CineSavant

Blu-ray The Pride and the Passion Surround three international stars with several thousand extras in Franco's Spain and you've got yourself an instant historical adventure epic. Unfunny Cary Grant has a BIG GUN, Spanish peasant guerilla (!) Frank Sinatra looks totally lost, and Sophia Loren conquers Hollywood by making with the sultry eyes and body moves.

Blu-ray The Ox-Bow Incident Leave it to director William Wellman to direct the most compelling social justice movie of the 1940s. Taken from a bestselling novel, it's a wrenching examination of the workings of a natural American phenomenon, the Lynch Mob.

Blu-ray Wild in the Streets Shelley Winters, Christopher Jones and Diane Varsi star in American-International's most successful 'youth rebellion' epic -- a political sci-fi satire about a rock star whose opportunistic political movement overthrows the government and puts everyone over 35 into concentration camps... to be force-fed LSD.

Blu-ray The Immortal Story Orson Welles' French TV show with Jeanne Moreau is a near-masterpiece, directed with assurance and style. It's the filmmaker's first color feature, and his last completed fictional feature.

Blu-ray Tale of Tales It's strange, it's different, and I can see why it wasn't a theatrical hit... but Matteo Garrone's superb telling of three very adult, very extreme 17th century folk tales is a special item, beautifully directed and visually splendid.

Blu-ray Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon Troubling fact: the great director Otto Preminger's worst film is not Skidoo. Three physical misfits form an alternative family as a defense against the world. It's a good idea for a movie, but the writer and director do just about everything wrong that a writer and director can do.

Blu-ray Love Me or Leave Me MGM's show is a surprising powerhouse musical bio about the personality clash between an ambitious singer and the powerful enabler who wants her in his bed. Doris Day and James Cagney are at their best in an only slightly compromised telling of the real-life showbiz relationship of 'twenties star Ruth Etting and the domineering mobster...

Blu-ray A Taste of Honey

Blu-ray Road House (1948)

Blu-ray + DVD Microwave Massacre 'Worst Movie Ever?'   No way. But neither is Wayne Berwick and comic Jackie Vernon's tacky cannibalism tale a piece of art. When I say it's interesting, it's more as a study item than entertainment. Bad movie -- but a terrific restoration!

Blu-ray The Spiders (1919) When Fritz Lang began in film he was a better writer than director. This lavish two-part thriller sees him concocting a multi-genre mashup, shoehorning cowboy action thrills and an exotic lost Incan civilization into dagger-and-poison serial skullduggery.

Blu-ray Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words

Blu-ray Chandu the Magician Hissable villain Bela Lugosi is in denial --- no, actually star Edmund Lowe is in the Nile, deep-sixed in a sunken sarcophagus. Lugosi's up top trying to get his art deco death ray in running order -- opposed only by some nubile babes and a Great White Hypnotist from the Swami school of mind control.

DVD-R These Three Radical changes were required to adapt Lillian Hellman's Broadway play for post-Code Hollywood, to eradicate a theme that in 1934 was entirely taboo. But were audiences really unaware of the subject matter switch?  William Wyler excels with this bowdlerized, yet curiously near-perfect, story about the power of scandal.

Blu-ray Woman in the Dunes

Blu-ray Destiny Death doesn't take a holiday in this, the granddaddy of movies about the woeful duties of the Grim Reaper. Fritz Lang's heavy-duty Expressionist fable is as German as they get -- a morbid folk tale with an emotionally powerful finish.

Blu-ray Pioneers of African-American Cinema It's arrived -- thanks in part to a successful Kickstarter campaign, this nearly comprehensive compendium of American 'Race Films' is here in a deluxe Blu-ray presentation.

Blu-ray Betrayed Costa-Gavras sets his focus on right-wing political terror in the American heartland, where FBI agent Debra Winger finds farmer Tom Berenger at the head of a clan of murderous white supremacists. Our friends and neighbors!

Blu-ray A Touch of Zen A Taiwanese wuxia masterpiece from director King Hu: three hours of suspense, visual beauty and amazing action scenes. A beautiful mystery woman captivates an artist-scholar. He who happily becomes her strategist in a battle to hold off an army... partly with ghost illusions.

Blu-ray Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Liz Taylor scorches the screen (as least as much as it could be scorched in 1958) in a watered-down yet still potent Tennessee Williams adaptation. Paul Newman gets his Brando act together, and the rest of the show is stolen by 'Big Daddy' Burl Ives.

Blu-ray The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension The new branded line Shout Selects chooses Buckaroo for special-special edition treatment, with a long making-of docu just like the ones from the heyday of DVD. And this oddest of oddball sci-fi pictures has a backstory worth documenting.

Blu-ray The Gang’s All Here Wonderful isn't a good enough word to describe this joyful, funny and visually intoxicating Alice Faye musical by Busby Berkeley. Decades later it became part of a big Camp revival, but the real draw is still the Benny Goodman swing music, delightful performers like Carmen Miranda, and Berkeley's bizarre Technicolor visions.

Blu-ray Muriel, or The Time of Return Alain Resnais' deceptively conventional drama is really about interpersonal dynamics: lives lived in the here and now are really anchored in events and concerns from the past, that bleed into the present. Delphine Seyrig's antique dealer invites an old beau to visit, but instead of clarity and direction finds just more personal confusion.

Blu-ray Modesty Blaise Joseph Losey didn't normally make trendy, lighthearted genre films, and in this SuperSpy epic we find out why -- the impressive production and great music don't compensate for a lack of pace and dynamism, not to mention a narrow sense of humor. Yet it's a lounge classic, and a perverse favorite of spy movie fans.

Blu-ray ‘Neath Arizona Skies This early John Wayne oater displays the natural star quality and winning personality that sustained him through the 1930s -- it's a naïve, charming western that features some of The Duke's closest early associates.

3-D Blu-ray Miss Sadie Thompson Rita Hayworth in 3-D, in a hot story that was acceptable for 1925 and 1932, but too racy for repressed 1953. On a tropical island, a prostitute cabaret singer battles a fiery preacher missionary inspector for her freedom. Hayworth is dynamite, and it takes all of her talent to keep the show afloat, with so...