push in the Pacific Theater of WW2, with none other than John Wayne as the competent commander leading the charge. Soap-opera scenes aside, it's a thrilling epic directed with...

Region B Blu-ray One Armed Boxer High-quality chopsocky mayhem!  Guest reviewer Lee Broughton returns with an assessment of Jimmy Wang Yu's action-packed martial arts flick. The combat comes thick and fast when a team of deadly mercenaries are employed to wipe out the honourable pupils of the Zhengde School. Writer-director Jimmy Wang Yu is placed front and centre in most of...

Blu-ray The Web (1947) It's smooth noir sailing with this polished noir from Universal-International and its choice cast of pros -- Edmond O'Brien, Ella Raines and William Bendix, plus Vincent Price doing an excellent turn as a Machiavellian businessman, a 'frame' expert with a side specialty in double-dealing. Director Michael Gordon earns an early credit at Universal-International with a...

Blu-ray Pickup on South Street Sam Fuller turns from combat in Korea to cat 'n mouse games in New York City, with America's stand-up defenders being exactly one low-life pickpocket and one saucy woman of the sidewalks. Richard Widmark is a charming chiseler with a wicked grin, Jean Peters is the hot number who takes a knockdown as a love...

Blu-ray Major Dundee It's a new deluxe Limited Edition of Sam Peckinpah's mangled masterpiece, the third fancy boxed set in as many years. Arrow's presentation certainly has the edge in graphic elegance. They've also strived to include as many earlier extras as possible, plus new analytical-critical takes on the picture, and an excellent (and wickedly funny) visual essay...

Blu-ray (Region-Free) Essential Film Noir Collection 2 Viavision's second deluxe Film Noir boxed finds real variety in the film style, with entries that range from low-budget efforts to a picture filmed on location in Mexico. Richard Conte solves a notorious movie studio murder in Hollywood Story, Gig Young is a cop who considers going crooked in City that Never Sleeps, Glenn Ford...

Blu-ray The Human Condition Masaki Kobayashi's six-part adaptation of the book by Jumpei Gomikawa may be the most ambitious, most truthful film about the big-picture reality of war. Idealist Tatsuya Nakadai thinks he can avoid complicity in human evil by volunteering as a civilian to manage a work camp in occupied Manchuria, only to find that he's expected to...

Blu-ray Stranger on the Run Favorite director Don Siegel is in fine form in this 1967 TV movie, a keeper with qualities not seen in Hollywood's mega-westerns of the day. Henry Fonda's ragged drifter is hunted by a gang of railroad deputies, and chief deputy Michael Parks doesn't intercede because he can't control his own men. A great screenplay, Siegel's...

DVD The 317th Platoon This unheralded story of the French retreat in 1954 Vietnam is one of the best films ever about guerilla combat. The professional French soldiers do what they can to avoid capture, but the new Lieutenant won't abandon their wounded. The Alsatian top sergeant fought with the Germans ten years before, yet is the best and...

Blu-ray Guns for San Sebastian It's a big international action epic, filmed in Mexico with a French director. Anthony Quinn is an 18th-century bandit who liberates a Mexican hamlet from marauding Yaqui Indians and a villainous Charles Bronson. Quinn is good, and all the necessary elements are present: fights, handsome scenery and a big battle... but it's fairly tepid stuff,...

Blu-ray (Region-Free) Alfie (1966) + My Generation Move over, Angry Young Men: Alfie Elkins leverages class resentment and killer good looks to become a ladies' man extraordinaire... in his own eyes. Michael Caine was born to play Bill Naughton's smooth-talking, responsibility-dodging cad's cad. Alfie mistreats a glorious lineup of actresses -- Julia Foster, Jane Asher, Vivien Merchant -- and Shelley Winters is...

Blu-ray Merrily We Go to Hell Marriage, social pressure, professional disappointment -- and if you want to be really unhappy, add alcohol to that mix. Fredric March and Sylvia Sidney are convincing sophisticates but also vulnerable people negotiating fragile lives. What can be done when one's mate is dissolving in booze and drawn to the arms of another?  Dorothy Arzner's best...

Blu-ray Larceny It happens every time: we want to cruelly betray somebody, but LOVE keeps getting in the way. When evil Dan Duryea sics con-man louse John Payne on the saintly war widow Joan Caulfield, three other women come tagging along as well, 'cause Payne is just too attractive. The swindle in George Sherman's unsure noir gets...

Region Free Blu-ray The Face Behind the Mask Is this a horror classic?  I'd certainly say yes, just for the shrewd and sympathetic performance of Peter Lorre as an unlucky immigrant whose disfigurement in a fire turns him to life of crime and vengeance. An impossibly young Evelyn Keyes shines as the sweet love interest but the performances and Robert Florey's good direction...

4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray The Good, The Bad and The Ugly 4K It's still one of the most popular movies ever, and fans are proving that by shelling out for an umpteenth home video release, this time on the 4K Ultra HD format. Everybody knows exactly what to expect from Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach, but what about the transfer quality and encoding --...

Blu-ray (Plays on Region A) The President’s Analyst Here's a GREAT picture whose time has come -- Theodore J. Flicker's spy spoof is one of the smartest, funniest political satires ever, and probably James Coburn's finest hour as an actor-producer. A high-class shrink knows too many Presidential secrets, making him an international espionage target in a giddy spy chase. Everything leads to an...

Blu-ray Explorers One of Joe Dante's finest pictures speaks heart-to-heart to gee-whiz space fans -- transporting us from our backyard to the far reaches of the galaxy. With a boost from aliens unknown, Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix and Jason Presson are the intrepid space cadets that construct a fantastic vehicle from mysterious dream-signals, no Interociter required. Their...

Blu-ray Scarface (1932) Still the fiercest and most cinematic of the first wave of gangster classics, Howards Hughes and Hawks's pre-Code rule-breaker was the one that brought down the ban on 'glamorous' gangster movies. In this case classic hardly means dated: the cars and clothes are vintage but the sex and violence are sizzling hot. Paul Muni is...

Blu-ray To New Shores & La Habanera Douglas Sirk proves his mettle as a consummate romantic storyteller in these part-musical melodramas from the peak of his career in Germany. They cemented stardom for Zarah Leander, a beauty who could have been an international success had the timing and politics been different. Both pictures send their heroines on far-flung adventures. In To New...

Blu-ray Fast Times at Ridgemont High "Learn it. Know it. Live it!" The best-remembered teen comedy of the '80s is also an insightful and unabashed look at real attitudes, behaviors and motivations of young people learning to deal with adult issues. Beyond the hilarious Sean Penn and the luscious Phoebe Cates lies a talented squad of notables and stars-to-be like Jennifer...

Blu-ray Hellfighters "Two smoldering women made all the danger worthwhile!"... heck, we didn't even see 'em catch fire. John Wayne is charismatic and Andrew V. McLaglen's direction is decent for once in this formulaic 'easy listening' pot-boiler from the Wayne school of laid-back '60s entertainment. After winning the Vietnam War, our intrepid action man extinguishes 101 out-of-control...

Blu-ray + DVD Blood of the Vampire The man with eyebrows that can kill!  Not really, but that's the impression given by the poster illustration. The Baker/Berman producing team gave their Hammer/Terence Fisher imitation a decent production -- good color, autopsy-grade gore, female victims in low-cut gowns -- but neither Jimmy Sangster's script nor the flat direction bring it to life. Donald...

Blu-ray Giants and Toys Brilliant filmmaking from Japan: Yasuzô Masumura's film all but screams in protest, that unfettered consumer capitalism is cannibalism, plain and simple. In the radical director's scathing, savage satire, Tokyo's desperate advertising 'Mad Men' create a fresh new star celebrity to promote their product, only for the warfare of cutthroat competition to shatter careers, fortunes and...