CineSavant

Arrow jumps into the 4K Ultra HD bracket with a knockout 40th anniversary presentation of this campy, music-filled and incredibly colorful Dino De Laurentiis spectacle. The impressive package has an endless catalog of extras, plus a second Blu-ray disc with a full-length feature about the film's one-hit-wonder star Sam J. Jones. Buyers beware -- no backup Blu-ray disc of the feature is included. In every other respect, "Go! Flash! GO!" Flash Gordon 4K First things first: a lot of movie fans aren’t into the high-end home video experience, for the very good reason of finances. But I also hear from readers that still resist an upgrade from DVD to Blu.  One reader threw a fit when TV went digital; he may still be picking up local NTSC signals...

Blu-ray The Naked City A Blu-ray of the incomparable crime thriller The Naked City has finally made it to region A, and looks and it sounds much better than ever before. This is the movie that officially began the craze for taking dark dramas from the studio back lot to dynamic urban locations. Criterion is simultaneously releasing Mark Hellinger...

Blu-ray Flying Leathernecks This by-the-numbers Naval aviation epic — more precisely the Marine Corps. — has looked pretty wretched ever since indifferent color prints were made for television. RKO’s production revisits the fighting in the Pacific Theater with an eye on promoting enlistment during the Korean conflict. Anticipating the commercial combination of John Wayne and combat in the...

Roger Corman began his boom year of 1957 with a marvelous bit of 'way-out' sci-fi -- a 'Tidal Wave of Terror' no less. This note just arrived from Donald J.'s Seafood Emporium: "You puny, dunderheaded humans, don't let the campy title fool you! Soon you will be 'absorbed' into our crabby super-mentalities, heh heh heh. We atom-age crustaceans are made of electric anti-matter -- it's incredible! Our telepathy is the best telepathy ever -- everybody says so! It is what it is!" The new Blu-ray will charm fans seeking prime 'fifties monster nirvana. Attack of the Crab Monsters I know it’s tragic, but while lucky ’50s kids just a couple of years older than me saw the marvelously audacious Attack of the Crab Monsters new at the bijou, I had to wait until I was fifty years old. All the Allied Artists shows were on Chiller Theater channel 11, and from a hundred...

Blu-ray Black Gravel Talk about an eye-opener — this West German show confronts a topical controversy and skips the usual filmic compromises. Popular films produced in the postwar Bundesrepublik Deutschland normally avoided controversy. Bernhard Wicki’s 1959 war film The Bridge (Die Brücke) is a tragedy of German child-soldier defenders that’s careful to offend nobody. In Billy Wilder’s fine,...

Region B Blu-ray Mister Vampire Master Gau (Ching-Ying Lam) runs a small town mortuary assisted by two young but idiotic apprentices, Man Choi (Ricky Hui) and Chou (Siu-Ho Chin). Unfortunately, big trouble comes the trio’s way when they are employed to oversee the reburial of Mr. Yam’s (Ha Huang) long dead father (Wah Yuen). It soon transpires that the feng...

Blu-ray Airplane! Nobody argues with Funny — funny is funny, and that’s that. I’m not going to spoil a single gag in this picture… fans of the movie can remember every last joke, but we know they’ll laugh even if they’re seeing it for the tenth time. Who doesn’t like Airplane! ?  Forty years after disco died...

Blu-ray Black Test Car + The Black Report Is this the beginning of a wave of sensational Yasuzô Masumura imports for U.S. Blu-ray collectors?  If so, bring it on! The Yasuzô Masumura DVDs released by Fantoma about fifteen years ago were real eye-openers. His intense art-movie horror film Moju (aka The Blind Beast) is deliriously perverse and transgressive. His steamy tale of sexual...

Blu-ray Night Visitor Try as I may this can’t be a real review. I have no problem reviewing discs that I contribute to, but I edited this one and have had thirty years to develop a warped, self-serving attitude toward it. Just the same, I have no connection to the business end of the disc and it isn’t...

Blu-ray Red Ball Express Combat films took a short break after WW2 but bounced back in 1948 with patriotic hits like The Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne. The trend continued in some major pictures that pleased veterans with their general accuracy — Battleground,  Twelve O’Clock High (both 1949). Less distinguished WW2 pictures were still being made when...

Blu-ray Toni We’re told that in 1933 Jean Renoir was stinging from some pictures that didn’t go over well with the public, including the classic comedy-drama Boudou Saved from Drowning. Relief came with an opportunity to film under the auspices of Marcel Pagnol at his facilities in the South of France. Renoir availed himself of Pagnol’s equipment and...

Blu-ray Hiroshima (1953) Considering that it was made after the Japanese occupation was lifted, Hiroshima is an impressively even-handed drama and a good resource when considering the present reassessment of the use of atomic bombs on Japan in August of 1945. It’s also a realistic, serious presentation of the experience of the victims of the first bomb, as...

Blu-ray The Sign of the Cross I’m not a fan of Cecil B. DeMille’s sound-era movies, even when I admire their craft. DeMille was a genuine cinema pioneer and always had an excellent camera eye; his silent movies were lavish spectacles and sophisticated sex comedies. His 1927 The King of Kings is an admirable and tasteful story of Jesus that endured...

Blu-ray Hollywoodland Allen Coulter is yet another talented film director whose best work may be in various forms of television. He directed 12 episodes of The Sopranos and produced twenty. Although he’s credited with only two features, both are worthy efforts. His 2006 Hollywoodland has an automatic interest factor but is in many ways a risky item....

Hoo-haw, as they say... but the hot reputation of this pre-Code slice of censor bait begins and ends with its astonishing original poster. The movie itself isn't daring in sex, smut or violence, but is instead a highly cinematic art-piece about a woman taking on the sins of men and society. Director Phil Goldstone fashions a labyrinth of flashbacks, flash-forwards and scenes set in a psychological limbo. The woman under pressure is the sensual Zita Johann; she's falling in a fatalistic tailspin as bleak as any future loser-Noir heroine. UCLA's 4k restoration comes from the original camera negative. The Sin of Nora Moran One look at the famous original poster guarantees that the alluring The Sin of Nora Moran will go on lists of pre-Code sizzlers that one must see. The artwork by Vargas is unrelated to the movie, which is not about a woman with long blonde hair. The church bluenoses that rammed through the code enforcement...

Blu-ray + DVD The City Without Jews Just off the 10 Freeway on the West side of Los Angeles, signs direct tourists to the ‘Museum of Tolerance.’ We’ve always taken the name of the museum to be sad but true — tolerance is so rare, it can be seen only in a place that displays Egyptian mummies and extinct reptiles. Intolerance, of...

Blu-ray Pat and Mike Hollywood progressives liked to make their movies — dramas, comedies, whatever — into teaching moments, which is just swell assuming one agrees with the viewpoint being pushed. That doesn’t mean that every picture has to be a ‘Western Union’ message movie, the kind that Goldwyn waved a finger at. Or was it Zanuck? For 1950’s...

The Complete Films of Agnes Varda The great Agnès Varda passed away just over a year ago. She appears to have been creatively active almost to the very end, an insatiable, unstoppable filmmaker of taste & discretion and natural ability. IThe first time I became aware of her was with Le Bonheur, the effect of which was devastating. That disturbing movie...

Wake Island Never heard of Wake Island?  Its fall terrified Americans at Christmas of 1941. The war’s just begun, we’re definitely not winning, and the assignment was to make a movie about a tragic defeat that might be the first of many tragic defeats to come. Paramount’s careful morale-builder doesn’t exaggerate or sentimentalize the brutal fall of...

Blu-ray L’innocente The availability of European art cinema became spotty in the 1970s, even if Fellini and Bergman were aided by the vigorous distribution of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Many noted pictures we enjoyed at festivals like FILMEX were not seen again until the arrival of Home Video and cable stations like the ‘Z Channel.’ Luchino...

Tony Curtis Collection Tony Curtis Collection The Perfect Furlough, The Great Impostor, 40 Pounds of Trouble Blu-ray KL Studio Classics 312 minutes Street Date August 4, 2020 available through Kino Lorber 49.95 Starring: Tony Curtis Tony Curtis appears to have become a Golden Boy at late-’40s Universal-International by playing the role of ambitious actor to the hilt. Everybody...

Blu-ray Raggedy Man Catching up with films thirty and forty years after one first saw them yields discoveries beyond deciding if so-and-so picture ‘holds up.’  Terrence Malick cold-sneaked his Badlands  one night at the UCLA Film School, and it was so different that we couldn’t immediately pin down its special qualities. A generation later the same director’s The Tree...

Blu-ray Orgasmo Severin Films’ lavish ode to a group of films by a single director is a dream box that Umberto Lenzi should have lived to appreciate — the solid packaging and handsome design outshine Severin’s earlier collection for Al Adamson. All four of the pictures are finally shown uncut, in variant versions and at the right...

Blu-ray Elvira, Mistress of the Dark Local television horror hosts are generally a sad lot; about the only ones to win national attention were John Zacherle’s ‘Zacherley’ and Maila Nurmi’s ‘Vampira.’  Nurmi’s short stint on L.A. television netted her little more than a role in an Ed Wood movie. Zacherle had more staying power, but because of my age, I only...

Blu-ray The Public Eye Many filmmakers tackle period urban stories but few generate a real ambiance for times gone by. Too many get pigeonholed as ‘neo-noirs’ even though the period dressing — cars, costumes, music — overwhelm both the directors and the talent in front of the screen. Chinatown manages to effortlessly ooze 1934 Los Angeles, while favorite L.A....

A bigger and brighter film debut couldn't be imagined ... Doris Day became America's sweetheart in Michael Curtiz's peppy production, graced with a witty script and several catchy, radio-ready song hits. And the color is better than new in this impressive Blu-ray remastering job -- Woody Bredell's Technicolor hues are literally eye-popping. It's great fun seeing Ms. Day invent her natural, fresh-faced screen persona right before our eyes. Romance on the High Seas Not all Doris Day pictures are great movies, but her presence always makes me smile. As Michael Curtiz discovered — and Hollywood should have seen long before — Ms. Day had a natural, honest fresh-faced quality that instantly wins over audiences. She’s the freckle-faced girl next door, who also happens to be a highly popular...