| |
Ponyo
BD - A new, very different take on the premise of
Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, Ponyo is about a
precocious little fish named Br nnhilde, whose father just
happens to be the flamboyant and sinewy king of the sea.
Determined to reach the surface and explore new places, the
aquatic princess makes a break for it, and happens to meet a
five-year-old boy named Sosuke, who lives in a house overlooking
the ocean in a tiny fishing village with his mother, Lisa, and
his father, a fisherman who is often away. After rescuing his
tiny friend from being stuck inside a discarded glass jar,
Sosuke makes a strange, instant connection with the little
goldfish, whom he names Ponyo. Blu-ray
Release date: March 2nd, 2010
Peeping Tom - A frank
exploration of voyeurism and violence, Michael Powell’s
extraordinary film is the story of a psychopathic cameraman—his
childhood traumas, sexual crises, and murderous revenge as an
adult. Reviled by critics upon its initial release for its
deeply unsettling subject matter, the film has since been hailed
as a masterpiece. Studio Canal DVD Release Date: February
19th, 2007
Sawdust and Tinsel -
Acknowledging the influence of Dupont's Variety - one of the
keystones of German expressionism, in which marriage was seen as
a perilous high-wire act - Bergman here employs the circus as a
metaphor for the humiliating hoops through which men and women
are put by their sexual dreams and desires. Heavily masochistic
in its anguished account of the futile attempts of an ageing
circus owner (Grönberg) and his steely young mistress (Andersson)
to escape the dreary limitations of their mutually destructive
involvement, it isn't exactly prepossessing in theme. But
visually it is a treat, with Bergman's richly baroque
compositions and persistent use of deep focus brilliantly
exploiting the circus and theatre settings. And the performances
are first-rate. Sandrew Metronome DVD Release Date: June 4th,
2008
Shanghai Gesture - An
intriguing and at times surprisingly subversive film which stars
Huston as the tycoon whose business involvement in buying a
property in Shanghai attracts the wrath of Munson, the owner of
a casino in the area. When he comes face to face with his
daughter (Tierney), who has been manipulated by an Arab
(Mature), his world falls apart and he is forced to re-examine
his relationship with money as well as with his family.
Sublimely conveyed by von Sternberg, The Shanghai Gesture is
proof of what Hollywood can do if it allows its talent the room
to manoeuvre. Films Sans Frontieres DVD Release Date:
January, 2005
Ace in the Hole - One of
the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced
by a Hollywood filmmaker, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is
legendary for both its cutting social critique and its status as
a hard-to-find cult classic. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest
performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper
reporter caught in dead-end Albuquerque who happens upon the
story of a lifetime—and will do anything to ensure he gets the
scoop. Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker
vision, a no-holds-barred exposé that anticipated the rise of
the American media circus. Paramount DVD Release Date:
January 8th, 2008
Happy Together - For Happy
Together (1997), Wong reduced his essential cast of characters
to three and flew them halfway around the world, from Hong Kong
to Buenos Aires (adding a couple of side trips to Iguacu Falls
and Tierra del Fuego). The subject, moreover, is probably his
boldest to date: an acrimonious and ultimately doomed gay
relationship between two Hong Kong expatriates, a match that
never quite becomes a triangle with a straight expatriate from
Taipei. But far from concentrating or distilling his material,
Wong winds up scattering it to the winds. Kino's Remastered
DVD Release Date: March 31st, 2009
Circle of Iron
BD - David Carradine says
that Circle of Iron (1978) is among his personal favorites and
adds that "To me it will always be The Silent Flute," a title he
prefers over the studio picked Circle of Iron or the other
popular alternate title, The Flying Fists of Horror. Director
Richard Moore concurs with Carradine and thought Circle of Iron
"too macho," but gamely bowed to the studio's wishes. Circle of
Iron is billed as an adventure epic originally conceived of by
Bruce Lee that was then taken to the next production level by
actor James Coburn, and ultimately adapted to the screen by
scribes Stirling Silliphant (who won an Academy Award for his
script to In the Heat of the Night) and Stanley Mann (whose
writing credits would later include Conan the Destroyer). DVD
Release Date: May 29th, 2007
Isabella
BD - Time shifting, so much
a part of Isabella's architecture, is announced subtly by the
first line, "Your eyes remind me of my first girlfriend." It is
spoken by Shing (an unlikely Chapman To), to a teenage girl
(teenage pop singer turned actress, Isabella Leong), evidently
as a pick-up. This single line of dialogue contains all the
motivic germs for the story that unfolds, prior to and following
this moment. At this point, the camera frames both their faces
tightly and we do not know anything about their identities or
relationship to one another. Blu-ray Release date: June 9th,
2009
All the Right Noises
BD - Originally sold with
the provocative tagline 'Is 15 too young for a girl? Is one wife
enough for one man?', this time-capsule of a film concerns
itself with the story of a young married man who has an affair
with a teenage girl, and forms part of a peculiarly 1960s
British wave of films exploring such sensitive subject matter
(others included Term of Trial, Age of Consent, and Three into
Two Won't Go). Blu-ray Release
date: August 24th, 2009
Central Bazaar - For this
remarkable experimental film, the provocative avant-garde legend
Stephen Dwoskin gathered together a group of strangers and
filmed them as they explored their fantasies over a period of
five days: a project that now sounds a little like TV's Big
Brother. The ceremonial gowns and make-up here not only evoke
the eroticism of European horror movies but also highlight the
film's interplay between performance and intimacy. DVD Release
Date: May 25th, 2009
The Damned United
BD - Peter Morgan's
excellent script crackles with quotable dialogue and contains
several laugh-out-loud moments, but also paints a genuinely
moving portrait of the friendship between Clough and Taylor.
Similarly, Hooper orchestrates several impressive scenes (in
particular a fabulous sequence where Clough spends an entire
match pacing up and down the changing room, listening to the
cheers and gasps outside) and makes strong use of archive
footage throughout. U.S. Blu-ray
Release Date February 23rd, 2010
Frantic / Presumed Innocent
BD - Two spellbinding
Harrison Ford thrillers mark their hi-def debut together. Harris
Ford teams with two supremely gifted filmmakers - Alan J. Pakula
and Academy Award winner Roman Polanski - on a pair of
suspenseful and involving mysteries. From Scott Turow's
bestseller, Pakula directs the twist-filled whodunit Presumed
Innocent, in which Ford is pledged to uphold the law yet
determined to escape it. He plays an attorney who's both the
prosecutor of a murder case...and Suspect #1. Polanski helms the
edge-of-your-seat caper Frantic. After his wife suddenly
disappears in Paris, American doctor Ford confronts a
bewildering web of language, locale and bureaucracy as he
scrambles to find her. Blu-ray
Release date: February 23rd, 2010
Quadroon - QUADROON is
sensitively written and earnestly performed but quickly becomes
hard to take seriously from the first line of dialogue, however,
as most of the Creoles sound like they are channeling SNL's
Czech Brothers (Lupo is particularly hard to take seriously)
upstaging the leads. Kincaid (who later made a career directing
B movies and adult films as Joe Gage) and McKee (now in casting
and production) are sympathetic leads but the stagey blocking of
many scenes lends them an air of cliche rather than
theatricality or cinematic scope. Apart from the costumes look
good, the low budget is apparent in just about every other
aspect including the photography and lighting while the settings
vary from authentic-looking to studio flats. The potentially
exploitable aspects of the film - including an interracial love
scene between Caleb and Coral - are handled more tastefully than
the advertising suggests. DVD Release Date: March 16th, 2010
COI Vol. 1 Police + Thieves
- The Central Office of Information (COI) was established in
April 1946 and has produced thousands of films that reflected
the culture and concerns of the nation. Volume 1 of the COI
collection tackles crime, juvenile delinquency, policing and the
justice system. A variety of styles and genres - story
documentary, drama, public information shorts - are employed to
deliver crime prevention messages and bolster recruitment in
this area. DVD Release Date: February 15th, 2010
Arang - ARANG is an Asian
horror flick told from the perspective of the detectives rather
than the potential victims. That said, while the mystery element
is more diverting than in other Asian horror flicks, the scare
element is much more routine and decidedly unscary (usual
long-haired ghost appearing over shoulders, in mirrors, in small
spaces, as well as a ghost child too). The twists thrown in
around the perfunctory "find the hidden corpse" are surprising
for a horror flick but a bit contrived for the thriller genre
and just as we're about to accept the film and its obligatory
surprise ending denouement on their own terms and forget about
asking what "arang" means, up pops a text screen. The subtitles
translate the heading as "The Legend of Arang" but then does not
bother to translate the legend itself before rolling the end
credits. As such, ARANG is stuck somewhere between being a
change of pace and more of the same. DVD Release Date: May
8th, 2007
Contempt
BD - Coproduced by the
vulgar American showman Joseph E. Levine--best known at the time
for his distribution of Italian-made Hercules movies with Steve
Reeves and his subsequent involvement with Federico Fellini--Contempt
could only seem the grotesque marriage of crass exploitation and
high art. (In fact, all the nude shots of Bardot were ordered by
Levine after Godard considered the film done; acceding to the
producer's request as literally as possible, he even clarified
the commodification process in the opening evaluation of
Bardot's body.) US Blu-ray
Release Date: February 16th, 2010
Make Way For Tomorrow - Leo
McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow is one of the great unsung
Hollywood masterpieces, an enormously moving Depression-era
depiction of the frustrations of family, aging, and the
generation gap. Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi headline a cast of
incomparable character actors, starring as an elderly couple who
must move in with their grown children after the bank takes
their home, yet end up separated and subject to their
offspring’s selfish whims. An inspiration for Ozu’s
Tokyo Story, Make Way for Tomorrow is among American cinema’s purest
tearjerkers, all the way to its unflinching ending, which McCarey refused to change despite studio pressure. DVD
Release Date: February 23rd, 2010
The Clouded Yellow -
Available for the first time on DVD completely uncut in it's
full length version, this action-packed thriller ranks alongside
Hitchcock's great British thrillers. When ex-spy David Somers
takes a low-profile job in the country cataloguing a butterfly
collection, he finds that dangerous work continues to pursue
him. David grows fond of his employer s niece, a fragile, fey
young woman named Sophie. When Sophie is framed for the murder
of Hick - the spiteful handyman, he becomes embroiled in a
murder mystery and goes underground with the beautiful suspect.
The fugitives stay one step ahead of the police until the
breathless climax. Starring the Oscar nominated and Emmy Award
winning Trevor Howard (Gandhi, The Third Man, Superman) in one
of his greatest films alongside the Oscar nominated and Emmy
Award winning Jean Simmons (Spartacus, Guys and Dolls,
Elmer
Gantry) and directed by Ralph Thomas (Doctor in the House).
DVD Release Date: March 22nd, 2010
The Informant!
BD - Mark Whitacre (Matt
Damon) was fast rising through the ranks at agri-industry
powerhouse Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) when he became savvy to
the company's multinational price-fixing conspiracy, and decided
to turn evidence for the FBI. Convinced that he'll be hailed as
a hero of the people for his efforts, Whitacre agrees to wear a
wire in order to gather the evidence needed to convict the
greedy money-grabbers at ADM. Unfortunately, both the case --
and Whitacre's integrity -- are compromised when FBI agents
become frustrated by their informant's ever-shifting account,
and discover that he isn't exactly the saintly figure he made
himself out to be. Unable to discern reality from Whitacre's
fantasy as they struggle to build their case against ADM, the
FBI watches in horror as the highest-ranking corporate bust in
U.S. history threatens to implode before their very eyes. Scott
Bakula, Joel McHale, and Melanie Lynskey co-star.
Blu-ray Release date: February
23rd, 2010
Georges Méliès Encore -
Georges Méliès built the world's first movie studio in 1896 and
from it cascaded many fantastic films, as featured on Flicker
Alley’s monumental thirteen-hour, five-DVD box, Georges Méliès,
First Wizard of the Cinema. Since it was published, an
additional 26 films produced by Méliès between 1896 and 1911
have been found and made available for this single-disc,
supplemental collection. They further support that Méliès was
the most accomplished filmmaker in the world during the first
years of cinema. DVD Release Date: February 16th, 2010
Embodiment of Evil - Long
thought dead, mass murderer Ze De Caixao (Coffin Joe to English
audiences) aka Josefel Zanatas (writer/director/star Jose Mojica
Marins) is released from prison after a 40 year prison term
(during which he killed 30 fellow prisoners). He returns to the
slums of Sao Paolo where his faithful servant Bruno (Rui Resende)
has not only maintained a lair for him but has also recruited a
quartet of liberated souls to assist him as he resumes his
grisly quest to continue his bloodline with the perfect woman
(and gruesomely destroy any woman who fails and any man who
tries to stop him). Hindering his quest are survivors and family
of the victims of his previous exploits (including a cop blinded
in one eye by Coffin Joe's talons and an extremely penitent
monk) who may be even more corrupt and repellent than Ze as well
as terrifying visions of his dead wife and other past victims
(whose appearances usually prompt clips from the previous
films). DVD Release Date: July 27th, 2009
Confession of Pain
BD - Detective Bong (Takeshi
Kaneshiro) comes home one night to find his girlfriend had taken
her own life. It had been a particularly grueling day at the
office to start with, culminating a few hours earlier in a
bloody stroke of vengeance on a murderous killer of hookers by
his boss, "Chief" Hei (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai). Hei goes on with
his life and marries Susan (Xu Jinglei) the daughter of a
wealthy businessman. But Bong, consumed with the seemingly
unanswerable question of "why", resigns from the force to become
a second class private detective and a first class drunk.
Blu-ray Release date: December
17th, 2009
|
(
****
(
(
(
(
(
