CineSavant

The Buster Keaton Collection Volume 4 More Keaton is always a good thing -- fans of The General and The Cameraman will find plenty to enjoy in these two classics. Buster befriends a cow ( ! ) in Go West and conquers several sports in College. Cohen's Buster Keaton Collection series is up to Volume 4, with both shows featuring Italian...

Fear No Evil / Ritual of Evil Just as she hops into bed with Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, Michèle Mercier exclaims, “Television is a cinema that you can see at home.” Et voilà—from Michèle’s lips to Studio City’s ear, Hollywood responded with a new kind of home entertainment, movies made exclusively for TV. The first examples of this awkward...

Blu-ray Girlfriends Criterion lets out the stops to celebrate a filmmaker long due for some victory laps -- Claudia Weill's endearing drama takes on the subject of a modern woman trying to be independent but human in the tough art world of New York. The Movies was a hard field to crack as well. Criterion says that...

Blu-ray Danger: Diabolik Double your Diabolik and double your pleasure! ... this Australian import chases a domestic disc onto the market after only a few months, but of course comes with irresistible new extras to tempt collectors and completists. Mario Bava's funny, dynamic action thriller was the first feature to really capture the graphic art 'feeling' of comic...

Blu-ray + DVD The Puppetoon Movie Volume 2 Talk about the Lost Arts -- Animation of various kinds, even stop-motion, is now a major part of filmmaking entertainment. But back in the 1940s the wonder man for 'how'd they do that' Technicolor marvels was George Pal, a grateful displaced European who made marvelous 'trickfilm' animations using little wooden puppets with hundreds of interchangeable...

Blu-ray Apache In 2001 I wrote, 'Someday I'll get to see a good copy of Robert Aldrich's great movie Apache.' Kino's excellent new Blu-ray of a recent MGM remaster brings back the color and the correct screen shape, and even cleans up some wicked frame damage that's been there for sixty years. The athletic Burt Lancaster will...

Blu-ray The Shop Around the Corner CineSavant's hands-down favorite holiday film, this Ernst Lubitsch classic radiates human kindness in all directions. Nobody is perfect: misunderstandings benign and profound are the gentle impetus for a sweet story that will renew one's belief that people are basically good. It's James Stewart's best pre-war performance, as he fits his character so perfectly; as in...

Blu-ray The Curse of Frankenstein Hammer's first color Gothic horror show recovers its charnel house luster in the WAC's ambitious 'surprise' restoration. The severed heads and Peter Cushing's blood-smeared costumes are back to their crimson best again, and with the improved image Terence Fisher's taut direction really grabs us, extracting maximum impact from Jimmy Sangster's 'did you see that?' shock...

Blu-ray Ladybug Ladybug Several atom-fear exposés bravely 'told the truth' about the madness of the nuclear standoff. They didn't get more liberal-precious than this uncompromising, difficult-to-watch ordeal based on a true incident. When an Imminent Attack alarm sends a tiny elementary school into a panic, Frank and Eleanor Perry pull no punches, finding the worst possible outcome to...

Blu-ray Major Dundee (Australian Import) The new [Imprint] label turns its attention to the Sam Peckinpah favorite, the almost-classic that suffered a number of setbacks -- a studio regime change, impractical remote locations, the wrong producer -- and a director with zero diplomatic skills, who couldn't finish his script and fought political battles when his movie needed his full attention....

The Irishman Brotherhood, betrayal, bloodshed… memories are made of this. And these days memories are Frank Sheeran’s only companions. He was a man who engaged in crimes at the behest of some of the most powerful and dangerous men in the country, including the former Teamster head Jimmy Hoffa who disappeared in 1975. Frank took credit for...

Blu-ray The Day of the Locust John Schlesinger's adaptation of Nathanael West's novel is one of the best 'Hollywood on Hollywood' pictures ever, even if it soaks everything about The Golden Age of Tinseltown in an acid bath of cynicism. The perverse dystopia of dreams and vice is beautifully rendered in every respect, and culminates in a finale that caught ordinary...

Region B Blu-ray King Kong (1976) Dino De Laurentiis took a lot of flack for his underwhelming remake of the incomparable 1933 horror classic, which he promoted into a monster-sized hit. Nothing could eclipse the original but the good casting still appeals. An honest ad campaign would have leaned on two points:  SEE Jeff Bridges and Charles Grodin carry an insultingly...

Blu-ray The Pirate Now for a real treat for musical fans, a core MGM dazzler with top stars, fully restored and looking incredibly good. Vincente Minnelli's snappy, funny 1948 show isn't ranked among producer Arthur Freed's best but it ought to be. Silly farce gets a high-toned, technically amazing workout as Judy Garland's demure señorita secretly lusts after...

Blu-ray Silent Running Bruce Dern is on a life-saving mission! After killing John Wayne in The Cowboys but before trying to massacre the Super Bowl in Black Sunday, his forest ranger Freeman Lowell committed space piracy to save the trees, man!  The only one back on Earth who seems to care is Joan Baez. Douglas Trumbull's technically-accomplished first...

Blu-ray The Gunfighter When Hollywood from time to time reinvented the western the results were sometimes sensationally good, as attested to by this superior neglected classic. We'd call it the first psychological western if the term weren't so limiting. Gregory Peck once again proves how good he can be when well cast and he's surrounded by fine characterizations,...

Blu-ray Ulysses (1954) No, it's not the story of the 18th President of the United States. Kirk Douglas must have been a big hit in Rome, starring in one of the first and best of the Italo epic 'classics' years before musclemen cornered the market. Homer's tale of the husband who took ten years to come back from...

The Wonders of Aladdin Henry Levin was a more than reliable director of Hollywood entertainments, most notably the unassailable widescreen thrills of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Donald O’Connor was a first-class, multi-faceted actor. Mario Bava was a visionary genre trickster. And Vittorio De Sica was one of world cinema’s greatest artists. Shocking, then, that their 1960...

Blu-ray The Mortal Storm It's pretty scary to think that as late as 1940 both Washington and the American public were sharply divided over Nazi Germany. Poland had been overrun and France was about to fall, but MGM waited until June of that year to release this softened adaptation of a novel written as a warning to the world...

Blu-ray Mad Max (1979) The true breakdown of society appears to have begun in Australia around 1979, when George Miller made this berserk extrapolation of every toxic futurist prediction on the books. Out on the open road the only thing saving society from horrifying motorized gang violence is a corps of equally crazed patrolmen in their interceptor vehicles. With...

Amazon Women on the Moon Mark Twain said “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.” That applies just as well to 1987’s Amazon Women on the Moon, John Landis’s unofficial sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie and the bastard child of Joe Dante and Jon Davison’s The Movie Orgy. Like those back-handed tributes...

Region B Blu-ray 976-Evil Guest reviewer Lee Broughton returns with an assessment of Robert Englund's offbeat video rental store favourite 976-EVIL. Satanic panic ensues when two teenage cousins are foolish enough to start using an automated telephone "horrorscope" service. Dialling 666 just might be granting the pair a direct line to the Devil himself and there's bound to be...

Blu-ray Dragnet (1954) Join Joe Friday and Frank Smith as they make a case against the rotten gangland crooks that moiderized Dub Taylor with a shotgun, point blank! See detectives loiter about while smart remarks and BIG music stings provide the excitement! The big-screen version of the hit TV show has a surfeit of guest crooks, unhappy women,...

Region B Blu-ray Columbia Noir #1 Region B Blu-ray-capable noir fans have a formidable six-pack of noir crime pictures on tap: a WW2 espionage thriller, two caper pix and the show that launched the notion of a hit man who's both charismatic and psychopathic. The list of leading actors is stellar as well: Glenn Ford, Kim Novak, Eli Wallach, Brian Keith,...

Ultra-HD + Blu-ray + CD Daughters of Darkness Finally, a horror shocker that needs to make no excuses! Harry Kümel's interpretation of the Elizabeth Báthory legend excels in all departments and succeeds in each of its aims. Erotic Eurohorror meets Sternbergian visual decadence, making a vivid (and bloody) statement about classic screen exoticism. Given the full glamour treatment, silky Delphine Seyrig is striking...

Region B Blu-ray + PAL DVD Dementia This bizarre, creepy and maudit masterpiece of silent expressionist horror is an independent 1950s production that never had a chance commercially. Butchered by a second distributor, its ignominious fate was to wind up as a movie-within-a-movie footnote for Steve McQueen. Cohen/BFI's 'rescue' remastering of John Parker's picture does some things great -- we never thought...