| |
Henry V
BD - Kenneth Branagh makes
his feature-film directorial debut with this adaptation of
William Shakespeare's Henry V. After the Chorus Derek Jacobi
introduces the play, young king of England Henry V Kenneth
Branagh begins an angry dialogue with King Charles of France
Paul Scofield. The king's son, Dauphin Michael Maloney, insults
Henry and the argument escalates into war. In flashback, Henry
is seen as a young man drinking in a tavern with Falstaff Robbie
Coltrane, Bardolph Richard Briers, Nym Geoffrey Hutchings,
Pistol Robert Stephens, and Mistress Quickly Judi Dench.
Meanwhile, Henry and his captain, Fluellen Ian Holm, assemble an
army and invade France. The French greatly outnumber the British
troops, yet Henry leads them to victory in the Battle of
Agincourt after delivering his famous St. Crispin's Day Speech.
Throughout this struggle, Henry also courts Katherine Emma
Thompson and eventually wins her over.
Blu-ray Release date: January 27th, 2015
Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring
BD - Yves Montand (The
Wages Of Fear) and Gerard Depardieu (Cyrano
de Bergerac) star in Jean de Florette, a timeless
tale of greed, survival and fate. Set amidst the rugged hills of
Provence, this epic saga follows the heroic efforts of Jean
Cadoret (Depardieu), who inherits a farm from his mother,
Florette, and leaves his city job behind, hoping to create a
"new Eden", with his wife and daughter. But, unbeknownst to
Jean, his greedy neighbor, Cesar Soubeyran (Montand), is
plotting to steal the land out from under him with a wicked
scheme that drives Jean to the brink of madness! Ten years after
her father’s death, Manon (Emmanuelle Beart,
Un Coeur en Hiver) has
no idea that her neighbor Cesar Soubeyran (Montand) cheated her
out of her father’s land. But when Manon discovers that
Soubeyran was directly responsible for her father’s death, she
goes after him with a vengeance in this "epic [and] rousing tale
of retribution", (Newsweek)! Daniel Auteuil (Cache,
36th Precinct) also
stars. Blu-ray Release Date:
January 27th, 2015
Thief
BD - In Thief, James Caan plays Frank, a
professional jewel thief who wants to marry Jessie (Tuesday
Weld) and settle down into a normal life. In order to achieve
his dream of a family, Frank--who is used to working solo--has
to align himself with a crime boss named Leo (Robert Prosky),
who will help him gain the money he needs to begin his domestic
life. Frank plans to retire after the heist, yet he finds
himself indebted to Leo and he struggles to break free. Thief is
the first feature film from director Michael Mann and it seethes
with his stylish, atmospheric direction. Though his cool
approach may put off some viewers, it's a distinctive and
effective story-telling approach, and Caan's performance ranks
among his very best, making Thief a crime movie like few others.
Arrow Blu-ray Release Date:
January 26th, 2015
The Razor's Edge
BD - Screen legend Tyrone
Power stars in this engaging classic based on W. Somerset
Maugham's best-selling novel. Despite being offered an
impressive job when he returns from World War I, Larry Darrell
(Power) instead opts for the Paris bohemian lifestyle, followed
by a soul-searching trip to the Far East. After his beautiful
fiancée (Gene Tierney) loses patience with the spiritual seeker
and marries a wealthy man, Larry finds himself drawn to Sophie
(Anne Baxter in an OSCAR-Winning performance), an old friend.
Newly widowed, Sophie has descended into alcoholism, a state
from which Larry hopes to save her in this thought-provoking
film Nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Blu-ray Release Date: January
13th, 2015
Performance
BD - Roeg's debut as a
director is a virtuoso juggling act which manipulates its visual
and verbal imagery so cunningly that the borderline between
reality and fantasy is gradually eliminated. The first half-hour
is straight thriller enough to suggest a Kray Bros documentary
as Fox, enforcer for a London protection racket, goes about his
work with such relish that he involves the gang in a murder and
has to hide from retribution in a Notting Hill basement. There,
waiting to escape abroad, he becomes involved with a fading pop
star (Jagger) brooding in exile over the loss of his powers of
incantation. In what might be described (to borrow from Kenneth
Anger) as an invocation to his demon brother, the pop star
recognizes his lost power lurking in the blind impulse to
violence of his visitor, and so teases and torments him with
drug-induced psychedelics that the latter responds in the only
way he knows how: by rewarding one mind-blowing with another, at
gunpoint. Blu-ray Release Date:
March 25th, 2014
Love is the Devil
BD - Maybury's film about
Francis Bacon (Jacobi) focuses on the slow but inexorable
downward spiral of his seven-year relationship with his lover,
model and muse George Dyer (Craig), a smalltime villain whom the
painter first met burgling his house. It's the tale of a charged
but uncomfortable encounter, not only between two very different
personalities, but between two different (but both very English)
worlds: the arty, boozy Soho set and, ironically rather less
amoral and more sympathetic, the East End criminal fraternity.
At its heart is a raw, painful, even cruel love affair based on
dominance, submission, snobbery and sadism, which is brought
vividly to life by images often (but never excessively)
reminiscent of Bacon's paintings. The performances are terrific,
with Jacobi particularly astonishing as Bacon.
Blu-ray Release date: January 20th,
2015
Lucy
BD - Starting with the provocative premise – that
human beings use only 10% of their brain capacity – this is
strictly science fiction. Filmmaker Luc Besson knew that this
percentage figure was inaccurate, yet plunged ahead with his
inventive adventure, revolving around a naďve young American
named Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) who gets tricked into delivering
a mysterious metal briefcase to a Taiwanese crime boss, Mr. Jang
(South Korean actor Choi Min Sik), and forced to become one of
his drug mules. When she’s repeatedly kicked in the gut, there’s
leakage from the bag of blue crystals, a narcotic known as CPH4,
that’s been surgically inserted in her abdomen, and a
metamorphosis occurs: Lucy becomes superhuman.
Blu-ray Release date: January 20th,
2015
Le Jour se Leve
BD - Possibly the best of
the Carné-Prévert films, certainly their collaboration at its
most classically pure, with Gabin a dead man from the outset as
his honest foundry worker, hounded into jealousy and murder by a
cynical seducer, holes up with a gun in an attic surrounded by
police, remembering in flashback how it all started while he
waits for the end. Fritz Lang might have given ineluctable fate
a sharper edge (less poetry, more doom), but he couldn't have
bettered the performances from Gabin, Berry, Arletty, and (as
the subject of Gabin's romantic agony) Laurent. Remade in
Hollywood as
The Long Night in 1947.
Blu-ray Release Date: October
27th, 2014
River's Edge
BD - The nude, strangled
body of a teenaged girl lies on the edge of the river. Her
murderer is her boyfriend, Daniel Roebuck. All the kids in
Roebuck's dismal, dead-end town know who committed the murder.
Trouble is, no one bothers to turn Roebuck in; some of the teens
don't know how to react to the crime, while others, strung out
on drugs and booze, just don't give a damn. A study of
contemporary alienation, River's Edge was based on a real-life
incident that occurred in Milpitas, California, in 1981. That
same year, Neal Jimenez wrote his screenplay for River's Edge,
but was not able to finance the project until 1987. Except for
Dennis Hopper, cast as a holdover from the sixties who hobbles
about on one leg and makes love to a blow-up doll, the cast was
largely comprised of unknowns, many of whom (Crispin Glover,
Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye) would definitely be heard from in the
future. Blu-ray Release date:
January 13th, 2015
War and Peace
BD - In a span of three
hours and twenty-six minutes, these people roll out on the
screen a vast Technicolored panorama of human drama and military
spectacle, which, while it may at times stagger the viewer,
gives no evidence of having exhausted them. The whole
crisscrossed saga of Czarist patricians and the repulse of
Napoleon in Russia in 1812 unfolds with a ponderous rhythm, and
the actors extant at the end—especially Henry Fonda and Audrey
Hepburn—appear as fresh as they were when it began.
Blu-ray Release date: January 20th,
2015
Ganja & Hess
BD - Flirting with the
conventions of blaxploitation and the horror cinema, Bill Gunn s
revolutionary independent film Ganja & Hess is a highly stylized
and utterly original treatise on sex, religion, and African
American identity. Duane Jones (Night of the Living Dead) stars
as anthropologist Hess Green, who is stabbed with an ancient
ceremonial dagger by his unstable assistant (director Bill
Gunn), endowing him with the blessing of immortality, and the
curse of an unquenchable thirst for blood. When the assistant s
beautiful and outspoken wife Ganja (Marlene Clark) comes
searching for her vanished husband, she and Hess form an
unexpected partnership. Together, they explore just how much
power there is in the blood. Blu-ray
Release Date: January 26th, 2015
Kiss of the Vampire
BD - Honeymooning in
Bavaria, Gerald and Marianne Harcourt experience car trouble and
are forced to spend a few days in a small remote village. Soon
Doctor Ravna, owner of the impressive chateau that sits
imposingly above the village, invites them to dinner and the
couple are persuaded to go. Their association with Ravna and his
charming beautiful family is to prove disastrous as they become
unwittingly embroiled with this company of vampires who seek to
initiate them into their diabolical creed. When the pair attend
a masked ball at the chateau a few days later things start to go
eerily wrong when Gerald begins to feel faint and Marianne
disappears only to later return in front of a ceremony of gowned
vampires and announced as their new disciple.
Blu-ray Release date: December 1st,
2014
The Rain People - Coppola's
fourth feature, a fascinating early road movie made entirely on
location with a minimal crew and a constantly evolving script.
Never very popular by comparison with Easy Rider probably
because it suggested that dropping out was mere escapism, it has
far greater depth and complexity to its curious admixture of
feminist tract and pure thriller. Knight is outstanding (in a
superb cast) as the pregnant woman who runs away in quest of the
identity she feels she has lost as a Long Island housewife, and
finds herself increasingly tangled in the snares of
responsibility through her encounters with a football player
left mindless by an accident (Caan) and a darkly amorous traffic
cop (Duvall). Symbolism rumbles beneath the characterisations (Caan
as the baby she is running from and with, Duvall as the
sexuality and domination she is trying to deny) but it is never
facile; and the rhythms of the road movie (leading through
wonderfully bizarre locations to a resonantly melodramatic
finale) confirm that Coppola's prime talent lies in
choreographing movement. DVD Release Date: June 22nd, 2009
Trial - That venerable
academy State University won't renew law prof Glenn Ford's
contract because he lacks courtroom experience. He signs up with
slick lawyer Arthur Kennedy ("Law's a business like any other"),
who promptly makes him point man in a high-visibility trial. A
Mexican boy has been charged with murder of an underage Anglo
girl in a case of statutory rape. Town racists whip up a lynch
mob; meanwhile, Kennedy flits across the country to milk cash
from a leftist rally for the boy. But, confident that Ford will
blow the defense, he's only interested in providing a profitable
martyr for the "cause." DVD Release Date: July 29th, 2014
Revolt in the Big House -
This B-grade prison movie really packs a wallop, thanks to
committed performances from a cast featuring Gene Evans, Tim
Carey and Robert Blake. A stock story is brought to convincing,
exciting life as hardened criminal Gene Evans is thrown into the
"Big House". Right off the bat, he organizes a crashout. But he
has other things on his mind as well. Routine as it may at first
seem, this movie holds a number of surprises that make well
worth anyone's time. Evans is solid as ever and expert at taking
charge of the situation. He has no trouble standing up to and
intimidating Tim Carey (a feat in itself). But the most
impressive performance comes from young Robert Blake: his subtle
use of accent and his consistency of character show true acting
talent. DVD Release Date: October 28th, 2014
All My Sons - Set in a
small-town in the Midwest, Chris Keller (Burt Lancaster) returns
from the war to join his self-made father, Joe (Edward G.
Robinson), in his successful manufacturing firm and is
determined to marry childhood neighbor friend Ann Deever (Louisa
Horton). She now lives in Chicago with her lawyer brother George
(Howard Duff), where they moved to after her father Herbert
(Frank Conroy) was sent to prison for selling the government
defective airplane cylinders which caused the deaths of 21
pilots over the Pacific. At the time, Joe and Herbert were
business partners. Joe got off because he lied on the stand and
let his partner take the full blame. Chris's older brother was
engaged to Ann, but the flyer has been missing in action for
three years after going on a raid, and Chris's mother Kate (Mady
Christians) believes her son is still alive and therefore will
not grant permission for the marriage. DVD Release Date:
November 21st, 2014
Viktor - In this
fast-paced, film noir-style thriller, Viktor Lambert (Gérard
Depardieu) is serving a seven-year sentence for an art heist in
his native France, leaving his teen son s welfare in the hands
of a friend in Russia. When he learns of his son s ruthless
murder, just months before his release, he becomes obsessed with
unraveling the mystery ... and consumed with the desire for
vengeance. Returning to Moscow, where he has a dark history
himself, he enlists the help of his long-time love and criminal
partner, glamorous Russian club owner Alexandra Ivanova
(Elizabeth Hurley), and his lifelong best friend, renowned
Chechen ballet choreographer Souliman (Eli Danker). Unconcerned
with his own well-being, Viktor enters a dark and violent
underworld of drugs, diamonds and smugglers, embarking on his
own pitiless manhunt. When he discovers he is to become a
grandfather, it sparks hope and gives him reason to live ... But
now he must also keep her safe from the same killers in a brutal
game of cat and mouse. Can a father s sins be redeemed ... and a
bitter man find his heart? DVD Release Date: January 13th,
2015
|
