CineSavant

Blu-ray The Land Unknown "Behind A Barrier Of Antarctic Ice...A Paradise Of Hidden Terrors!" Universal-International laid out a pretty penny to film this elaborate spin on The Lost World, modernized to take in discoveries at the South Pole. It's a showcase for fancy B&W opticals and traveling mattes ... but the featured monster stars are a big letdown --...

Blu-ray The Prisoner Alec Guinness transfers an acting challenge from the stage to the screen, in this account of a Cardinal forced to knuckle under to a Communist regime -- instead of extracting a confession with torture, Jack Hawkins' Inquisitor uses psychology to find his prisoner's weakness. The picture is uneven but its key performances are choice, with...

Superman Serials – The Complete 1948 & 1950 Collection Theseries starred Noel Neill as reporter Lois Lane, Tommy Bond (the smirking bully Butch of the Our Gang comedies) as eager beaver Jimmy Olson and vaudeville hoofer Kirk Alyn as the self effacing rube who, by the way, could change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel in his bare hands. Superman was produced...

Blu-ray The Heiress William Wyler and a trio of fantastic actors make indelible movie history from a grim story by Henry James. How much of love is bald opportunism? How many successes married their way into money? And what's a lovesick woman to do when a beau may not be true? This may be the key Wyler picture,...

Blu-ray A Face in the Crowd Elia Kazan never stopped making great pictures, but much of his output after 1952 was politically defensive in nature. This powerful indictment of American media madness is a genuine classic, but it also points up the need for 'good folk' to sometimes betray their associates. The target this time around is the most kill-worthy monster...

Blu-ray Tarantula A plug for commercial exterminators everywhere, William Alland's titanic hairy spider provided plenty of chills for 1950s drive-ins, delivering exactly the naïve monster thrills teenagers craved. John Agar and Mara Corday do what they can with the clunker script and Jack Arnold's direction, while Leo G. Carroll saves face by retreating below a rubber mask...

Region free Blu-ray The Reckless Moment One of Max Ophüls' best American movies is this razor-sharp 'domestic film noir' with excellent acting and a premise that was probably too sordid-real for 1949: cheap crooks blackmail an ordinary housewife trying to protect her family. Joan Bennett confronts the crisis head-on, facing down James Mason's unusually sympathetic 'collector.'

Frankenstein 1970 Color TVs, swimming pools and cars (especially cars). American culture of the 50s was fueled by desire for the newest status symbol – even the title of the latest monster movie was pitched to the upwardly mobile – get behind the wheel of the atomic powered Frankenstein 1970. Take a look under the hood though and...

Blu-ray Bend of the River The Anthony Mann - James Stewart crowd-pleaser now comes to Region A Blu-ray. With its bright Technicolor hues, it's the wagon train movie fans remember first after Red River. Stewart is a good guy with a dark background who tries to atone by helping some settlers. The thorn in his side is an unreformed former...

Address Unknown, Escape in the Fog, The Guilt of Janet Ames, The Black Book, Johnny Allegro, 711 Ocean Drive, The Killer That Stalked New York, Assignment: Paris, The Miami Story Film Noir 9 Film Collection Mill Creek and Kit Parker package nine mid-range Columbia features from the 1940s and 1950s, not all of them strictly noir but all with dark themes -- crime, creepy politics, etc. None have been on Blu-ray, and all but one are in fine condition.

The Whole Town’s Talking Overworked, under-appreciated and ever optimistic, Arthur Jones’ humdrum existence takes a turn for the weird when he returns home to find a stranger lurking in the shadows. Stranger still, the intruder is… Jones himself. Is this The Twilight Zone or a rough draft from Dostoevsky? No, it’s John Ford’s disquieting comedy from 1935, The Whole...

Blu-ray On the Basis of Sex With two major movie accolades in one year, Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the real Wonder Woman, bar none. Mimi Leder's dramatic biography takes on a relatively small piece of Ms. Ginsburg's life, but the simplifications aren't a problem. It does have the feeling of an old-fashioned celebratory bio, with colorful characters and hiss-able...

Blu-ray Diamonds of the Night Director Jan Němec made his name during the Czech New Wave of the 1960s, and later saw his career cut short when the ruling party decided to classify one of his films as 'banned forever.' This first feature is a striking chase story about two young men escaped from a Nazi prison train. It experiments...

DVD The Star Witness Veteran William Wellman directed this pre-Code thriller that puts an average New York family at odds with a pack of ruthless gangsters. It's a 1931 tale of drive-by shootings, witness intimidation and child kidnapping -- just one year later, movies about child kidnappings were banned, after the tragedy of the Lindbergh baby. Walter Huston is...

Blu-ray The River’s Edge Is it a film noir?  This desert-set crime tale sees a rat (Ray Milland) escaping to Mexico with a bag of cash, forcing a hunting guide (Anthony Quinn) to show him the way and stealing his wife (Debra Paget) in the bargain. Remember what Godard said about only needing a girl and a gun to...

Blu-ray Vampyres Dull vampire pix were once as ubiquitous as zombie pix are now, but when a good one came along we'd certainly take notice. The predatory Fran and Miriam are a wholly new twist on the 'Wicked Lady' highwayman theme -- the picture transcends the softcore horror genre with class and style. Fringe director José Ramón...

Blu-ray Becky Sharp Some show had to be the first -- back in 1935, this was the first movie to be produced entirely in full 3 strip Technicolor. Just like any revolutionary filmic development, it came from outside the studio system, which says something about how Hollywood works -- studios will spend millions of dollars to take advantage...

Hope and Crosby – The Road Pictures Between 1940 and 1962, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby starred in seven “Road” pictures directed by such distinct talents as David Butler, Norman McLeod and Hope’s own gag-writer Norman Panama who would lead the comedian kicking and screaming into the sixties with How to Commit Marriage, a poison pen letter to the counterculture released in 1969....

Blu-ray Underground (1928) It's expressive silent filmmaking at its best -- Anthony Asquith vies with Alfred Hitchcock for most creative direction in silent-era England. Elissa Landi and Brian Aherne meet in the Tube but become entangled in a scheme of the jealous Cyril McLaglen. Restored just a few years back after being unavailable for generations, this is a...

Blu-ray I Wanna Hold Your Hand Manhattan goes nuts as thousands of Beatles fans arrive to celebrate the arrival of the Mop Tops from Liverpool. Experts at wringing manic fun from crazy chaotic farces, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale make their first film to hit the screen one of their best, with brilliant craft and a fresh-faced cast of relative newcomers...

Blu-ray The Quiller Memorandum Michael Anderson directs a classy slice of '60s spy-dom. In West Berlin, George Segal's Quiller struggles through a near- existential battle with Neo-Nazi swine more soulless than his own cold-fish handlers. Harold Pinter supplies the circular dialogue, Alec Guinness the charming insincerity and Max von Sydow a devilish menace. Quiller is mesmerized by the seductive...

Region B Blu-ray The Triple Echo This obscure 1972 thriller features excellent performances by Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed, and marks the feature debut of the great director Michael Apted. The wartime home front drama takes a surprisingly precocious and sensitive view of a bizarre incident that probably happened in real life: to escape his military service, a reluctant soldier cross-dresses...

Blu-ray The Body Snatcher This bona fide classic may be, as Gregory Mank says, the best American horror picture of the 1940s. The teaming of Boris Karloff and Henry Daniell is sensational. Producer Val Lewton gives the players career-best characterizations and dialogue, and director Robert Wise adds tension and chills. Bela Lugosi is in for a supporting part. Icing...

DVD The Fiancée & The Invisibles Why do stories about resisting the Nazis seem so important right now?  Here are two discs from different labels, with one subject. Both stories are set in Germany during the war, but the approaches are quite different. A political prisoner struggles to subsist in The Fiancée an East German classic from the part-educational DEFA Film...

Blu-ray The Man Who Killed Hitler and then The Bigfoot The man who did what and then what?  Robert D. Krzykowski's first feature isn't a throwaway joke, but an elegantly crafted and designed fantasy grounded in human values. Sam Elliott's crusty sixty-something secret agent comes out of retirement to save the world again -- will the slaying of another bizarre horror lay to rest disturbing...

Cleopatra Jones A good-natured if rickety assemblage of action movie cliches, Cleopatra Jones is dominated by two bigger than life actresses, Tamara Dobson and Shelley Winters. The movie’s trailer promoted Dobson as the “soul sister’s answer” to James Bond but you can count Bruce Lee, Emma Peel, Shaft and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. among Cleo’s many relevant...