CineSavant

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...

Lady in a Cage Though the title suggests anything from a feminist manifesto to a women-in-prison melodrama, Lady in a Cage is in fact a home invasion thriller with a mile-wide mean streak. Critics in 1964 saw the film itself as the intruder, a smash and grab aberration wallowing in bloodshed and perversion. In The New York Times, Bosley...

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...

Angels with Dirty Faces Released on a Thanksgiving weekend in 1938, Angels With Dirty Faces was a holiday treat with an unexpected punch; it could have been just another morality play dressed up in gangster drag but James Cagney’s powerhouse performance puts it in a class by itself. Cagney plays a rags-to-riches mobster named Rocky Sullivan, a charismatic cock...

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 --...

All- Region Blu-ray The Naked Jungle This creepy-crawly epic enjoyed a strong reputation on my grade-school playground.  Does George Pal's man-versus-the-elements saga hold up 68 years later?  The 'exotic' special effects get the point across but the real appeal is the suppressed lust between Charlton Heston and his mail order bride Eleanor Parker -- all heavy breathing and stern reproaches. I'm...

The Spider Woman Strikes Back People are measured by the company they keep—in a superhero’s case, that company is usually the supervillain. Villains, besides giving the hero a reason to exist in the first place, can liven up the joint; a dam burst here, a toppled bridge there, chaos and special effects ensue, and the popcorn munchers are happy. Sherlock...

Night Gallery (Season 1) A modern-day mythologist with a populist bent, Rod Serling fused the cautionary tales of fantasists like Ray Bradbury to the righteous anger of muckrakers like Ambrose Bierce and A.J. Leibling. Add to that mix the never ending run-ins with network honchos and we can assume that the beleaguered Everyman who populated Serling’s most enduring creation...

Region 2 PAL DVD A Tale of Two Cities (1958) It's the 'other' version of Dickens' terrific novel, an English film that few Americans have seen. This Australian DVD is in the PAL format and from a rather outdated transfer, yet I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a favorite story enacted by a great batch of UK talent. Dirk Bogarde stars and the many character roles go...

Region-free Blu-ray Last Train from Gun Hill One of the best yet least seen of John Sturges' westerns couples a fine screenplay with strong star perfs and superb direction: the straightforward story builds tension throughout. Kirk Douglas is a sheriff out for both justice and revenge and Anthony Quinn is the he-bull rancher who stands in his way: the guilty party is...

Blu-ray All My Sons Burt Lancaster and Edward G. Robinson are excellent in this adaptation of Arthur Miller's award-winning Broadway play, about a family torn apart by the denial of dark secrets from the WW2 homefront. Mady Christians is the mother who refuses to accept her son's death, and Louisa Horton and Howard Duff the brother and sister trying...

Blu-ray The Great Moment Every once in a while a movie studio would ruin what might have been a masterpiece -- and Preston Sturges' last-released Paramount comedy suffered exactly that. "Triumph Over Pain" was supposed to be something new, a daring blend of comedy and tragedy. Studio politics intervened and tried to turn it into a straight comedy. Disc...

4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray A Hard Day’s Night 4K The Fab Four's first and biggest movie hit comes to 4K Ultra HD!  The Beatles brought something new and exciting to 1964 and the world embraced it. This United Artists release was a major event in the first wave of Beatlemania, setting the standard for Swinging London cool; thanks to Richard Lester's flip approach and...

Region Free Blu-ray The Blockhouse For this perplexing British production Peter Sellers fronts a solid cast (Charles Aznavour, Jeremy Kemp, Per Oscarsson and Peter Vaughn) in a numbingly literal tale of seven men buried alive in a wartime warehouse of supplies and foodstuffs -- and who are forced to stay there for years, praying for rescue. Stories of this kind...

Blu-ray Straight Time Small thief and parolee Max Dembo is pinned in a parole system that all but guarantees he'll go back to robbing banks and jewelry stores. Dustin Hoffman has one of his best and most unusual roles, taken from the story of a real bank robber. Directed by Ulu Grosbard, the docu-drama look at the seedy...

Blu-ray Breaking In Favorite director Bill Forsyth lends his knack for droll understatement to a screenplay by John Sayles, a crime tale that opts for keen character study and doesn't stretch credibility. Burt Reynolds has a gem of a role as a career burglar doing his bit for the next generation, showing a 'new guy' the ins and...

Blu-ray Dancing with Crime + The Green Cockatoo Lovers of vintage English crime thrillers will have a lot to chew over with this pair of escapist gangster pix, one pre-war and one post-. In each an innocent young couple suffers a run-in with a criminal gang. John Mills and Richard Attenborough are the 'fresh' new talent on display. The leading lady of Dancing...

Blu-ray The Mighty Peking Man A monster ape-man smashes Hong Kong accompanied by his adopted daughter, a sexy blonde in a daringly abbreviated bikini. The lavishly produced King Kong rip-off was released here under the title Goliathon; Quentin Tarantino raised its profile with a 1999 'Rolling Thunder' reissue. Beyond absurd, all the way to insane, the Shaw Bros.' crazy kaiju...

Blu-ray Red Angel Yasuzo Masumura's searing outrage didn't abate in the 1960s; this unflinching view of the WW2 Japanese counterpart of a 'M.A.S.H.' unit cuts straight to the ugly truth of war, as the unending destruction of human bodies and minds. The horrors of ad hoc amputations match the behaviors of the demoralized patients. Masumura's top muse Ayako...

The Brass Bottle Possessed of a commanding baritone and an even more elegant delivery, Tony Randall was a natural for radio, cutting his teeth as program announcer for WTAG in Worcester before landing the role of a two-fisted detective in the early ’40s with I Love a Mystery. It was a voice—silky but full of import—ideal for Shakespeare in...

All-Region Blu-ray A Reflection of Fear 'Teach your children well' they say, but Sondra Locke's young girl in this show is the victim of parenting so bad it verges on criminal ... John Lewis Carlino's adult murder mystery has excellent imagery courtesy of director William A. Fraker and cameraman László Kovács. But the studio 'made changes,' removing explicit adult content and...

Blu-ray Day the World Ended Another key '50s sci-fi makes it to Blu-ray in an admirable encoding. Roger Corman's end-of-the-world survivalist struggle against radioactive mist and three-eyed mutants shines in the glory of Superscope: Richard Denning and cute Lori Nelson must contend with a human monster in Touch Connors' gangster. Adele Jergens spices things up while Paul Birch delivers downer...