CineSavant

Blu-ray The Thomas Crown Affair Hollywood glamour strikes the crime genre, with a bank robbery tale that concentrates on high living and high fashion. Superstars Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway play a coy game of thief and investigator. This expensive show is not really in fashion anymore, but in 1968 it was high-class filmmaking, with Norman Jewison solidifying his position...

Blu-ray The Amicus Collection Released in 1956, Rock, Rock, Rock was a bantamweight jukebox musical bolstered by the presence of three indelible signifiers of 50’s pop culture, rabble-rousing DJ Alan Freed, Hollywood’s perennial Lolita Tuesday Weld and guitar slinging provocateur Chuck Berry. Produced by Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, the movie’s success inspired the New York-born duo to pack...

Blu-ray The Diabolical Dr. Z Engaged to direct by a reputable producer, Jesús Franco takes yet another stab at conventional B&W horror. The pulp thrills get a boost through the contributions of talented collaborators: excellent camerawork flatters the idiosyncratic obsessions of a writer-director in search of his own dream-world sensibility. Although it's not saying much, this might be the best...

DVD Claude Autant-Lara: Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France Criterion’s Eclipse Series, an ever-expanding line of esoteric dvd releases, ensures that lesser known titles of important filmmakers remain available to the movie-loving public. They’ve just added another worthy edition to the mix with four films by French film director Claude Autant-Lara: Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France. In keeping with the wallet-friendly nature of...

Region B Blu-ray Charley Varrick (Region B) It's the loose-censored early 1970s, and screen bandits shootin' up the American movie landscape are no longer suffering the once-mandated automatic moral retribution. Walter Matthau launched himself into the genre with this excellent Don Siegel on-the-run epic, about an old-fashioned independent bandit who accidentally rips off the mob for a million. It's great, wicked fun.

Blu-ray Blade Runner 2049 After 35 years Philip K. Dick's brainstorm returns in a film sequel worthy of the original; Denis Villeneuve does right by the concept, but the show will be tough sledding for ADD-plagued modern viewers. Ryan Gosling follows in Harrison Ford's replicant footsteps, surrounded by an impressive group of supporting actors. It's long, it's moody, it's...

DVD From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses Take a trip into the depths of German silent film in a documentary that links expressionist cinema with dark political undercurrents. Director Rüdiger Suchsland's essay adapts a famous & worthy but slightly outdated book, yet is an excellent overview of movies in the Weimar period.

Blu-ray The Hanging Tree "To really live, you must almost die," sings Marty Robbins, a lesson learned by Austrian import star Maria Schell. Delmer Daves' best western puts virtue and faithfulness to the test: Gary Cooper's distrustful, manipulative doctor hides his dark secrets and punishes those that admire and love him. Yet the ultimate reckoning demonstrates that sins can...

All-Region Blu-ray Bend of the River (Meuterei am Schlangenfluss) The second Anthony Mann / James Stewart western displays excellent direction and impressive Technicolor location photography high in the high mountains of Oregon. A matinee staple, it delivers everything -- Stewart's mostly good hero and Arthur Kennedy's mostly bad hero spar and tangle and eventually fight to the death near the timber line. Handsome Rock...

Blu-ray Raw Deal (1948) Style can be the star in Classic Noir, making a less prestigious film more entertaining than one with bigger names. Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt spin an excellent crime-love-murder triangle, for a road picture that's one of the best Noirs not made by a big studio. Director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton...

Blu-ray Jabberwocky The prospect of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky directed by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam promised a brave new world of sophisticated nonsense; The Mad Hatter meets the Ministry of Silly Walks. Equally appetizing was the thought of illustrator John Tenniel’s hideous creature brought to life by Gilliam, the Python’s premiere visual satirist. But Gilliam, working in a...

Blu-ray Not as a Stranger What? Doctors aren't perfect? And some practicing doctors are incompetent? Stanley Kramer's All-Star medical soap opera takes two unlikely students (Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra) through med school and confronts them with a number of pat dramatic complications. But the movie belongs to top-billed Olivia de Havilland, who lends a touch of class to the...

Blu-ray The Executioner’s Song Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, target for Saturday Night Live, punchline for Seinfeld and tagline for Nike, was already a pop-culture sensation when he sat down before a firing squad and proclaimed, “Let’s do this.” The surprising thing about The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer’s hardscrabble epic detailing Gilmore’s final months, was that it was decidedly unsensational,...

Blu-ray Young Mr. Lincoln Viewers looking (desperately) for American leaders to admire can't do better than to reflect on John Ford's folksy, at least partly authentic honorarium to one of the greats. Henry Fonda is 100% dead-on as a vision of Abe Lincoln to bring tears to our eyes. Imagine . . . there's such a thing as political...

Blu-ray Legend of the Lost America’s top box office star John Wayne sneaks away to a remote corner of the Sahara Desert with the top Italian sex symbol Sophia Loren ... and foolishly brings an entire camera crew with him. Henry Hathaway's impressive desert adventure boasts a fairly amazing, bona fide Lost City, made even more impressive through the Technirama...

Blu-ray The Hospital A story of murders in the ER becomes, courtesy of writer Paddy Chayefsky, either a preview of social breakdown or an impassioned examination of why we invest our lives and souls in imperfect institutions. George C. Scott is the doctor coming apart at the seams, who meets his match in a New Age hippie from...

Blu-ray Matinee A scary monster movie comes to Key West just as a nuclear crisis breaks out! Joe Dante's incomparable paean to monster kid culture has finally arrived on Region A Blu-ray, with the great extras we expect from every Dante-involved home video offering. The picture only gets more charming and funny with time, from its great...

Blu-ray Cadillac Man The irrepressible Robin Williams is Joey, a trash-talking Cadillac salesman with three women on the line, who becomes an involuntary hero when Tim Robbins smashes his motorcycle into the car showroom and threatens to kill everybody. Roger Donaldson's crisis-farce black comedy is still funny — and my favorite Robin Williams feature.

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...

Blu-ray The Whales of August This look at the 'adjustments' of old age and the pain of nostalgia is a prime opportunity to admire a pair of legendary actresses. David Barry's play observes the intersection of several interesting personalities on one glorious late-summer day. Bette Davis and Lillian Gish earn our full attention, backed by memorable turns from Ann Sothern...

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.