CineSavant

Blu-ray The Breaking Point You can tell it's film noir -- even the cabin cruiser has Venetian blinds. Ernest Hemingway's favorite film adaptation of his work is this uncompromised story of a good man charting a criminal course on the high seas. John Garfield is again 'one man alone' against the system, and the moral quicksand all but swallows...

3-D Blu-ray + Digital Kong: Skull Island 3-D Kong is back, transformed into a 'MonsteVerse' colossus suitable for combat with Kaiju-sized foes. The key inspiration is video games but the day is saved by capable performers in mostly amusing roles. Even though the show treats its fantasy halfway seriously, it's still an infantile guns 'n' monsters romp, embellished with impressive visual effects.

Region B Blu-ray The Battle of the River Plate Powell & Pressburger's big-scale historical epic is perhaps the best film ever about an old-school naval encounter between battleships. The first half depicts the showdown between England and Germany in the South Atlantic, and the second half a tense diplomatic game in the neutral country of Uruguay. Peter Finch, Bernard Lee and Anthony Quayle shine...

Blu-ray The Sea Chase John Wayne plays a German sea captain in a film that goes out of its way to create a favorable image of our former enemy, with hardly a Nazi flag or even a German accent in sight. Wayne and his co-star Lana Turner are as Teutonic as Blondie and Dagwood, yet the story works as...

Blu-ray Shalako It's 007 in the saddle! Sean Connery didn't become a career cowboy but his one stint as a Louis L'Amour hero is a diverting change of pace. And we couldn't resist the pairing of two of moviedom's most attractive actors -- Connery and Brigitte Bardot.

Blu-ray The Quiet American (1958) There appear to be no rules governing tricky politics in movies -- Joseph L. Mankiewicz's adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about terrorism in French-held Vietnam completely reverses the author's message. Does a conspiracy theory about a movie still carry any weight, when our daily political life now plays like one giant conspiracy?

Blu-ray Straw Dogs – The Criterion Collection Adrift from civilization, an attractive young couple find themselves threatened, assaulted, and eventually compelled to defend themselves in a bloody showdown. That is the basic premise of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, released in 1971 and inspired by some of the same movies then crowding the legendary dives of 42nd street. On its surface Straw Dogs...

Blu-ray The Valachi Papers Charles Bronson plays a real-life Mafiosi in a period picture with a fine script, some good performances and a production so sloppy that the whole thing could be called The Anachronism Papers. Joseph Wiseman and Lino Ventura bring additional tough-guy star-power, and Bronson actually commits himself to the role -- quite a change of pace...

Blu-ray + DVD Obsessions What a great sales hook -- a feature film with a Bernard Herrmann music score that we hadn't heard of. And one of the writers was Martin Scorsese, before Boxcar Bertha and Mean Streets! But wait, it isn't as simple as that. The new release is more than a little confusing. Its own ad copy...

Blu-ray The Angry Red Planet Hey, Ib Melchoir's Opus Mars-us is back, in a not-bad new scan and color-grading job. If the nostalgia bug has bitten you deep enough to appreciate a fairly maladroit but frequently arresting space exploration melodrama, this may be the disc for you. Let's be honest: NOBODY can resist the allure of the fabulous Bat-Rat-Spider-Crab, and...

Blu-ray The Lost City of Z They don't make 'em like this any more, and the original TV spots for James Gray's accurate retelling of history almost didn't know how to sell it. Charlie Hunnam spends his life trying to solve a riddle of the Peruvian rainforest, in between fighting in WW1 and dealing with class prejudice. Yup, one could say...

Blu-ray Blood Alley Now a successful producer, John Wayne tries a big budget action picture with an anti-Communist theme. It's The Alamo on a ferryboat, set in the far East where the locals are a hungerin' for Freedom. Wayne is an apolitical adventurer who just feels like savin' Chinese and kissin' Lauren Bacall. Ace director William Wellman holds...

Blu-ray Ikarie XB 1 For the discerning science fiction fan, this is the best of the Eastern-bloc Cold War Sci-fi epics, a genuinely brilliant and warmly human 'Voyage to the End of the Universe,' restored in 4k resolution. It's from before 2001: A Space Odyssey, and has an equally wondrous but totally different vision of the future.

Blu-ray Varieté At last, an expressionist silent classic that takes full advantage of cinematic principles. The legendary E.A. Dupont goes in for subjective-emotional effects of which Hitchcock would approve, and cameraman Karl Freund and effects wizard Eugen Schüfftan pull off spectacular visuals and special effects. No wonder this was a huge hit in America, it's way ahead...

Blu-ray Free Fire Have an itch to see a movie about a gunfight, the whole gunfight and nothing but the gunfight? Search no more, for Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump have the movie for you: twenty minutes of angry crooks in conference, and then seventy minutes of non-stop shootin,' with no annoying plot context or character depth to...

Blu-ray The Bridge at Remagen What's the best true-story WW2 combat film for pure-grit, no-nonsense tanks 'n' bombs 'n' crazy mayhem action on a giant scale? This non-stop battle epic gets my vote. George Segal and Ben Gazzara's infantry dogs are suitably tough, cynical and desperate, especially when they're repeatedly sent into danger. The history is fairly accurate -- there...

Blu-ray L’argent (Money) Welcome to the final film of the aesthetically precise, rigorously austere Robert Bresson, an adaptation of a fateful tale by Leo Tolstoy visualized in Bresson's frequently maddening personal style. An extreme artist makes a fascinatingly unyielding show: as with the classic paintings that Bresson admires, appreciation requires special knowledge.

Blu-ray Ugetsu In 1941 Orson Welles was busy giving the film industry a hot foot with Citizen Kane, a bullet-train of a movie whose rhythms sprang from the ever accelerating hustle and bustle of contemporary American life. That same year one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, Kenji Mizoguchi, was taking his sweet time with a four hour samurai...

Blu-ray The Savage Innocents The original Quinn the Eskimo (no kidding) is another life-loving rough portrait from Anthony Quinn, in Nicholas Ray's rather successful final spin as a writer-director. Despite some technical awkwardness, Ray's sensitivity to outsider souls finds full expression. Humans don't get any more 'outside' than Inuk, a primitive unequipped to deal with the modern world.

Blu-ray Hell and High Water Samuel Fuller sure knows how to wind up the geopolitical tension, especially in a rip-roaring provocative atom threat adventure. This show might have caused problems if anybody cared what movies said back when the Cold War was hot. Richard Widmark skippers a leaky sub to the arctic and discovers that the Chinese communists are going...

Blu-ray Hell in the Pacific Class-act John Boorman continues to mix genre grit with European-flavored art cinema, and the result is another winner. Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin fight a miniature two-man war when they're marooned together on the same tiny island. Boorman's strong direction and Conrad Hall's knockout cinematography insure a maximum visual impact; it's great filmmaking all around.

Blu-ray They Live by Night Don't look to this noir for hardboiled cynicism – for his first feature Nicholas Ray instead gives us a dose of fatalist romance. Transposed from the previous decade, a pair of fugitives takes what happiness they can find, always aware that a grim fate waits ahead. The show is a career-making triumph and a real...

Blu-ray Running on Empty These fugitives on the run aren't innocent young lovers. Still wanted for anti-war violence from years before, an ex-radical couple struggles to remain free just as their children become old enough to think for themselves. Screenwriter Naomi Foner and director Sidney Lumet's fascinating movie is a sympathetic look at an untenable lifestyle.

Region B Blu-ray Comfort and Joy You never heard of the Great Glasgow Ice Cream Wars?  They weren't exactly Armageddon.  The gentle director Bill Forsyth makes a radio personality's involvement with two competing ice cream companies more of a plunge into amiable drollery. If you like Gregory's Girl and Local Hero you'll understand the odd, unhurried attitude of this oddball show...

DVD Brother Can You Spare a Dime It's 1930s America as seen in the movies, through music, and the evasions of newsreels. Franklin Delano Roosevelt preaches prosperity while James Cagney slugs out the decade as a smart-tongued everyman -- in a dozen different roles. Director Philippe Mora investigates what was then a new kind of revisionist info-tainment formula: applying old film footage...

Blu-ray Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy Rome Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero: Filmed mostly on the streets in newly-liberated territory, Roberto Rossellini's gripping war-related shows are blessed with new restorations but still reflect their rough origins. The second picture, the greater masterpiece, looks as if it were improvised out of sheer artistic will.