CineSavant

Blu-ray Wagon Tracks Last year we were gifted with an excellent Blu-ray of a silent John Ford western, 3 Bad Men, which turned out to be a satisfying sentimental action tale. This month we get a much older silent western that’s almost as interesting. Its star is William S. Hart, the silent icon most of know through a...

Blu-ray The Sicilian Clan American crime fanatics wary of European imports now have access to a fully Region-A disc of a big-star, big budget French-Italian-American gangster film from 1969, Henri Verneuil’s exciting The Sicilian Clan. It was filmed in two separate versions, a multi-lingual European original and a less exciting, English-language cut for America. A huge hit overseas, The...

Blu-ray No Highway in the Sky A few years back, whenever a desired title came up on list for a Fox, Columbia or Warners’ MOD (made-on-demand) DVD, my first reaction was disappointment: we now want to see our favorites released in the better disc format, Blu-ray. But things have changed. As MOD announcements thin out, we have seen an explosion of library titles...

Region 2 PAL DVD Seddok, L’erede di Satana (Atom Age Vampire) Let me herewith take a break from new discs to review an Italian release from six years ago, a movie that for years we knew only as Atom Age Vampire. Until sporadic late- night TV showings appeared it existed for us ’60s kids only as one or two interesting photos in Famous Monsters magazine. Forry...

Blu-ray Stanley & Iris There ought to be a place on a screen for every kind of film story. True, old movies fronted a mostly false consensus picture of the world, claiming that there was a ‘normal’ baseline for our lives. The reality of most social issues was ignored in favor of pleasant fairy tales where all conflicts could...

Blu-ray Who? Today’s filmgoers say they want more cerebral science fiction films, and some moviemakers make an effort to comply. This year’s Arrival is quite ambitious, and last year’s Ex Machina is as good as any sci-fi movie since 2001. But back in the 1950s producers quickly discovered that the audience wanted little more than monsters and...

Blu-ray Two for the Road Some so-called sophisticated ‘sixties romantic dramas have dated pretty badly, as it’s not easy to create a movie acceptable to a fickle audience, that doesn’t end up with attitudes, politics or even costumes that don’t look ‘wrong’ just a few years later. I’ve found that enjoying Audrey Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s takes a conscious act...

Blu-ray Gas-s-s-s Roger Corman finally accepted himself as an iconic filmmaker for this, his final show for A.I.P.. Barely released and long considered a failure, Gas-s-s-s – Or – It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It sees Corman and his writer associate George Armitage attempting a Mad magazine- like amalgam of all...

3-D Blu-ray The Mad Magician 3-D Twilight Time, bless 'em, hands us another treat to go with their 3-D discs of Man in the Dark, Miss Sadie Thompson and Harlock Space Pirate 3-D -- and this time it's a fun bit of 1950s horror -- with a hot pair of short subject extras.

Blu-ray Revenge of the Blood Beast It’s back into the genre argument pits with the interesting director Michael Reeves. Reeves has persisted as a cult figure far longer than most directors with only three credited feature films. The movies are uneven but promising, and certainly the artistic equal (or better) than most of the work being turned out at the time...

Blu-ray David and Bathsheba Right in the middle of WW2, 20th Fox struck religious pay dirt with two respectful religion-themed movies, one about a miracle and another about the hard life of a priest. Each created a new Hollywood star. Five years later there began a regular Hollywood Bible War. In 1949 Cecil B. DeMille released his first Biblical...

Blu-ray Something Wild (1961) After writing up an earlier MOD disc release of the 1961 movie Something Wild, I received a brief but welcome email note from its director: “Dear Glenn Erickson, Thank you for your profound appreciation of SOMETHING WILD. If possible, I would appreciate if you could send me a copy of your review by email. Sincerely...

Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD The Accountant Comic book action thrillers are so influential today, that more naturalistic suspense thrillers are giving way under the strain. Just winding up is a long series of paternal revenge & response thrillers starring Liam Neeson, who is forever striking back against the ‘evil forces’ threatening the sacred family unit. No action hero ever fights for...

Blu-ray The Keys of the Kingdom The Twilight Time label has access to much of the Fox library, and draws from the vault what’s been fully restored and what’s not already claimed elsewhere. Accompanying their UA- sourced disc of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa is a 1944 Fox release from the writer-director-producer, a big studio production directed in this case...

Blu-ray The Barefoot Contessa As a teenager, many of my first and strongest movie impressions came not from the movies, but from certain critics. I memorized Robin Wood’s analysis before getting a look at Hitchcock’s Psycho. Raymond Durgnat introduced me to Georges Franju and Luis Buñuel, and I first learned to appreciate a number of great movies including The...

Blu-ray The Internecine Project Don’t let the ugly Italian poster art on the disc box throw you — The Internecine Project is a clever plot-driven murder tale in an espionage vein that gathers a string of B+ stars from the early 1970s for ninety minutes of suspense. It’s not the kind of suspense that makes you wonder what’s going...

Blu-ray Battleground “The Guts, Gags and Glory of a Lot of Wonderful Guys!” — say, what kind of movie is this, anyway? Action movies about combat are now mostly about soldiers that fight like killing machines, or stories of battle with a strong political axe to grind. WW2 changed perceptions completely, when a mostly civilian army did...

Blu-ray The People vs. Fritz Bauer What happens when a prosecutor tracks down one of the most evil criminals of the century, only to find that politics and corruption prevent him from issuing an arrest warrant? This is the true story of the hunt for the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann -- not from the POV of the Israeli agents that...

Blu-ray His Girl Friday / The Front Page The restoration of a newly rediscovered director's cut of the 1931 The Front Page prompts this two-feature comedy disc -- Lewis Milestone's early talkie plus the sublime Howard Hawks remake, which plays a major gender switch on the main characters of Hecht & MacArthur's original play.

Blu-ray + DVD The Driller Killer It's icky, drippy and grindingly gross -- and will make your forehead itch -- but Abel Ferrara's Bowery-set dime store horror opus has withstood the test of time. It's a decent enough psychodrama, if one can set aside all the psychological-philosophical booshwah that's leaked into horror criticism. Oops, Savant's guilty of that too.

Blu-ray Wait Until Dark Is this a genuine classic? I think so. Sure, it's the old story of the blind girl in jeopardy, but it's been worked out so well. Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna and Jack Weston shine in a keen adaptation of Frederick Knott's play, which could be titled, Dial C for Can't See Nuthin.'

Blu-ray ‘Pimpernel’ Smith How could England have won the war without him? Horatio Smith sneaks about in Nazi Germany, liberating concentration camp inmates right under the noses of the Gestapo. Leslie Howard directed and stars in this wartime escapist spy thriller, as a witty professor too passive to be suspected as the mystery spy.

Blu-ray Loophole (1981) It sounds like a winner -- Albert Finney and Martin Sheen team up for a daring subterranean bank robbery in the heart of London. The locations, the sets and the production are all first class. So what happened? Susannah York and Jonathan Pryce are in on the heist as well.

Blu-ray + DVD Deepwater Horizon Does your memory go as far back as 2010, or have too many catastrophes and cataclysms blurred your vision? Peter Berg's tense account of the BP Gulf Oil Spill debacle covers twenty hours of technological peril, as Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell battle idiotic executives and a badly-cemented oil well that's fixing to blow sky...

DVD 50 Years with Peter Paul and Mary The immensely popular singing trio provides an extremely pleasant eighty minutes of musical nostalgia - with plenty of full-length performances but also the full variety of their music through the years. Interviews with the principals give us the back story, light but not superficial, while film clips show their political activism through the years.

Blu-ray Bad Day at Black Rock Don't mess with the one-armed man -- did you know that at 56 years, Spencer Tracy could whup Ernest Borgnine to a frazzle? John Sturges knocked this one out of the ballpark and booted his career into high gear. It's well remembered... but does anyone remember that the subject is the murder of a Japanese-American?...