CineSavant

Blu-ray The Scar Director Steve Sekely's hardboiled film noir leans heavily on the talents of star-producer Paul Henreid and camera ace John Alton -- the three of them whip up the best gimmick-driven noir thriller of the late 'forties. Strained coincidences and unlikely events mean nothing when this much talent is concentrated in one movie. It's also a...

Blu-ray The Rounders The laid-back, plot challenged non-violent western gets a boost in this folksy comedy about two aging cowboys with less sense than the horses they tame. Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda star together for the first time, leaving behind their older images... they're too tender-hearted for their own good. If the sex comedy wasn't quite so...

Blu-ray Buena Vista Social Club Cuba has just been opened up to Americans, but twenty years ago musician Ry Cooder saw to it that a vanishing music tradition was preserved for posterity. Wim Wenders followed up with this rough & ready documentary that became almost as popular as the best selling album of mambos, boleros and cha-chas.

Blu-ray The Delinquents "Here is the screen's most shocking exposé, of the 'Baby-Facers' just taking their first stumbling steps down Sin Street U.S.A.!"  Robert Altman's first feature film is far too good to be described as anything but an expert step toward an impressive career. But he had to deal with a young actor who drove him up...

Blu-ray Fahrenheit 451 François Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's dystopian, illiterate future looks better than ever, and the scary part is that some of its oddest sci-fi extrapolations seem to be coming true. It's a movie that truly grows on one. The Bernard Herrmann music score is one of the composer's very best.

Blu-ray CHAMBER OF HORRORS / A GAME OF DEATH Near the turn of the century a struggling war correspondent named Edgar Wallace began churning out detective stories for British monthlies like Detective Story Magazine to help make the rent. Creative to a fault, his preposterously prolific output (exacerbated by ongoing gambling debts) soon earned him a legion of fans along with a pointedly ambiguous...

Blu-ray The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Jacques Demy's international breakthrough musical gives us Catherine Deneuve and wall-to-wall Michel Legrand pop-jazz -- it's a different animal than La La Land but they're being compared anyway. The story of a romance without a happily-ever-after is doggedly naturalistic, despite visuals as bright and buoyant as an old MGM show.

Blu-ray Sunset in the West This charming Roy Rogers oater could reboot interest in vintage 'series' westerns. Basically a film for little kids, it's earnestly played by all concerned and director William Witney's direction sparkles. The added filip that makes the difference is the beautifully restored Trucolor image -- Roy's wonder horse Trigger is indeed magnificent. I listened carefully, but...

Blu-ray From Hell It Came You Axed for it, as Forry would say: the grade Z horror movie that launched a thousand bad puns is also an unbeatable party favorite. Idiotic island natives clash with condescending Anglo scientists, and a death curse initiates the hell-spawning of a horrifying, vengeance-seeking pagan demon-monster. Sounds great -- but what we get is Tabonga,...

Blu-ray 36 Hours Long before movies routinely created 'worlds' with their own twisted fantasy logic, only a few paranoid thrillers, usually odd genre items, tried out twisted stories of deceptive 'hidden realities.' Like an extended Twilight Zone entry, this lively James Garner war pic morphs into a bizarre conspiracy worthy of Philip K. Dick. If only it weren't...

Blu-ray The Saga of Anatahan Take one fiercely individual auteur fed up with the Hollywood game, put him in Kyoto with a full Japanese film company, and the result is a picture critics have been trying to figure out ever since. It's a realistic story told in a highly artificial visual style, in un-subtitled Japanese. And its writer-director intended it...

Region B Blu-ray + PAL DVD Eyes Without a Face (Bfi Import) Sometimes a movie is simply too good for just one special edition... Savant reached out to nab a British Region B import of Georges Franju's horror masterpiece, to sample its enticing extras. And this also gives me the chance to ramble on with more thoughts about this 1959 show that inspired a score of copycats.

Blu-ray Electric Boogaloo, the wild untold story of Cannon Films Director and documentarian Mark Hartley scores both a film history and comedy success with this 'wild, untold' account of the 1980s film studio that was both revered and despised by everyone who had contact with it. The 'cast list' of interviewees is encyclopedic, everybody has a strong opinion, and some of them don't need four-letter...

Blu-ray + DVD Property Is No Longer a Theft Can radical theater make a good movie? Elio Petri continues his string of biting social comment movies with a black comedy about rich people, thieves, and the notion of ownership -- it's a caustic position paper but also a funny satire, with quirky yet believable characters. Ugo Tognazzi is terrific as scheming capitalist, as much...

Blu-ray Lifeboat When Alfred Hitchcock films are praised, this 1944 picture tends to get overlooked. Yet it hooks and holds audiences as strongly as any of the Master's classics. When a handful of English and Americans are lost at sea, survival depends on their ability to cooperate. Can they trust the experienced sea captain -- a German...

Blu-ray + DVD Story of Sin There's plenty of Sin in Walerian Boroczyk's searing movie but little of it can be laid at the feet of its heroine, no matter what terrible crimes she commits. In pre-WW1 Poland the innocent Ewa's tragedy is to fall hopelessly in love, without restraint; Boroczyk's camera doesn't flinch as the hapless Ewa falls from grace....

Blu-ray Ride the High Country Before he became the flag bearer for cinema violence, Sam Peckinpah made his reputation with this unique western, a marvelous rumination on ethics, morality and personal responsibility. MGM all but threw it away in the summer of 1962 but it immediately became a critical favorite.

DVD The Russians are Coming / Career Another offering of vintage East German pictures gives us all the pieces of a cinematic puzzle: Heiner Carow's 1968 memory- movie of traumatic experiences in WW2 displeased the Communist authorities and was shelved... only to be cannibalized as a back-story for a new 1970 release aimed as a dig at West German values. It's a...

Blu-ray AFTER THE FOX / BEING THERE After The Fox, a sunny mid-sixties farce about con-artists and movie-makers, boasts a powerhouse pedigree featuring leading men Peter Sellers and Victor Mature, a script by Neil Simon and Cesare Zavattini, music by Burt Bacharach, poster art from Frank Frazetta and the legendary director/actor/gambler Vittorio De Sica at the helm. With such diverse talent on board,...

Blu-ray The Vampire Bat Another impressive horror restoration! Majestic Pictures pulls together a great cast, including Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill, for a smart gothic horror outing complete with squeaky bats, a flipped-out village idiot (Dwight Frye!), a crazed mad scientist (the worst kind) and a lynch mob with torches that have been hand-tinted in color. Melvyn Douglas is...

Blu-ray The Skull Peter Cushing! Christopher Lee! Each is at the top of his game, playing competing collectors of occult incunabula -- the kind that comes with a satanic curse, when the purloined item in question is the Skull Of The infamous, despicable and sharp-toothed Marquis De Sade! Freddie Francis directs up a storm in this amicable Amicus...

‘How to Succeed’ – Take 2 Not so fast Savant — with the help of correspondent input, CineSavant presents more information on David Swift’s adaptation of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying — correcting and modifying some assumptions in my first review. Don’t worry — it’s good reading. A Savant article This is an odd circumstance. I routinely update,...

Blu-ray Invisible Ghost Bela Lugosi fan alert! This Monogram horror opus is yet another narrative-challenged fumble of unmotivated, incomprehensible characters... but Bela's great in it, and in a central role, too. He's a sympathetic non- maniac this time, if you don't count his tendency to go into trances and (cough) smother random houseguests. Savant's review has the lowdown...

Blu-ray Julieta Pedro Almodóvar bounces back with an absorbing saga of a mother and daughter told in an interesting style. A woman feels isolated, powerless, alone and anguished about what has happened in her life. Is any of it her fault? Or is all of it her fault? How do we hold relationships together, or do they...

Blu-ray Peyton Place The book was raw & dirty, and did you read what that girl did with that guy on page 167? Racking up a stack of Oscar nominations, Peyton Place became one of the big hits of its year, launched the careers of several young actors and proved that Hollywood could pasteurize most any so-called un-filmable...

Blu-ray ELLE / BLOW UP Michèle Leblanc, glamorous entrepreneur of a successful video game company, is the calm at the center of many storms. Her son’s girlfriend has given birth to another man’s child, an employee is stalking her with anime porn and her botox-ridden mother is betrothed to a male prostitute. In the face of all this outrageous fortune, Michèle...