CineSavant

Blu-ray The Sin of Nora Moran 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...

Audie Murphy Collection “My temper was explosive… perhaps I was trying to level with my fists what I assumed fate had put above me.” – To Hell and Back, Audie Murphy, 1949 A remarkably self-aware assessment for such an angry young man. To hear him tell it, Audie Murphy came out of the cradle itching for a fight—when...

Blu-ray + DVD The City Without Jews A major silent film find: recently rediscovered and restored, this much-sought Austrian satire offers historical insight on antisemitism in 1920s Europe, and by extension today's anti-immigrant politics. A fictitious city decides that the solution to its ills is to expel its Jewish population. That exact premise would in just a few years become political reality...

Blu-ray Pat and Mike Still one of Tracy and Hepburn's best, this follow-up to Adam's Rib works on all levels. It rings the feminist rights gong just hard enough, and drums the notion that women deserve a chance to achieve their potential without sex discrimination getting in the way. Katharine Hepburn is at her most attractive when being athletic....

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Thanks to George Robinson’s Technicolor photography and Vera West’s kaleidoscopic costumes, death and destruction look pretty as a picture in 1944’s Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Director Arthur Lubin’s action fantasy is no patch on the Fleischer brothers’ Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (it too, a resplendent Technicolor production) but this Universal...

The Complete Films of Agnes Varda An artist's life is always more than their 'published' works, but that this massive 'Agnés in a box' comes close to being the last word on an impressive filmmaker sometimes dubbed The Mother of the French New Wave. It certainly is as comprehensive and complete as possible when it comes to her films. So far...

Blu-ray 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 Luchino Visconti's handsome final feature adapts a classic Italian novel about an arrogant aristocrat whose selfish double-standard philosophy causes ruin and misery. The 19th century villas and ornate costumes dazzle, but the depressingly fated story will be tough going for sensitive audiences. This new disc encoding highlights the intoxicating atmosphere, and the intense performances of...

Blu-ray Tony Curtis Collection Good Old Tony Curtis!  We could always depend on Tony for a sly, ingratiating smile, charm that ranged from candid-sweet to barracuda insincerity, and a desire to please that never quit. Some of his best work came while schmoozing and nice-nice clawing his way to the top, where he epitomized the glamorous movie star with...

Slave of the Cannibal God At the same moment the Korean War was ending and Eisenhower entered the White House, illustrator Samson Pollen found his niche; illuminating the fever dreams of suburban dads for action magazines from Man’s World to Stag. He enjoyed a long career and in 1978 he was handed an assignment right up his alley, a garish montage of anacondas,...

Blu-ray Raggedy Man Here's a story about a different kind of 'lockdown.'  This near-perfect Americana drama might be the real pinnacle of Sissy Spacek's wonderful career. The no-baloney tale of rural life on the Texas coastline during WW2 is packed with strong emotions and solid sentiment. Wartime hardship and catch-as-catch-can romance strike an uneasy balance with more threatening...

Blu-ray Orgasmo Severin's extravagant four-film six-disc The Complete Umberto Lenzi / Carroll Baker Giallo Collection is a luxurious trip into sexy, violent Italo thrill territory. CineSavant concentrates on the first Lenzi-Baker collaboration, a truly nasty bit of misanthropy that bridges the gap between standard 'Lady In Peril' fare and the full-bore giallos that would soon become the norm....

The Lady Eve In The Lady Eve a wealthy ophiologist named Charlie Pike and a sexy card shark named Jean Harrington fall in love. It’s a rapid-fire romance fueled by equal portions of love and lust and when the affair crashes and burns, director Preston Sturges simply restarts the movie: Jean reintroduces herself to Charlie as a British socialite named Eve...

Blu-ray Elvira, Mistress of the Dark We love Cassandra Peterson, a smart woman who made a go of horror host work in the tough Los Angeles TV market, long after the short-lived Vampira and just a few years after the passing of Sinister Seymour. After Elvira's Movie Macabre she got to make this lively comedy feature, and thus planted her stake...

Blu-ray The Public Eye Howard Franklin's absorbing tale of the New York underworld is told from the  point of view of a night-prowling shutterbug who documents life on the streets, from the swanky nightclubs to gangland killings on the cold sidewalks. Joe Pesci has his most endearing role in a part suggested by the famous photographer Weegee, a small...

Blu-ray Romance on the High Seas 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...

Blu-ray 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916) A near-spotless restoration on the 104 year-old adaptation of the Jules Verne classic finally presents it in a form where we can judge its merits. The screenplay is an erratic jumble, imposing serial thrill elements onto an undigested amalgam of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers with its sequel L'Ile mystérieuse. But the physical production...

Blu-ray America as Seen by a Frenchman This marvelous proto-documentary is a cultural travelogue, before such films became a conduit to express social outrage or moral condemnation. To the French filmmakers America in 1960 is still a land of wonders, a bigger-than-life fantasyland, where you can visit a places called Fantasyland and Frontierland and see your culture's past play out as entertainment....

Region Free Blu-ray A Bullet for the President Guest reviewer Lee Broughton tackles Tonino Valerii's Spaghetti Western-cum-political conspiracy thriller. By brazenly transposing key aspects of John F. Kennedy's assassination onto the assassination of James A. Garfield in 1881, Valerii gives both western and conspiracy film fans much food for thought. A career best performance by Giuliano Gemma, repurposed sets from Once Upon a...

Blu-ray Pride and Prejudice (1940) MGM in 1940 was just the movie factory to turn out a smart, compact version of the Jane Austen novel, with Greer Garson in fine form and Laurence Olivier possibly slumming but also contributing a flawless performance. Robert Z. Leonard's direction is invisible but does no harm; adaptors Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin telescope events...

The Flesh and the Fiends The Flesh and the Fiends lives up to its name and then some. The setting is Scotland but the squalid streets and charnel houses suggest Dickens’ London at its bleakest. Everything is for sale here, the fleshy whores of the cathouses and the fiends who haunt them. On the other side of the tracks lives...

Blu-ray The War of the Worlds "It neutralizes mesons somehow. They're the atomic glue holding matter together!"  For most of the 1950s George Pal's Martian invasion tale reigned as the top Sci-fi spectacle about an alien invasion. All the money went into the visuals, beautifully turned out by Byron Haskin and Gordon Jennings. Paramount's much-awaited full restoration job does the picture...

Blu-ray The Day the Earth Caught Fire What's the best Ecological Thriller of all time?  Finally available in a good Region A disc is Val Guest and Wolf Mankowitz's thrilling, realistic account of our world turned topsy-turvy, and perhaps plunging into a fiery oblivion. The violent shifts of climate and weather patterns echo today's global warming chaos. Newspapermen Edward Judd and Leo...

The Thief of Baghdad When he shuffled off this mortal coil in 1995, Arthur Lubin’s New York Times obituary was titled “Arthur Lubin, 96, Director Of ‘Mr. Ed’ TV Series, Dies.” It’s doubtful the prolific Lubin would have complained about that particular credit headlining his accomplishments; the man who directed Karloff and Lugosi, jumpstarted Abbott and Costello’s film career...

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break If Larsen E. Whipsnade ever laid eyes on Harold Bissonette, his mouth would water. Bissonette, a mild-mannered grocer for whom no good deed goes unpunished, is the perfect target for a con man like Whipsnade. W.C. Fields performed variations on both of those diametrically opposed characters throughout his career but in Never Give a Sucker...

Region B Blu-ray Britannia Hospital Lindsay Anderson's third 'Mick Travis' movie is a crazy comedy eager to overstep lines of cinematic decorum. Britain in 1982 is a country at war with itself, torn by elitist snobbery and working-class revolt. Union grievances cripple the functioning of a major public hospital, on a day when the Queen is set to visit. A...