CineSavant

Blu-ray Wild in the Country Elvis fans laud this high-end drama, an attempt by the superstar to lock into a mainstream acting career. Presley has fine dramatic support, especially from his three leading ladies, but the requirement that an Elvis movie be all things to all people -- especially marketers -- really takes its toll. It's a soap where almost...

Seven Chances & Battling Butler The Buster Keaton Collection Vol. 3 In his day Buster Keaton's popularity trailed that of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, but now those reputations have switched around. These two 'lesser' Keaton features generate more sheer fun than anything going. Seven Chances and Battling Butler are great on remastered Blu-ray -- better materials, no missing frames -- but do yourself a favor...

Blu-ray An Angel at My Table Here's the story of a woman who overcame adversity -- not the dramatic, historical kind, but the sort of mundane discriminatory issues that come along with being 'different.' Director Jane Campion's biographical drama about the unsteady life and amusing triumphs of New Zealand author Janet Frame was adapted from a TV miniseries. Poor, isolated and...

Blu-ray Moonfleet It's Fritz Lang versus CinemaScope, for the first and last time. The format suited to snakes and funerals effectively hamstrings the great filmmaker's expressive camera direction, yet the movie is one of the best of MGM's last-gasp '50s costume dramas. Corrupt smuggler Stewart Granger is redeemed by the faith of a young boy who believes...

Blu-ray 4D Man An old monster formula props up this fantastic film but at its heart is a brilliant premise that excites the imagination. Jack H. Harris's sophomore picture after The Blob has its awkward moments but the good stuff is much better than we expect it to be. Ambitious performances by Robert Lansing, Lee Meriwether and James...

Blu-ray Alice, Sweet Alice This unique proto-slasher is not a rip-off of The Exorcist and for my taste is more meaningful, despite associating innocent children with horrible killings and religious repression. Director Alfred Sole uses these edgy elements to whip up an involving mystery, and a committed cast lifts it high above the exploitation gutter. Great extras, especially a...

Blu-ray A Foreign Affair If you like Billy Wilder but haven't seen everything he's done, this is the film for you, a sparkling but typically sharp-tongued comedy-drama set in the last place expected in 1948 -- bombed-out Berlin, rumored to be awash in corruption. Jean Arthur is the Iowa congresswoman out to clean up the town, and Marlene Dietrich...

Region ? Blu-ray SEE BELOW The Last American Hero All-American race car mania is alive and well in this excellent Jeff Bridges movie, a true biographical story researched by Tom Wolfe. Junior Johnson needs a future beyond running moonshine for his father, and finds it climbing the rungs of success in the stock car racing game. This may be the most satisfying saga of...

Blu-ray Quatermass 2 What ought to be appreciated as one of the most prescient of 1950s suspense films holds a place among the best science fiction movies ever -- and it formed a style template for a thousand paranoid spy thrillers to follow. Val Guest pares Nigel Kneale's fantastic storyline down to its essentials, making his scientist-hero the...

Blu-ray Behold a Pale Horse Here's a highly suspenseful thriller with fine characterizations, set in a grim but meaningful place -- Fascist Spain in the late 1950s, when Franco's operatives still hold the country in a tight grip. The very modern story (by Emeric Pressburger) is also timeless: the old lost-cause warrior takes on one last mission into enemy territory....

Region B Blu-ray The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne Someone save Judith Hearne, for she can't save herself. Jack Clayton's film of Brian Moore's novel has stunning performances by Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins -- but whew, for many of us its social cruelties will feel like traumatic emotional abuse. Not enough nasty people and clueless victims in your life? ... this show will...

Blu-ray Lust for a Vampire Courageous disc boutique Scream Factory takes on one of Hammer's biggest embarrassments, that almost everyone connected to it would like to disown. I bailed from my first viewing around 1990 ... yet this time around found it somewhat better than I expected. The girlie-show nudity is treated as a special effect, and the story at...

Blu-ray Death in the Garden (Mort en ce Jardin) Finally out on Blu-ray in Region A, Luis Buñuel’s beautiful color adventure is a worthy jungle tale shot through with his signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.” The Spanish surrealist's filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois; all of his films are political, but...

Blu-ray The Reptile Hammer's attempt at a budget monster romp for 1966 isn't quite as good as its sister film Plague of the Zombies, but it has fine atmosphere and a couple of worthy grace notes, namely its fine actresses Jennifer Daniel and Jacqueline Pearce. Although the title monster bites some fans the wrong way, it works for...

Blu-ray Merrill’s Marauders Is this Samuel Fuller's biggest production? He tries to convey the harrowing reality of a military campaign that tested the limits of endurance and punishment that troops could absorb. In his last movie, Jeff Chandler is the famed commander who must ask his special forces to march hundreds of miles in the unforgiving jungle, and...

Blu-ray Weird Science Woo Hoo! We're girl-starved teen nerds, and we're cooking up our own living sex toy with our home computers! John Hughes turns an infantile idea into one of his not-bad teen angst comedies, as Kelly LeBrock materializes to fulfill their wildest dreams. The idea is of course transformed into a basically benign coming-of age story...

Blu-ray Pin Up Girl Personality is everything in the movies — even in the Golden Age, plenty of film performers ‘clicked’ for reasons having nothing to do with acting chops or obvious talent. Pin Up Girl trumpets its patriotic aim from the get-go, with a title sequence that jams in all four service anthems, behind an image of Betty...

Blu-ray Alphaville My teenage introduction to art film culture was something of a science fiction auteur detour (R2-D2?). I discovered Alphaville at a tiny art theater above the Fox Riverside, where Gone with the Wind had previewed in 1939. I bought the filmscript book to understand what the heck was going on... and slowly began to appreciate...

Blu-ray This Island Earth "The supreme excitement of our time! Challenging the unearthly furies of an outlaw planet!" Big-budget space opera finally came to movie screens, in Technicolor and widescreen, in this irresistible kid magnet of a sci-fi extravaganza. Viewers are split on its worth, as the screenplay caroms between mind-expanding visions and puerile dialogue. But it's the first...

Region B Blu-ray Jet Pilot John Wayne! Janet Leigh! Nifty jet-age flying sequences! Goofy, bad-taste sex jokes! Hans Conreid as a chortling Russian army officer!   Howard Hughes' personal fun project took seven years to make while he played games with the aerial footage. It's a highly-polished absurd joke, but it's certainly entertaining. See Hughes try to do for Janet...

Blu-ray The BRD Trilogy Rainer Werner Fassbinder's national epic tells the story of Germany's 'economic miracle' recovery through the experiences of three strong women, each resilient in a different way. The Marriage of Maria Braun takes us from the bombings to a postwar struggle for survival. Veronika Voss hangs on to her illusions of a glorious stardom that died...

Blu-ray Footlight Parade This amazing Busby Berkeley extravaganza is the best choice to impress newbies to pre-Code musical madness: it is absolutely irresistible. James Cagney's nervy, terminally excitable stage producer makes the tale of Chester Kent accessible to viewers otherwise allergic to musicals -- he's as electric here as he is in his gangster movies. Remastered in HD,...

Blu-ray Mothra Toho's fabulous, kid-safe Kaiju spectacle about the super-moth from Infant Island might be a stealth Cold War fairy tale. Kids respond to the fanciful Shobijin fairy princesses, while adults (watching the Japanese version) might catch the authors' message about belligerent nationalism and the abuse of Third Worlders. Greedy 'Rolisican' opportunists pay the price of an...

Blu-ray Gone to Earth / The Wild Heart Classic cinematics from first-rank filmmakers. No ballet or heroism, so not a crowd pleaser, but Michael Powell's original version of Gone to Earth is another unique Archers creation. Jennifer Jones finally gets to chew on a character role with grit, as a natural virgin/vixen misunderstood by contrasting suitors. David O. Selznick's revision The Wild Heart...

Blu-ray These Are the Damned "Kinder der Eisigen Dunkelheit!" If those words don't give you a chill, you may be one of 'The Damned.' Joseph Losey's fascinatingly morbid reflection on atomic terror was too much for England in 1961, wasn't released in the U.S. for four full years, and then only after being shorn of nine minutes of footage. An...

Blu-ray Hold Back the Dawn All hail Olivia de Havilland, America's longest living movie star. The more de Havilland pictures we see, the more we admire her taste and judgment in roles... or is that better expressed as, the more we admire her ability to guide a near-perfect career, going so far as to defy the studios in court. This...