CineSavant

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...

3-D Blu-ray Taza, Son of Cochise 3-D 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...

The Bat Released during the dog days of summer in August of 1959, The Bat was an air-conditioned summer treat for the  eight year-old unprepared for a blood and thunder horror movie – even if this mild thriller does star that consummate killer Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead as a novelist who dabbles in murder – the more...

Blu-ray Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain Guest reviewer Lee Broughton returns with a Region B review of Tsui Hark's mystical tale of derring-do in ancient China. Hark revived a once popular variant of the wuxia film form -- the Chinese shenguai wuxia films from the late 1920s -- which paired chivalric martial arts with more overtly mystical and mythological elements. The...

Blu-ray Mystery of the Wax Museum 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...

Blu-ray Brighton Rock Graham Greene's tense crime tale is as important as his classic The Third Man but nowhere near as well known. Down Brighton way the race-track boys have sharp ways of solving disputes and terrorizing the common folk -- think 'straight razor.' Richard Attenborough's breakthrough film is also a showcase for Hermoine Baddelely and a marvelous...

Blu-ray Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales Welcome to the exciting, hesitant, guilt-laden and provocative world of Eric Rohmer, and his varied voyages of slightly intimidated romantic discovery. There are six Moral Tales (and some short subjects) and each finds a main character stymied by indecision: should he hew to the narrow moral path, or stop being so conflicted and let relationships...

Blu-ray The Golem: how he came into the world A top movie monster is back from filmic perdition, restored to his full might and power. Rabbi Lowe's answer to the persecution of the ghetto is a mysterious unthinking automaton capable of terrible destruction. Paul Wegener's indelible clay statue stands as a core myth in Jewish lore. But he's still here, usually in allegories about...

Region B Blu-ray John Ford at Columbia 1935-1958 For producer-director John Ford Columbia Studios was apparently a calm port in a hostile movie climate. Away from the bankability guaranteed by John Wayne, Ford never quite regained the power of his earlier triumphs, from the silent era to his socially conscious classics at Fox. The four Columbia-controlled pictures presented on Powerhouse Indicator's lavishly appointed...

Blu-ray The Love of Jeanne Ney When does a silent classic really become a classic?  When we can see a reconstituted full original version, which in this case meant decades spent waiting. G.W. Pabst's celebrated 1927 jeopardy-soap has romance, treachery, murder, a revolutionary war and a score of terrific characters embodied by Brigitte Helm, Sig Arno, Vladimir Sokoloff and the weird...

Reflections in a Golden Eye “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” That’s an oddly detached way to begin a story that thrives on hysteria. It’s the prelude to Carson McCuller’s novel with an equally blasé title, Army Post. Inspired by the “alien” atmosphere of Fort Benning during the writer’s childhood,...

Blu-ray The Great Escape Images from this picture were burned into our Boomer childhood brains ... we actually sat still for almost three hours to watch it. John Sturges' epic show is like a fine-tuned watch -- its unbreakable story is populated by ideal characters that become instant heroes, just for acting like normal men that want free of...

Blu-ray The Cremator Horror films aren't only about vampires and goblins -- Czech director Juraj Herz's mind-chilling study of a Fascist opportunist communicates truths about aberrant psychology and Fascists, that audiences would never read in print. A bourgeois burner of cadavers leverages his Reich-useful trade into his own little warped empire of evil. Karl Kopfringl's modus operandi hardly...

Blu-ray Sweet Bird of Youth Not all Tennessee Williams film adaptations are successful, but Richard Brooks' blend of romance, show biz venality and political thuggery is just too entertaining to dismiss. The entire cast is better than good, with Geraldine Page shining and Paul Newman well-cast. And the ingenue Shirley Knight receives her most iconic role, right at the beginning...

Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter Ronald Searle published his first St. Trinian’s cartoon in a 1941 issue of the English humor magazine, Lilliput. The sketches, done in pitch black scrawls that spread over the page like a spider’s web, detailed the misadventures of a rowdy band of juvenile delinquents in a floundering boarding school. The “Saint” in St. Trinian’s was...

Blu-ray Europa Europa Director Agnieszka Holland pulls off a difficult task -- her true-life Holocaust tale neither trivializes the horror nor glamorizes individualized victims at the expense of the big picture. Marco Hofschneider is the inexperienced German teenager who by strange quirks of fate becomes a staunch Stalinist in a Communist school, then a Nazi war hero and...

Blu-ray Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson Exploitation films have their mavericks, their patron saints and their bad boys: this well-researched and lovingly assembled shock-bio introduces us to a particularly talented persistent filmmaker whose sexed-up horror & action grindhouse non-epics proved commercially viable even into the video age. Then comes the Ghastly Death part, a cruelly undeserved finish for a movie guy...

Blu-ray Rachel and the Stranger Here's a pleasant surprise: one of RKO's most popular releases of 1948 has suddenly emerged in an uncut version that's a full twelve minutes longer than anything most of us have seen. The gentle, family-oriented frontier tale has an attractive trio of star performers, excellent location work and a thoughtful, teasing script. I must have...

Blu-ray Billy Liar Do you ever lapse into daydream fantasies to escape from everyday life? Tom Courtenay and John Schlesinger changed their destinies and that of Julie Christie with this brilliant (black?) comedy about what ought to be a tragic situation. The frustrated Billy rebels against his dull routine with outrageous lies and chicanery, but hasn't the courage...

DVD - Region 2 Only - No English Audio or Subtitles The Head A scientist who operates out of a starkly Modernist laboratory of glass and steel, Dr. Ood comes from a long line of German crackpots with a flair for the theatrical. Rotwang, the bug-eyed inventor of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, springs to mind along with Dr. Gogol, the lovelorn psychopath of Karl Freund’s Mad Love. And not...

Blu-ray Outcast of the Islands Lust-filled treachery in the steaming tropics!  He dared to love a cannibal empress! Taglines like that suggest that it wasn't easy to sell Carol Reed's phenomenally good adaptation of Joseph Conrad's classic, a tale of human self-degradation and malevolence in the tropics. Long difficult to see, it's finally here to dazzle a generation that might...

Blu-ray The Sound Barrier Why is David Lean's stirring ode to British aviation so historically and technically bogus?  Because at heart it's a science fiction film!  Ralph Richardson drives his test pilots and his own son to die on the altar of aviation R&D, in a tale focused firmly on futurism and the push to the stars. Nigel Patrick...

DVD The Great Gildersleeve Movie Collection Like the transition from silent movies to the talkies, the progression from radio to film was a rocky road for some performers. Bud Collyer and Daniel Chodos, the actors who lent their musclebound vocals to Superman and Doc Savage, would have been unthinkable modeling skin-tight long Johns or shredded undershirts on the silver screen. But...