CineSavant

Blu-ray + Digital HD Ex Machina Is this not the most brilliant screenplay from 2015?  Alex Garland assembles a perfect fable about robots, artificial intelligence and the hubris of a software genius who thinks he's a God. Garland's direction is tops as well, as is the acting of Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander. When did I realize I was...

Let There Be Light: John Huston’s Wartime Documentaries When John Huston went to war he took his mission seriously... as an artist. He made four wartime docus for the army. San Pietro and the long suppressed Let There Be Light are the classics we studied in film school; Winning Your Wings is typical enlistment booster material and Report from the Aleutians a remarkably...

DVD-R Wind Across the Everglades The Audubon Society battles plumage poachers in the Everglades, circa 1900. Legendary director Nicholas Ray suffered an on-location meltdown filming this early ecologically sensitive epic, but the finished product is still one of his better pictures. Burl Ives, Christopher Plummer and Chana Eden give top 'Ray' performances. The eccentric supporting cast includes Peter Falk, boxer...

Blu-ray From the Terrace This is as sexy as Hollywood pix got in 1960. John O'Hara's novel about class snobbery and the drive for success posits Paul Newman as a moody go-getter. In glossy soap opera fashion, his silver spoon-fed bride Joanne Woodward morphs into an unfaithful monster. Some adulterous relationships are excused and others not in this glossy,...

Blu-ray Figures in a Landscape Where was Leonard Pinth Garnell when we needed him?  Joseph Losey is often accused of pretension but in this case he may be guilty. Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell are escapees scrambling across a rocky terrain, pursued by a helicopter that seems satisfied to just harass them. Keeping the audience in the dark doesn't reap...

Blu-ray Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things Hey, let's dig up a rotting corpse, just for fun! A group of crazy Florida theater students plays a group of crazy Florida theater students in Bob Clark's spirited no-budget attempt to ride in the wake of Night of the Living Dead. An hour of bad jokes is capped by a satisfying zombie onslaught that got...

Blu-ray Nineteen Eighty-Four Where do I get my Big Brother campaign pin and yard poster? Michael Radford's elaborate Orwell adaptation sticks closely to the original book, even after decades of deriviative dystopias have stolen its fire. John Hurt is excellent as Winston Smith, and Richard Burton is his inquisitor.

Blu-ray The American Friend Wim Wenders goes neo-noir in this wonderfully moody character-driven crime tale. Soulful art framer Bruno Ganz is the patsy in a murder scheme, but Dennis Hopper's sociopath / villain has a change of heart and befriends him. This modern classic looks great and features movie directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller in major guest roles.

Blu-ray Bitter Rice Forget the proletarian messages, this Italian Neorealist classic is really an exploitation film about ogling brazen, buxom babes in short-shorts, up to their knees in a rice paddy. Hollywood actress Doris Dowling is the nominal star but new discovery Silvana Mangano became the knockout dream of every Italian male suffering from postwar shortages (cough). Giuseppe...

DVD-R Hitler’s Children RKO's morale-building wartime thriller adds an element of sexual perversion to its story of Nazi crimes against children, thus creating one of the studio's all-time biggest hits. Bonita Granville is the victim Tim Holt her Nazi-youth heartthrob, and Otto Kruger provides the perverted sneers.

Blu-ray + DVD Everest 3-D At last, an adventure movie that does without action-epic superhero BS. It's simply You Are There with a dozen likeable, determined climbers coping with calamity in a place that, for all the help that can be sent, 'might as well be on the moon.' The excellent depth effects all but nail us to the screen.

Blu-ray + Digital HD The Look of Silence Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary feature takes his earlier The Act of Killing one step further. An Indonesian optometrist dares to interview death squad leaders that half a century before murdered a million people as part of an anti-communist genocide. The eye doctor's own brother was one of the victims. What we see sheds light on a long-suppressed outrage,...

Blu-ray The Complete Lady Snowblood The bloody adventures of a swordswoman dedicated to murderous revenge provided Quentin Tarantino with a major inspiration. Director Toshiyo Fujita's impeccable images make the gorgeous Meiko Kaji into an almost abstract superheroine in beautiful cultured dress and hairstyles -- and soaked with sprayed blood.

Four Men and a Prayer It's the John Ford film you never heard of, not because it's bad, but because it's a little confused. Richard Greene, David Niven and an emotional George Sanders (!) dedicate their lives to clearing their father's name of a smear by international arms smugglers! Their spirited companion Loretta Young behaves almost as if this were...

Blu-ray The Captive City Robert Wise's taut noir suspenser about the Mafia takeover of a small city is like an underworld Invasion of the Body Snatchers. John Forsythe's newsman slowly realizes that gambling corruption has infiltrated the business district, city hall, and even his close associates; he's expected to become a crook too, or else. Great docudrama style aided by...

DVD-R The Beginning or the End Stop! Don't touch that dial...  If you like your atom-age propaganda straight up, MGM has the movie for you, an expensive 1946 docu-drama that became 'the official story' for the making of the bomb. The huge cast includes Brian Donlevy, Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Audrey Totter, Hume Cronyn, Hurd Hatfield, and Joseph Calleia. How trustworthy...

Blu-ray Mysterious Island (Encore Edition) Fans that missed Twilight Time's initial Blu-ray release of Ray Harryhausen's Jules Verne spectacle get a second chance with this Encore Edition.  It includes an improved transfer and new extras, including an excellent audio commentary with Steven C. Smith, C. Courtney Joyner and Randall William Cook. The show still sends us, and Bernard Herrmann's powerful music score...

Blu-ray Nightmares It's a TV movie graduated to feature status, with four imagination-challenged tales of terror. The script has lots of variety -- a video game possessed by the devil, a truck possessed by the devil, and lastly, a rat possessed by the devil! But the roster of actors is attractive -- Cristina Raines, Emilio Estevez, Lance...

Blu-ray Born Free Do you love movies about cute animals? The original pet-lion-in-Africa romp is actually a well balanced nature film about the separation between wild animals and those raised by humans. Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers winningly play the Adamsons, game wardens that dedicate themselves to the well-being of Elsa, the lioness they raise from infancy.

Blu-ray + DVD Faust (1926) The latest restoration of a German silent classic is F.W. Murnau's lavishly mounted version of the Goethe tale, starring Emil Jannings as Mephisto. It's an impressive drama but also has a sense of (Teutonic) humor here and there. Most every shot is a fantastic visuals, and the bigger scenes use visual designs worthy of fine...

DVD-R The Girl Most Likely From roughly 1925 to 1957, the powerful men in charge of the big studios controlled most aspects of production. That all changed when studios had to make deals with independent production companies, floating scores of projects and hoping a few would see the light of day. Production heads changed frequently, and when one was shown...

DVD-R Sweet Adeline It's sweet, all right, not to mention sentimental and corny -- as Adeline Schmidt, Irene Dunne leaves her father's beer garden to sing in New York, where she falls prey to a predatory playboy. Set in nostalgic 1898, this Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical features several unfamiliar but marvelous songs. Dunne shows the film world the...

Blu-ray The Detective Frank Sinatra shines in a story of police corruption that tries to say it like it is -- or like it was in 1968, just before the ratings system came in.  The well-intentioned, suspenseful story is burdened by odd censor choices,  Sinatra's conservative self-image, and rudely retrograde attitudes toward gays. In a sparkling new transfer...

Gunman’s Walk, Land Raiders & A Man Called Sledge Germany's Explosive Media company has a serious itch for American westerns, and they have a trio of new releases. One is a minor Hollywood classic with major graces, from the late 1950s. A second sees an American producer based in England filming in Italy with a rising international star, and for the third an established American star...

3-D Blu-ray + Digital HD Ant-Man 3-D The latest Marvel franchise hero is an incredible shrinking secret agent with powers wholly unlike his fellow Avengers. Ex-con Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is motivated by sentimental family connection issues, and so is everyone else. The Sci-fi ideas come off very well via imaginative CGI effects and the 3-D is great, too.

Blu-ray + DVD Battles Without Honor and Humanity – The Complete Collection Bloody havoc reigns! Kinji Fukasaku's no-holds-barred vision of ugly violence and uglier politics on the streets of Hiroshima is a five-film Yakuza epic that spans generations. The film amounts to an alternate history of postwar Japan, that puts an end to the glorification of the Yakuza code. The enormous cast includes Bunta Sugawara, Tetsuro Tanba,...