CineSavant

Blu-ray The Apartment Savant's vote for the best romantic comedy ever goes to a sordid fable about problems in the big city Rat Race: keeping both a job and one's self-respect. Picking up where 1930s pre-Code movies left off, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's 'how to succeed' thesis divides people into two groups, Takers and those that Get...

Blu-ray Forever Amber Meet the lusty Amber St. Clare, a 17th century social climber determined to sleep her way to respectability. Gorgeous Linda Darnell gets her biggest role in a lavishly appointed period epic; Otto Preminger hated the assignment but his direction and Darryl Zanuck's production are excellent. And it has one of the all-time great Hollywood movie...

The Whales of August The Whales of August Blu-ray KL Studio Classics 1987 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 90 min. / 30th Anniversary Edition / Street Date December 19, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring: Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Ann Sothern, Vincent Price, Harry Carey Jr., Frank Grimes, Margaret Ladd, Tisha Stering, Mary Steenburgen. Cinematography:...

Blu-ray The Garden of Allah One of the first full Technicolor features is a romantic fantasy about an innocent beauty's encounter with an equally innocent fugitive monk ... all surrounded by sensuous, confected Hollywood exotica, courtesy of producer David O. Selznick. Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer steam up the screen, but dancer Tilly Losch steals the show with just one...

Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Terminator 2: Judgment Day Still looking sharp 26 years since its premiere, James Cameron's picture completely masters the mass audience thriller while pushing the effects envelope far beyond the industry’s horizon. Technically slick, conceptually brutal, Cameron’s style is what still prevails in action-based Sci-Fi. All this, and Ah-nold too.

Special Elite Edition Blu-ray + DVD Ruby A significant horror hit from '77, Ruby surprised all that made it including its director Curtis Harrington, who struggled with an interfering producer for control of the set. Despite everything, star Piper Laurie still shines, and there's some good atmosphere -- for an Exorcist rip-off, it's not bad.

Blu-ray + Digital + 4K Ultra HD Dunkirk A huge summer hit and a righteous blow struck for positive, non-comic book entertainment, Christopher Nolan's account of a WW2 crisis is a major war picture with amazing, full-scale visuals that we are told were only slightly augmented with CGI effects. Hallelujah.

DVD Pulp A spoof? A black comedy? Michael Hodges and Michael Caine's hardboiled 'foreign intrigue' comedy lays on the movie references and clever dialogue, going the distance in the arcane, hipster-noir subgenre. Caine is always good in that mode, and Mickey Rooney gets a supporting role that can only be called bizarre.

CineSavant picks The Most Impressive Restorations of 2017 CineSavant 2017 Favored Disc Roundup Savant picks The Most Impressive Restorations of 2017 This is a tough year for best-of Home Video lists, if one’s interest is classic films, or more simply, great old movies. I long ago strayed from actually saying one movie is better than another, as I like too many of the...

Blu-ray Four Faces West Westerns are all about values: good and bad, law and lawlessness, etc. Joel McCrea and Frances Dee's 'bad man' saga isn't faith based, exactly, but it's great for humanitarian values, the simple notion that the good in people should be encouraged. And one important detail may make it unique. Hint: John Milius might be strongly...

Blu-ray Night Passage — Die Uhr ist abgelaufen It's the great Anthony Mann-James Stewart western that Mann didn't direct: Stewart goes it alone, over-filling a good western idea with 'cute' scenes and conservative messages Mann had no use for. But it's an exciting picture, and one of co-star Audie Murphy's best -- and it's the first feature in the splendid oversized format known...

Blu-ray Letter from an Unknown Woman This devastating romantic melodrama is Max Ophüls' best American picture -- perhaps because it seems so European? It's probably Joan Fontaine's finest hour as well, and Louis Jourdan comes across as a great actor in a part perfect for his screen personality. The theme could be called, 'No regrets,' but also, 'Everything is to be...

Blu-ray (separate releases) Maigret Sets a Trap & Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case Welcome to a pair of vintage mysteries with George Simenon's popular Inspector Jules Maigret, a gumshoe who gets the tough cases. Top kick French actor Jean Gabin is the cop who keeps cool, until it's time to rattle a recalcitrant suspect. In two separate cases, he tracks a serial killer in the heart of Paris,...

Blu-ray A New Leaf – Olive Signature Filtered through her experience as an unequalled comic performer, writer-director Elaine May scores a bulls-eye with this grossly underappreciated gem, fashioned in a style that could be called 'black comedy lite.' And that's the release version mangled by the producer. What might it have been if May had been allowed to finish her director's cut?

Blu-ray The Complete Monterey Pop Festival Criterion lavishes a major upgrade to its older box set celebrating the first major rock concert event, the 'California Dreamin' idyll that some say marked the beginning of the Summer of Love. Get ready to hear and see some history-making performances from Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and The Who....

Blu-ray + DVD Deathdream Average fans of A Christmas Story likely don't know that director Bob Clark had once made creepy horror pictures with Alan Ormsby, but this independent shock effort of the early '70s still casts a spell of dread. Although Vietnam is never mentioned, the war's shadow strikes deep into the heart of a small-town family. John...

Blu-ray General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a precedent! Barbet Schroeder's documentary gets up close and personal with a narcissistic dictator consumed by his own ego. Idi Amin rants and raves incoherently and demands to be the center of all attention while taking his country down a road to ruin. This is Africa in 1973, where Uganda...

Blu-ray Election We've all met Tracy Flick -- the eager-beaver student that charms the right teachers, wins all the awards and corners the big scholarships. Alexander Payne's witty, perceptive look at High School shows the predicament of a model teacher who can't help but sabotage a pupil's run for class president. Reese Witherspoon's wholly original characterization scores...

Blu-ray Stay Hungry Are '70s auteur pictures liberated and loose, or flaky and undisciplined? Bob Rafelson's Alabama escapade places Jeff Bridges amid a wide range of choice-quality nuts, with both Sally Field and Arnold Schwarzenegger staking their claim on the big screen. What do the changing face of The South and competition-level body building have to do with...

Blu-ray Operation Petticoat Tony Curtis grew up idolizing the suave and funny Cary Grant, emulated his romantic moves as an actor and then performed a brilliant impersonation of Grant for Billy Wilder. The next step had to be co-starring with the great man himself. Blake Edwards' amiable, relaxed submarine movie allows Grant to play with ladies' under-things, while...

Blu-ray Hangover Square No, it's not a the-day-after sequel to The Lost Weekend, but a class-act mystery-horror from 20th-Fox, at a time when the studio wasn't keen on scare shows. John Brahm directs the ill-fated Laird Cregar as a mad musician . . . or, at least a musician driven mad by a perfidious femme fatale, Darryl Zanuck's...

All-Region Blu-ray Wolf (All-Region) Aooowww --- Woo! Jack Nicholson summons his inner dog -- and dons the makeup and scary contact lenses -- to go the Larry Talbot route. Unfortunately, his moon-howling nighttime life isn't as interesting as the dog-eat-dog infighting in the publishing house where he works – where feral instincts and sharp lupine senses are a major...

Region B Blu-ray Little Big Man (Region B) Arthur Penn's under-appreciated epic has everything a big-scale western could want -- spectacle, interesting characters, good history and a sense of humor. Dustin Hoffman gets to play at least five characters in one as an ancient pioneer relating his career exploits -- which are either outrageous tall tales or a concise history of the taking...

Blu-ray Scarecrow We're on the road again with a pair of eccentric new-age hobos, the kind that just can't hack it in polite society. Gene Hackman and Al Pacino's conflicting acting styles get a workout in Jerry Schatzberg's tale of drifters cursed with iffy goals; Vilmos Zsigmond's Panavision cinematography helped it earn a big prize at Cannes.

Blu-ray The Yellow Handkerchief Ready for some full- on Japanese sentimentality? Superlative tough guy Ken Takakura takes us deep into heartbreak territory in search of a happy ending. Yoji Yamada's Hokkaido road epic throws together a trio of 'drifters of the heart' to see if they can solve each other's romantic dilemmas.

Blu-ray Fritz Lang: The Silent Films Hard-media home video is making a comeback, and Kino Lorber shows its faith in the medium with an extravagant collection of its entire silent holdings of the Fritz Lang library. Mythical heroes, sacrificing heroines, criminal madmen and uncontrolled super-science are his themes; it's a paranoid's view of the first half of the 20th Century, expressed...