CineSavant

Blu-ray The Glass Bottom Boat It's wacky, daffy and incredibly square, yet Frank Tashlin's late career Doris Day romp has a certain gotta-watch interest factor: the male cast of clowns performs the sexist comedy well, and Ms. Day's fantastic screen personality brightens everything. Space-age executive lothario Rod Taylor hires Doris just for romantic purposes, while Arthur Godfrey, John McGiver, Dom...

Blu-ray Wanda The work of a great, original, natural filmmaker, Wanda continues to confound viewers that don't recognize honest human reality when they see it. A woman dispossessed, uprooted and adrift no longer has a self-definition, just a basic drive to subsist and find someone who values her. Morals? It's hard enough just to survive. Director-actress Barbara...

Blu-ray The Deadly Mantis It's big, it buzzes, and it screams like a banshee. So why is the Mantis monster so ho-hum? Universal-International tried to squeak out another boffo big bug epic but 1957 screens were already crowded with grasshoppers and scorpions. The screenplay is derivative, and somebody allowed producer William Alland to throw in every stock shot that...

Blu-ray Detour This is a big one, the restoration we long thought would never come. CineSavant tries to explain what makes Edgar G. Ulmer's masterpiece uniquely memorable, how it works its Loser Noir magic, and why this particular restoration bodes well for a certain class of picture mired in murky rights issues. Meet Al Roberts, a hard...

Blu-ray The Tarnished Angels Douglas Sirk took our heads off with this intense, thematically adult tale of love and obsession in a Depression-Era flying circus that's the open air equivalent of the marathon dance craze -- pilots die to thrill the crowd. The terrific-looking show provides career-best roles for some deserving actors: Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Jack Carson and...

The 50 Foot Art of Reynold Brown Reynold Brown: A Life in Pictures by Daniel Zimmer and David J. Hornung 2009, The Illustrated Press, Hardcover, 224pp. ,$39.95 – 2017, Expanded version With the publication of an expanded edition of Reynold Brown: A Life in Pictures, it’s official… Brown was responsible for illustrating every movie poster ever made. Ok, not really but it...

3-D Blu-ray Jivaro 3-D Verily, Blu-ray 3-D is better than most theatrical 3-D!  Paramount's fourth and last 3-D production went out to theaters only in 2-D, so for all practical terms this Kino/3D Archive restoration is a depth-format premiere. Expect a kissing scene or two: lusty Fernando (¿Quién es más macho?) Lamas and demure Rhonda Fleming succumb to the...

Psyche 59 The story of a troubled marriage and a tenacious home wrecker, Psyche 59 is a Brigitte Bardot movie without Bardot – despite its overheated narrative Alexander Singer’s psychosexual potboiler is stuck at room temperature. Patricia Neal plays Alison Crawford, the unlucky sibling to Samantha Eggar’s hot to trot sister Robin and Curd Jürgens is Eric,...

Blu-ray The Return of the Vampire CineSavant contributor and advisor Gary Teetzel revisits a film he reviewed for us seventeen years ago. Instead of continuing to play his greatest role for Universal, Bela Lugosi 'returns' as a generic vampire in a very Dracula-like tale for Columbia. He's still the best fiend for the role. The show introduces a novel demise for...

Blu-ray Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? With his exaggerated visuals, eye-popping color and frantic characterizations, Frank Tashlin has been promoted to a genuine 'fifties icon. This freewheeling comedy hits on the Top Tashlin fetish subjects: Hollywood glitz, Madison Avenue neurosis, dynamic women, wimpy men and... and... bosoms, dammit. As the bubbly yet calculating sex symbol Rita Marlowe, Jayne Mansfield places career...

Blu-ray + DVD Der Hund Von Baskerville Sherlock Holmes fans have another good version of a favorite Holmes tale to savor, a late German silent film in full expressionist mode, set on an impressively moody English moor. One can see the influence of silent action serials and then-recent haunted house horror hits. And it is said that this is the first picture...

Blu-ray The Doctor William Hurt, Christine Lahti and Elizabeth Perkins do excellent work in this superior drama which delivers an important, unforced life lesson. An emotionless hotshot surgeon gets a dose of his own medicine when he's hit by a cancerous tumor, and is put through the same wringer that so humiliates his patients. What might be a...

Blu-ray Phantom Lady Robert Siodmak's first film noir is a visually expressive masterpiece in the lush romantic tradition that imposes a dreamlike mood on a nightmarish story.  Ella Raines goes to extreme lengths to break the conspiracy that's sending her boss to Death Row, aided by the Kafka-like indifference of modern Manhattanites. Franchot Tone is the man with...

The Admirable Crichton True love and the British Empire collide in 1957’s The Admirable Crichton, the riches to rags story of one hard-to-get butler and a boatload of love struck aristocrats. Loam Manor is run with steely officiousness by the valet known simply as Crichton, a kindly martinet who views the class system as the crowning achievement of...

All-Region Blu-ray Special Edition The Mark of Zorro (Im Zeichen des Zorro) Hollywood classics don't have to be stuffy -- this 1940 swashbuckling adventure has style, great action, laughs and one of the most attractive screen couples of their day, Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell. And that's not mentioning a superb fencing match, a great, quaint Spanish dance, and a smart cast directed by Rouben Mamoulian at...

Region B Blu-ray The Third Secret This moody, unsettling whodunnit benefits from sensitive cinematography, fine direction and a perfectly-cast group of players. Stephen Boyd gets a worthwhile starring role, backed by some good names and a nice debut from Judi Dench. What I don't understand is why Pamela Franklin, possibly the most talented and versatile young English player ever, didn't become...

Blu-ray Bedazzled (1967) All hail the memory of Stanley Donen.  We also appreciate the razor-sharp satire of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, whose genius Donen preserved in this hilarious Faustian comedy. Poor pitiful Stanley Moon bargains with the Devil for seven chances to win the woman of his dreams, which naturally turns out to be a big mistake....

Blu-ray The Mole People Not enough love is set aside for this ambitious, under-budgeted Lost Civilization epic. John Agar and Cynthia Patrick find love in an ancient albino civilization that worships a Death Ray and enslaves a race of Subterranean Humanoid Underground Dwellers -- Mole Men, what else?   Is it unconvincing? Does the production lack polish? Well, it...

Audition It could be described as lyrically sadistic but de Sade himself might flinch at Audition – like its fragile leading lady, Takashi Miike’s film treads ever so softly before lowering the boom on its stupefied  audience. Ryo Ishibashi plays Shigeharu Aoyama, a middle-aged widower tired of sleeping in a single bed but ill-equipped for the...

Blu-ray Mad Dog and Glory What can you say about a hybrid gangster picture that generates a good feeling about people?  We really like this show -- Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman and Bill Murray's characterizations are fresh and surprising -- and refreshingly non-PC, with David Caruso, Kathy Baker and Mike Starr providing solid backup. Everything's in fine form under...

Blu-ray Death in Venice High class Italo filmmaking slips into the '70s with Luchino Visconti still on top. This handsomely appointed period drama recreates Venice of 1910. Make that a highly stylized recreated Venice. As curiously enacted by Dirk Bogarde, Thomas Mann's story of a composer's inner turmoil over a maddeningly attractive teenaged boy becomes a one-man ordeal.

Blu-ray What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? It's cold-blooded murder, I tell ya!  Feisty Ruth Gordon goes undercover to find the evidence of homicide at Geraldine Page's desert home, where companion-housekeepers keep disappearing. Robert Aldrich produced this marvelous, E-Ticket battle between celebrated actresses, and the result is a creative new solution for retirement finance problems!

Blu-ray The Vengeance of She Olinka Berova is as sexy as Ursula Andress, but even with a new woman producer Hammer's She sequel doesn't give this new She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed much of a chance -- the story just sits there and the kingdom of Kuma is woefully under-produced. Good photography and acting help, but one doesn't earn high marks for the Boys...

Blu-ray Ecco + The Forbidden Those scurrilous Italian 'mondo' films are difficult to see in original versions; this Something Weird double bill yields an American hybrid of one of the better (?) examples, given the classy touch of a narration by George Sanders. A second oversexed pseudo-docu is a homegrown mongrel (careful, don't touch) with all the credibility of today's...

Region A+B Blu-ray The Wrong Box Director Bryan Forbes tries his hand at comedy. His nostalgic Victorian farce features an eclectic choice of Brit stars -- established greats John Mills & Ralph Richardson, the freshly-minted Michael Caine, reigning jester Peter Sellers and even a debut for the collegiate pranksters Peter Cook & Dudley Moore. It's a beaut of a production with...

Blu-ray Untamed Fiery dame Susan Hayward carries this far-flung 'women's epic' to delirious romantic extremes, as her Irish heroine defies nature and exploits admirers to claim the hunky Dutchman of her dreams. Using apartheid-ridden South Africa as a background for a cheerful white conquest wasn't as touchy an idea in 1955 as it is now, but it...