CineSavant

Shaft’s Big Score! / Shaft in Africa Released in 1971 during a notoriously divisive presidential campaign, Shaft was both a middle finger to the powers that be and a sexually charged Black Power taunt – a combination that convulsed 42nd Street audiences while scaring the bejesus out of your average Nixon voter. For that grindhouse crowd, Richard Roundtree, not Nixon, was The...

Blu-ray The Andromeda Strain Jumpin' gingivitis!  Vicious microbes from space threaten the world and our only hope is a team of scientists in an underground lab in Nevada. But the sneaky germ from the cosmos is a-mutatin' faster than a mess o' jackrabbits, into a form that doesn't just kill people, it consumes our flesh, too! No, it's not...

Blu-ray Police Story & Police Story 2 All the world loves Jackie Chan, whose cinematic action pictures bridge the gap between silent-era virtuosity and slick modernity. As light comedy entertainment these first two Police Story smash 'n' bash epics of eye-popping jeopardy are suitable as 'family entertainment' as well. Jackie is a marvelous hero, while Maggie Cheung is an old fashioned girl...

Blu-ray Ring of Bright Water This favorite animal film takes a half-step sideways out of the cute animal subgenre: the delightful Mij is no super-otter, just an ordinary playful garden-variety otter, as an Otter oughta be. (cough) Champion mellow English couple Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers have put together a film guaranteed to lower your blood pressure. But see it...

Fantômas – Three Film Collection Eighteen years after playing the duel roles of an aristocratic monster and his swashbuckling adversary in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Jean Marais got the chance for a reprise – this time as a two-fisted reporter named Fandor and his bête noire, the otherworldly antihero Fantômas. He (they?) were the protagonists of a colorful trio...

Princess Mononoke Hayao Miyazaki spent much of his early career as an artist and animator on children’s fare like Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon and Puss in Boots, each as energetic as a school recess and as uncomplicated as a bedtime story. From such modest beginnings a mighty oak grew… an entire forest in fact. In 1984 Miyazaki wrote and...

Blu-ray Stagecoach (1966) Twilight Time goes for a Blu-ray upgrade of the western remake with the all-star cast. Forget that there was ever a John Ford or a John Wayne and it's a perfectly presentable wild west story, but the mileage may vary for classic western fans inclined to make comparisons to the 1939 classic. Top billing goes...

DVD Men Must Fight CineSavant obsesses over yet another obscure bit of cinematic sociology: a glossy pre-Code MGM melodrama about mothers and war, which half-debates issues like pacifism, the losses of world war one, military vigilance, cowardice, chemical WMDs and foolish idealism! But don't worry, the title statement is the ultimate answer to everything. Oh, it's also political sci-fi:...

Blu-ray Von Richthofen and Brown Freshly divorced from American-International Pictures, Roger Corman leaps into the filmic mainstream with a fairly large-scale World War One aviation picture. He competes with the big studios but retains his nonconformist attitude: his retelling of the story of the Red Baron fixates on the theme of the death of chivalry in combat. For his star...

Blu-ray The Landlord It's the brightest debut feature of 1970, and perhaps the warmest movie ever about the American race divide. Hal Ashby and Bill Gunn's work is inspired: rich boy Beau Bridges buys a slum tenement and launches a wonderful ensemble comedy-drama in confrontation with the fantastic quartet of actresses -- Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Pearl Bailey...

Blu-ray The Big Clock Clever plotting goes into overdrive for this light-comedy proto-paranoid film noir about a magazine publishing empire so organized that it seems a sci-fi invention from the future. Ray Milland's charismatic fall guy finds himself embroiled in a murder plot filled with false identities, and a manhunt that he must supervise... to catch himself. Maybe Robert...

The House of the Seven Gables In 1940’s The House of the Seven Gables, Margaret Lindsay transforms from sunny romantic to stone-faced recluse in the blink of an eye – her startling performance gives a 20th century hot foot to Universal’s 19th century melodrama. Published in 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is set during the new era of enlightenment – a superstitious few...

Blu-ray Robbery Why do crime caper films have so much appeal?  Are we all closet criminals, eager to watch less timid souls risk life and limb to get the big payout and live happily ever after?   Peter Yates' stylish re-telling of England's Great Train Robbery makes for an excitingly detailed, nonsense-free heist straight from real life,...

Region B Blu-ray The Ghost Lovers Guest reviewer Lee Broughton returns with an assessment of an obscure period chiller expertly assembled by Shen Hsiang Yu. One of the Shaw Brothers' early attempts at screen horror, this superior gothic romance with a supernatural twist failed to find an audience upon its initial domestic release -- a circumstance that led to the studio...

All-Region Blu-ray No Orchids for Miss Blandish "You crazy rat you croaked him!"  Yes, you've probably heard better hardboiled dialogue, but this British imitation of American gangster pictures takes the cake for screwy line deliveries. It's derived from a book and play that's already derived from a salacious William Faulkner story. Jack La Rue and Linden Travers try to make a kidnapper-rapist...

FAN SERVICE: AVENGERS: ENDGAME AND SAD HILL UNEARTHED Haters gonna hate, and yeah, some folks will take, and have taken, their devotion to the Marvel Cinematic Universe to ridiculous lengths, in the same way that just about every pop culture phenomenon since Beatlemania has inspired people to do. But the likelihood is, if you’ve ever felt any kind of investment, however intermittent or...

DVD The Mysterious Island (1929) MGM's gigantic silent sci-fi extravaganza took three years to make, by which time the talkies arrived and everything went to pieces. Lionel Barrymore emotes (EMOTES!) in his early sound footage, and terrific effects take us to the bottom of the ocean where monsters and a race of Donald Duck creatures menace our heroic adventurers. And...

The Nightcomers Between 1944 and 1992 Jack Clayton directed just nine movies but they included some of the most elegant yet clear-eyed films to come out of post-war Britain – from the hard-knock realism of Room at the Top to the broken-marriage reverie of The Pumpkin Eater. A man of letters as well as cinema, his relatively brief...

Blu-ray Summer Stock I don't know if Garland fans still go around chanting 'Judy Judy Judy' at her every appearance, but they do have a timeless song 'n' dance number to celebrate here. Her last MGM movie is only a so-so vehicle but Gene Kelly and the studio's top music & dance talent work hard to put it...

Blu-ray Highway Patrolman (El Patrullero) The prize for best direction of 1991 ought to have gone to Alex Cox, whose visual economy in this show is to be applauded. Cox's camera is fluid, expressive yet technically invisible and unencumbered with fancy tricks: the frame never goes static, yet the film has only a couple of hundred cuts! Filmed in Spanish...

The Strange Door Charles Laughton is a vengeful aristocrat with a secret in the cellar and Boris Karloff is the family servant who holds the key to The Strange Door. Released in 1951, the Universal International period piece stars Laughton as Alain de Maletroit, a bitter reprobate who lures a fugitive into his castle with the promise of...

Blu-ray My Brilliant Career Gill(ian) Armstrong's breakthrough feature does a leapfrog over stories like Little Women, with heroines that prevail even when adhering to the Meek Sex role of their time. Judy Davis's Sybylla Melvin knows that she's a freckle-faced pain in the neck: despite being proud that she's attracted the local male catch, her every sinew is committed...

Blu-ray Lilith There's no movie quite like Robert Rossen's adaptation of the J.R. Salamanca book: mental illness and disturbance is neither simplified nor jammed into a preconceived pattern. There is a strong mythical element to Jean Seberg's enigmatic Lilith, who at times seems the breathing incarnation of elemental human forces -- I would imagine the Greeks believed...

Blu-ray Three Coins in the Fountain Ah, yes -- it's a hot day in 1954, so what could be better than a cool movie theater projecting beautiful Italian scenery onto an Eee-Nor-Mous CinemaScope screen, with Frank Sinatra warbling an Oscar-winning tune. The simple escapism of Fox's 'three girls find love' epic makes Rome look like a welcoming haven for carefree Americans...

DVD Red Skelton Whistling Collection One night in 1950 during an especially frenetic episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour, Jerry Lewis stepped away from Dean Martin to address the camera point blank – “You get the idea – I’m supposed to be a 9-year-old kid.” Hardly a revelation – especially to Red Skelton, the reigning king of prepubescent horseplay. That...

Blu-ray Melvin and Howard What does the American dream mean to you? Hardworking folk just want the job and the house and the family as promised in the 'old' Contract With America that began to slip out of reach in the 1970s. To examine the social absurdities at the tacky end of the consumer divide, Bo Goldman and Jonathan...