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Arrival
BD - Arrival is
something special. A twisty, cerebral drama that just happens to
involve aliens, Denis Villeneuve’s film is a truly beguiling
take on both the sci-fi canon and what, exactly, a grown-up
Hollywood film is supposed to be. Like the aforementioned
titles, Arrival plays with big stars (Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner,
Forest Whitaker), big set-pieces (extraterrestrial motherships
mysteriously arrive on Earth) and bigger ideas (the universe,
time itself). But unlike its genre mates, Arrival resists the
expectations of a mature audience. It is not merely an easy
salve to the more juvenile blockbusters crowding the marketplace
– it is something much more important, even if it’s also
occasionally confounding. Blu-ray
Release date: February 14th, 2017
23 Paces to Baker Street
BD - Van Johnson portrays a
blind American writer living in London. Blessed with an acute
hearing sense, Johnson overhears a kidnapping plot but neither
his friends nor the authorities believe him, chalking up his
story as the product of a writer's imagination. Disgruntled,
Johnson vows to scuttle the kidnapping himself -- with the
assistant of his fiancée Vera Miles. Despite his handicap,
Johnson puts the pieces together using sounds as evidence and
guidance. Ultimately Johnson finds his life in danger when he
corners the criminal in a dark alley.
Blu-ray Release Date: February 14th, 2017
No Highway in the Sky
BD - Henry Koster directs
the 1951 aviation drama No Highway in the Sky, based on
the novel by Nevil Shute. James Stewart stars as Theodore Honey,
a widower and single parent to 11-year-old Elspeth (Janette
Scott). He's also an absent-minded engineer who has formed a
scientific theory about metal fatigue in a specific model of
aircraft. He tries to convince British Airways that their
airplanes will come apart after a certain amount of miles, but
no one believes him. Then administrator Dennis Scott (Jack
Hawkins) sends him on a flying mission to investigate a crash
site in Newfoundland. Along the way, he meets stewardess
Marjorie Corder (Glynnis Johns) and movie star Monica Teasdale
(Marlene Dietrich). Blu-ray
Release date: February 7th, 2017
Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
BD - Spencer Tracy and
Katharine Hepburn (who won the Academy Award(r) for Best Actress
for her performance) are unforgettable as perplexed parents in
this landmark 1967 movie about mixed marriage. Joanna (Katharine
Houghton), the beautiful daughter of crusading publisher Matthew
Drayton (Tracy) and his patrician wife Christina (Hepburn),
returns home with her new fiancé John Prentice (Sidney Poitier),
a distinguished black doctor. Christina accepts her daughter's
decision to marry John, but Matthew is shocked by this
interracial union; the doctor's parents are equally dismayed.
Both families must sit down face to face and examine each
other's level of intolerance. In GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER,
director Stanley Kramer has created a masterful study of
society's prejudices. Sony Blu-ray
Release Date: February 7th, 2017
Wild Beasts
BD - For his final work,
Godfather Of Mondo Franco E. Prosperi took on the Nature
Strikes Back genre and delivered perhaps the most shocking
movie of his controversial career: When PCP gets into the water
supply of a city zoo, the drug-crazed beasts including tigers,
lions, cheetahs, hyenas and elephants, as well as seeing eye
dogs and sewer rats go berserk and rampage through the streets
of Rome. What follows is a terrifying mix of actual animal
attacks (supervised by professional circus trainers) and
over-the-top 80s Italian gore that remains the greatest
eco-revenge shocker in EuroCult history.
Blu-ray Release date: February 7th,
2017
Takashi Miike's Black Society Trilogy
BD - After several years
spent working almost exclusively in the direct-to-video world of
V-cinema in Japan, Takashi Miike announced himself as a
world-class filmmaking talent with this trio of
thematically-connected, character-centric crime stories about
violence, the underworld of Japanese society, families both real
and surrogate, and the possibly hopeless task of finding one's
place in the world. His first films made specifically for
theatrical release, and his first for a major studio, the
Black Society Trilogy was the beginning of Miike's mature
career as a filmmaker and they remain among the prolific
director's finest works. Blu-ray
Release Date: January 24th-25th, 2017
The Unknown Girl
BD - Like sculptors
reworking the same granite into familiar shapes, Belgium's
Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, always tell challenging,
immediate, contemporary stories rooted in the grey, industrial
townscape of French-speaking Seraing near Ličge. In their
latest, the remarkable young French actress Adčle Haenel plays
Jenny, a sensitive but no-nonsense local doctor consumed with
guilt when a young prostitute is found dead by the river near
her surgery. Blu-ray Release
date: February 6th, 2017
Blood Mania
BD - In Robert Vincent
O'Neill's BLOOD MANIA, Carpenter stars as Craig, lover of
the unstable Victoria (Maria De Aragon), who's very keen to see
her wealthy father reach an early grave so she can inherit his
fortune. Deciding to speed up the process, she concocts a
diabolical plan for his demise, only to be met with some
unexpected obstacles... Playing like a sex and violence drenched
soap opera, BLOOD MANIA is a mind-bending drive-in oddity
that keeps you guessing until its final shocking twist.
Blu-ray Release Date: January 31st,
2017
The Crying Game
BD - When British soldier
Jody (Forest Whitaker) is kidnapped by the IRA, he strikes up an
unlikely friendship with his captor, Fergus (Stephen Rea). When
the abduction goes awry, Fergus leaves for London where he
becomes embroiled in a curious love triangle with Dil (Jaye
Davidson), Jody's beautiful girlfriend. Full of suspense,
mystery and intrigue, this Academy Award-winning thriller
challenged mainstream sexual sterotypes and remains a powerful
and poignant exploration of gender and identity.
Blu-ray Release date: February
20th, 2017
Point of Terror
BD - In Alex Nicol's
POINT OF TERROR., Carpenter headlines as Tony Trelos, a
lounge singer who mysteriously wakes up on Andrea's (Dyanne
Thorne) private beach. The two quickly begin an affair, but
things get complicated when Andrea decides to murder her
wheelchair bound husband and Tony starts sleeping with Andrea's
pretty stepdaughter... With its Tom Jones inspired musical
interludes and DP Robert Maxwell's Bava-esque lighting scheme,
POINT OF TERROR plays like a candy colored acid trip into
the world of vanity themed exploitation.
Blu-ray Release Date: January 31st,
2017
45 Years
BD - In this exquisitely
calibrated film by Andrew Haigh (Weekend),
Charlotte Rampling (The
Night Porter) and Tom Courtenay (Billy
Liar) perform a subtly off-kilter pas de deux
as Kate and Geoff, an English couple who, on the eve of an
anniversary celebration, find their long marriage shaken by the
arrival of a letter to Geoff that unceremoniously collapses his
past into their shared present. Haigh carries the tradition of
British realist cinema to artful new heights in 45 Years,
weaving the momentous into the mundane as the pair go about
their daily lives, while the evocatively flat, wintry Norfolk
landscape frames their struggle to maintain an increasingly
untenable status quo. Loosely adapting a short story by David
Constantine, Haigh shifts the focus from the slightly erratic
Geoff to Kate, eliciting a remarkable, nuanced portrayal by
Rampling of a woman’s gradual metamorphosis from unflappable
wife to woman undone. Criterion Blu-ray
Release date: March 7th, 2017
The Handmaiden
BD - The art of the tease is
rarely as refined as in “The Handmaiden.” Set in Korea in
the 1930s, this amusingly slippery entertainment is an erotic
fantasy about an heiress, her sadistic uncle, her devoted maid
and the rake who’s trying to pull off a devilishly elaborate
con. The same could be said of the director Park Chan-wook,
whose attention to voluptuous detail — to opulent brocades and
silky robes, luscious peaches and creamy shoulders — turns each
scene into an invitation to ooh, aah and mmm. This is a movie
that tries to ravish your senses so thoroughly you may not
notice its sleights of hand. Blu-ray
Release date: January 24th, 2017
The Beyond
BD - Lucio Fulci's
masterpiece of face chewing spider action, milky eyed psychics,
face melting embalming fluid and rotted, flesh-crazed Zombies
returns in all its blood splattered, surreal and grossly
disturbing glory for a new generation of Horror Kids! If your
new business venture is sited on the cursed gateway to the hell
dimension of The Beyond, then maybe it s time to move
elsewhere but Liza (Catriona MacColl) is determined to make her
New Orleans hotel work, until strange things start happening,
people vanish and her waking thoughts are haunted by a ghostly
blind woman who seems to hold the answers to the whole bizarre
fever-dream. As reality breaks down and the plot explodes, Liza
must journey far from everything she understands and descend in
The Beyond... Arrow Blu-ray
Release Date: February 6th, 2015
Quarry
BD - Set in and around
Memphis during the early 1970s, Quarry is a thrilling
action drama that centers on the character of Mac Conway, a
Marine who returns home from a second tour of duty in Vietnam,
only to find himself stigmatized by his involvement in a highly
publicized massacre while fighting abroad. With the relationship
with his wife Joni growing tenuous, Mac finds himself tempted by
a lucrative offer from The Broker, a shady criminal involved in
a network of killing and corruption that spans the length of the
Mississippi River. After a series of events Mac – whom The
Broker codenames "Quarry" – finds himself conscripted against
his better judgment into The Broker's crew, a turn of events
that has dire consequences for both himself and Joni.
Blu-ray Release date: February
14th, 2017
City Streets - Strikingly
stylised bootlegging yarn, more romance than gangster movie,
said to have been an Al Capone favourite because the gang boss
(Lukas), far from rampaging Cagney-style with machine-gun in the
streets, is always careful to be seen to have clean hands: all
deaths take place discreetly off-screen, and a contract to kill
drawn up in an offhand line of dialogue ('I'd be willing to do
business with you, if anything happened to Blackie') is equally
elliptically sealed when the other party lights his cigar, looks
at the match, and then pensively snuffs it out. Mamoulian
sometimes over-stresses the visual and aural symbolism he
experiments with in support of these ellipses, but creates a
wonderfully evocative, low-key atmosphere not dissimilar to
Sternberg's Underworld with terrific camerawork from Lee Garmes,
and fine performances from Cooper and Sidney as the young lovers
enmeshed in the rackets. DVD Release Date: September 28th,
2016
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