CineSavant

Blu-ray Disc Funeral in Berlin Myopic Harry Palmer, the great cook, lover and reluctant spy returns to where his trouble with the British Army began. This time he's tangled up in a political snarl that might have dire consequences: not only are the Russians involved, ex-Nazis are on the payroll. Israel may have an agent in the field, and not...

Blu-ray Inside Daisy Clover It's a Hollywood rags-to-riches tale seen as a cruel coming-of-age story -- when Natalie Wood's feisty street kid becomes a child star, she learns that tinsel town is not only fake, but oppressively evil as well. Cut off from her dotty mom (Ruth Gordon) and surrounded by the sinister minions of studio head Swan (Christopher...

Blu-ray Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema II Although only one of these 1950s B&W thrillers falls within a mile of a hard definition of film noir, all give us glamorous actresses in interesting roles. Claudette Colbert takes her turn at playing a nun, Merle Oberon tries a femme fatale role on for size and Hedy Lamarr does very well for herself as...

Oh Joy, Oh Rapture! Mario Bava's comic book thriller makes the jump to Blu-ray in fine shape, with knockout visuals and eye-popping color. John Philip Law, Marisa Mell, Terry-Thomas and the late Michel Piccoli are all irreplaceable in this one-of-a-kind show. Bava's film translates action comic fantasy into cinematic terms, pictorial appeal and dynamism intact. The disc comes with a pair of excellent commentaries, featuring Nathaniel Thompson, Troy Howarth, Tim Lucas and John Philip Law himself. Danger: Diabolik We were very happy in 2005 when Danger: Diabolik arrived on DVD in a decent encoding. It was restored at Zoetrope in San Francisco, where disc producer Kim Aubry undid the previous remastering disasters that went out on VHS and laserdisc. The sad fact of this life (sob) is that too many of my favorite...

Blu-ray The Curse of the Werewolf Rip-roaring Oliver Reed's silver-coated were-beast is one of Hammer Films' very best screen monsters, which is more than enough reason to sample this colorful 1961 shocker. It was apparently ripped to shreds by the U.K. censors, a horror-crime spared us lucky Americans. The movie has been released more than once on Blu-ray but Shout's new...

Region B Blu-ray Cisco Pike (Region B) Easy Rider terrifies twenty confused studio executives because they don't understand it. Hoping to keep their jobs, they rush to hire more longhairs to make movies 'the kids' will see. Ex- UCLA film student B.L. Norton parlayed his way into writing and directing on the streets of Los Angeles, with new stars Gene Hackman and...

Blu-ray Pool of London I'd never heard of this gem of a British production; now it goes on my list of highly recommended titles. A dock area on the Thames is 'the pool,' and the sailors that disembark from the cargo ships are susceptible to the temptations of black market trade. A single eventful weekend traces the fates of...

Blu-ray Blood on the Moon Robert Mitchum intercedes in a range war in this 'A' western, and he's got the pro team of director Robert Wise and cameraman Nicholas Musuraca on his side. All but one action scene plays out at night, which is why this is sometimes called a Noir Western. The dark visuals fit that mold but the...

Great 3-D thrills -- Hollywood was working to perfect 3-D movies just as the craze died out. An impeccable Blu-ray 3-D restoration, the glory of young Rock Hudson and some of the best Utah scenery in depth makes this a very enjoyable disc. Director Douglas Sirk was itching to do a western, and the swiftly rising star Rock Hudson wanted to work for him again, even though it meant playing another Indian role. Were these men that desperate to get out of Hollywood for a month? At least they avoided filming in nuclear test sites... Taza, Son of Cochise 3-D One would think that the hot young actors in Hollywood, the ones with agents assuring them they were going to catch the brass ring, would have avoided stereotyped ‘Wild Indian’ roles like the plague. Although studio contractees had little or no control over the roles they played, the bright, incredibly photogenic Rock Hudson did manage...

Blu-ray Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain Ancient China: civil war and its attendant chaos blight the land with a multitude of colour-coded clans fighting each other for dominance of the country. Ti Ming-Chi (Biao Yuen), a weary scout who has been falsely accused of insubordination, flees the battlefield and enters a forbidding crevice in a mysterious mountain range. The crevice leads...

Talk about a worthy title for restoration -- somebody up there likes us. Digital tools and film preservation expertise have advanced far enough to revive this marvelous pre-Code comedy-shocker in a form that showcases its wild designs and stylized 2-color Technicolor sheen. Director Michael Curtiz's adept direction highlights Glenda Farrell's racy dialogue delivery as well as the spooky, expressionist horrors in Lionel Atwill's haunted 'waxitorium.' To top it off we have fabulous Fay Wray, the talkies' original scream queen, shrieking her way into the horror hall of fame in the tradition of The Phantom of the Opera. Plus -- for once the Warner Archive adds some fine new added value extras. Mystery of the Wax Museum There’s nothing like the onset of a major Hollywood craze, when the town invests ‘A’ production values in an exciting new genre. The big talkie horror push at Universal triggered a rush for chills & thrills at other studios. Paramount put its top star Fredric March into a prestigious effort that won an Oscar and...

Blu-ray Brighton Rock “Between the stirrup and the ground, he mercy sought and mercy found.” “You can’t conceive, my child, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” What are these thoughts doing in a movie about gangland terror in a sunny beach town? A fairly faithful adaptation of his original novel, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1948) comes...

Blu-ray Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales Fourteen years after their splendid DVD release, Criterion is back with a fully remastered upgrade of French director Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, in a three Blu-ray special edition box with all the same extra films and critical documentation as before. A lot has changed at Criterion in the interim. The first iteration of this...

Blu-ray The Golem: how he came into the world It’s big. It’s made of clay. It’s an unstoppable mythological Juggernaut that will obey its master’s every command. But who wants the responsibility for such power? Back near the beginning of DVD Kino put out a disc set of silent German horror greats, that couldn’t help but disappoint, quality-wise. The film sources were the same...

Region B Blu-ray John Ford at Columbia 1935-1958 Region B- capable fans in need of their John Ford Fix can certainly get it with this English disc set. It contains a major Ford title making a Blu-ray debut, plus a 1930s crime comedy that’s a genuine treat, and two late-1950s shows that have their fans but never clicked with this particular reviewer. I...

Blu-ray The Love of Jeanne Ney At UCLA film school in the early 1970s, associate professor and former film director David Bradley taught several screening classes per quarter, showing pictures from his vast personal collection of 16mm prints. Bradley was particularly flush with silent classics — he seemed to have all the standard MoMA prints, plus plenty of rare items he’d...

Blu-ray The Great Escape The Great Escape has reigned as standout entertainment for almost sixty years. No kid could walk away from a dizzying matinee, Elmer Bernstein’s music still buzzing in his head, without absorbing two prime facts: 1 )  Even if our fathers looked more like Donald Pleasance than James Garner, anything they did in the war effort...

Blu-ray The Cremator Discouraged by the Production Code, American horror films mostly shied away from truly disturbing material deemed unhealthy or immoral. Although exceptional pictures were made, few if any even began to approach the caliber of foreign horror fare. Yasuzo Masumura’s Japanese shocker Moju expresses the delirium of a ‘morbid ecstasy’ wholly incompatible with our ratings system...

Blu-ray Sweet Bird of Youth As with many American playwrights, Tennessee Williams was definitely bitten by the bug to stand up for freedom and call out our tendency toward political demagoguery. That’s the background for a tale that crosses a bit of Sunset Blvd. with 101 stories about a guy returning to his home town in hopes of winning the...

Blu-ray Europa Europa When feature motion pictures began to be made about the Holocaust, it became evident very quickly that the subject was a difficult fit for the entertainment medium. Horror shows couldn’t contain the cosmic level of tragic evil unleashed. To most of us sheltered Americans, it was just too much to take. The problems stack up...

Blu-ray Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson What makes lower-echelon exploitation producer-directors so interesting?  I think it’s because they put it all on the line. Every film student born imagines himself boldly directing movies that set the world on fire. We secretly admired our peers that were able to put together any kind of dramatic release, against the odds. We didn’t admire...

Blu-ray Rachel and the Stranger RKO’s major release Rachel and the Stranger opened in New York on September 18, 1948, just seventeen days after a particularly scandalous Hollywood arrest: the film’s newly-minted star Robert Mitchum was busted for possession of Marijuana with starlet Lila Leeds. Changing values and Mitchum’s hepcat persona  reversed what just a couple of years earlier would...

Blu-ray Billy Liar Had John Schlesinger completed only this one film, he’d still be a landmark director. Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse’s ultra-smart comic drama stretches the British New Wave with a freewheeling style that would soon become associated with the anarchic comedies of Richard Lester. But wait, there’s more. The fabulous spectacle of Julie Christie ambling down...

Blu-ray Outcast of the Islands As a rule, books by the great Joseph Conrad haven’t adapted well to film, especially his expansive adventures on the high seas and in ‘savage’ lands. In high school we were impressed by the poetics of Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, but soon thereafter the go-to Conrad book became his Heart of Darkness, with its grim...

Blu-ray The Sound Barrier You could almost hear author Tom Wolfe laughing in his fine book The Right Stuff. Wolfe reported that when the future astronauts saw The Sound Barrier in 1952, they couldn’t believe their eyes and ears. David Lean’s movie declared an English test pilot to be the first to exceed the speed of sound, in a...

Region B Blu-ray Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman At least once a year I find myself inspired to purchase (real money, mind you) a videodisc based on a recommendation from a Trailers from Hell guru. Brian Trenchard-Smith’s commentary persuaded me to check out Revolt of the Slaves and a single viewing of this weird-sounding movie sent me to the web in search of...