CineSavant

Blu-ray How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying Broadway's delightful -- but wickedly accurate -- satire of big business was brought to movie screens almost intact, with the story, the stars, the styles and dances kept as they were in the long-running show that won a Pulitzer Prize. This is the place to see Robert Morse and Michele Lee at their best --...

3-D Blu-ray Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 3-D J. K. Rowling is back with a wizard world tale over which she has complete control -- a diverting period adventure starring Eddie Redmayne and scores of fanciful magic creatures that belong on an endangered species list. Yep, it's 2+plus hours of CGI illusions -- in glorious 3-D for those so equipped, and Ms. Rowling...

Blu-ray 23 Paces to Baker Street No, not a blind Sherlock Holmes, but a blind Van Johnson who directs his butler, his girlfriend Vera Miles and the London police to thwart a crime based on something he overheard in a bar. Henry Hathaway directs a complicated murder mystery that plays like a combo of Rear Window and Wait Until Dark, with...

Blu-ray Tower A fateful day is re-examined by its survivors, whose stories are told via a brilliant narrative arrangement, and the use of animated recreations is only one aspect of it. The Texas tower shootings put our present, everyday reign of violent terror in a humanist context. It's not exploitative -- the killer's name is barely mentioned....

Blu-ray + Digital HD Fences Verdict? The film of August Wilson's play is absorbing, intense. If we rate by quality of writing, acting skill, and the craft of direction, Denzel Washington's film betters most of its fellow Best Picture nominees. It's also something positive for the arts, a 'black experience' play that can't be pigeonholed as merely black- themed. The...

Blu-ray Phaedra Or, "Never on Sunday with Your Stepson."   Director Jules Dassin's monument to his beloved Melina Mercouri transposes a Greek tragedy to a modern setting. The pampered wife of a shipping magnate is like a queen of old -- she can fling a priceless gem into the Thames on just a whim, and she goes...

Blu-ray MULTIPLE MANIACS Andy Warhol was nothing if not a multi-media maven. Along with his ubiquitous silkscreens and sculpture, he embraced movie-making beginning as early as 1963 with such literal-minded efforts as Haircut (a haircut) and Taylor Mead’s Ass (one hour of exactly what you think) and pretty much closed shop with 1968’s Lonesome Cowboys, a 109 minute western satire that, of...

Blu-ray Our Man in Havana It's Obi-Wan versus Fidel! Well, not really. The pre-Bond espionage genre lights up with cool intrigues and comic absurdities, as a Brit vacuum salesman in Havana is recruited to spy for Her Majesty's Secret Service. The filmmakers and stars are all top caliber, and the location is legendary: Castro's Cuba, immediately after the revolution.

Blu-ray Film / Notfilm An experimental film by an Irish playwright, shot in New York with a silent comedian at the twilight of his career? Samuel Beckett's inquiry into the nature of movies (and existence?) befuddled viewers not versed in film theory; Ross Lipman's retrospective documentary about its making asks all the questions and gets some good answers. First...

DVD Summer Storm Here's a real gem -- a 'classic' Chekhov story turned into a compelling tale of lust and murder. George Sanders and Linda Darnell shine as a judge and the peasant girl who intrigues him; Edward Everett Horton is excellent cast against type in a dramatic role.

Blu-ray World Without End "Thru the Time Barrier, 552 years Ahead... Roaring To the Far Reaches of Titanic Terror, Crash-Landing Into the Nightmare Future!" ... and as Daffy Duck says, "And it's good, too!" Allied Artists sends CinemaScope and Technicolor on a far-out timewarp to a place where the men are silly and the women are... very female. Hugh...

3-D Blu-ray September Storm — 3-D 3-D in CinemaScope? That seems like a strange combination, but this obscure treasure hunt adventure with Joanne Dru and Mark Stevens is indeed billed as being filmed in the 'Miracle of Stereo-Vision,' five years after the demise of Hollywood's first fling with 'depthies.' Kino and the 3-D Film Archives extras include two vintage 3-D shorts,...

Region B Blu-ray Cinema Paradiso Giuseppe Tornatore's ode to the Italian love of movies was a major hit here in 1990, despite being severely cut by Miramax. In 2002 the director reworked his long version into an almost three-hour sentimental epic that enlarges the film's scope and deepens its sentiments.

Blu-ray Compulsion This classy Fox production was considered the epitome of sick film subject matter in the pre- Psycho year of 1959, the true story of jazz-age thrill killers Leopold & Loeb. Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman are the nihilistic child murderers; Orson Welles stops the show with his portrayal of Clarence Darrow, going under a different...

Blu-ray RoboCop 2 It's ugly, it's violent, and it's graphic novelist Frank Miller's nasty vision through and through. Scream Factory's Collector's Edition brings out the amazing backstory of the production of this stop-motion- intensive first sequel to RoboCop. Druglord Caine is a menace, but we're just as appalled by the film's vivid depiction of a greater terror: Predatory...

Blu-ray We Are The Flesh / The Lovers on the Bridge Teetering on that thin edge between the ludicrous and the even more ludicrous, Emiliano Rocha Minter’s We Are The Flesh is a spittle-flecked, willfully deranged vision of life in a post-apocalyptic Mexico. Since its release in 2016, Minter’s movie, adrift in bodily fluids and overwrought speechifying, has been turning both heads and stomachs at film festivals...

Blu-ray 45 Years Andrew Haigh's quiet, two-person relationship tale won a lot of friends last year. A revelation from the past changes everything in the marriage of Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. We read the faces, read the gestures -- just like we do in our own close relationships.

Blu-ray The Valley of Gwangi Gwangi! Ready your rifles and lariats because this is one of the best. Harryhausen's happiest dinos- à go-go epic comes thundering back in HD heralded by Jerome Moross's impressive music score. Unless you count The Animal World, all of the stop-motion magician's feature films are now available in quality Blu-rays.

Blu-ray The Man Who Could Cheat Death A thyroid operation every ten years, plus regular libations of an eerie green liquid, has allowed Anton Diffring to live over a hundred years without looking a year over forty. Hammer's medical horror show features Christopher Lee, Hazel Court and sumptuous cinematography, but not a whole lot of surprises.

Blu-ray Finian’s Rainbow As a musical it's excellent -- fine tunes and lyrics, great singing and dancing by the ever-youthful Fred Astaire, the glorious songbird Petula Clark, and the impishly weird Tommy Steele cast appropriately as a grimacing Leprechaun. The update of what was a politically acute Broadway hit in 1947 is awkward but the show is a...

Blu-ray Chilly Scenes of Winter Joan Micklin Silver applies sensitive direction to Ann Beattie's novel about a lonely guy trying to win back his girlfriend, and going about it in all the wrong ways. John Heard is excellent as Charles, who can't understand why Laura (Mary Beth Hurt) has gone back to her husband and child. The whole thing plays...

3-D Blu-ray A*P*E 3-D It's awful, it's terrible, it's difficult to watch -- but it's finally available in its original 3-D, in the improved Space-Vision process. A giant monkey attacks Seoul, trashing cardboard buildings, toy boats and a dead shark (and it's not shamming). Keep a good movie on hand to rinse this one away immediately afterwards. Not recommended...

Blu-ray The Before Trilogy Who would have thought that a '90s 'slacker' independent filmmaker would make such a strong romantic statement? Well, it's not all romance in the old sense. In what must be a project of love, Richard Linklater examines the ongoing love life of Jesse & Céline, in three movies spread across eighteen years. The conversations flow...

Blu-ray Framed In the 1970s crime films morphed into sadistic vigilante fantasies about tough-guy heroes avenging terrible crimes against their families. Veteran noir director Phil Karlson directed the bruiser's bruiser Joe Don Baker in a standard tale of violent vengeance, with the violence factor given an extra bloody boost.

Blu-ray Kiss of Death This is the ultimate in screen sadism circa 1947, and it's all in the debut film performance of Richard Widmark as a too-nasty-for-words hood who likes to shoot people in the stomach. Actually, Victor Mature is not bad in a grim story of a stool pigeon that tries to square himself with the law, and...

Blu-ray Edge of Eternity Ace director Donald Siegel uses superior direction to transform a so-so who-dunnit into a thrilling big screen spectacle, using the Grand Canyon as a backdrop for a multiple murder set in an Arizona mining town in decline. The cameraman focusing on the scenery and the hair-raising stuntwork -- everything we see is real -- is...