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A Dandy in Aspic
BD -
Falling between the outlandish exploits of James Bond and the
dour realism of John le Carré's circus of spies , this paranoid
thriller is a dark and refined affair, with a superb supporting
cast headed by Mia Farrow and Tom Courtenay, wonderful
cinematography by regular Powell and Pressburger cameraman
Christopher Challis, and with a terrific score by Quincy Jones.
Blu-ray Release Date: March 25th, 2019
The Virgin Soldiers
BD - This situation comedy finds rookie
soldiers of the British Army trying to cope with military life
while stationed in Malaya. Brigg (Hywel Bennett) is a young
clerk who falls for the local school teacher Phillipa (Lynn
Redgrave), the daughter of Royal Sergeant Major Raskin (Nigel
Patrick). Brigg loses his virginal status in an encounter with
the prostitute Juicy Lucy (Tsai Chin), while Phillipa also
becomes sexually active for the first time. The film strikes a
nice balance between comedy and serious drama as the soldiers
are put to the test when a train wreck necessitates their
involvement, and later several soldiers try to get sick leave by
requesting circumcisions. Blu-ray Release Date: March 25th,
2019
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
BD - On February 9, 1964, the Beatles
made their first live appearance on American television on The
Ed Sullivan Show, ratcheting up the frenzy of a fan base whose
ecstatic devotion to the band heralded an explosive new wave of
youth culture. I Wanna Hold Your Hand looks back to that fateful
weekend, following six New Jersey teenagers, each with different
reasons for wanting to see the Fab Four, on a madcap mission to
Manhattan to meet the band and score tickets to the show. With
this rollicking first feature, director Robert Zemeckis and
cowriter Bob Gale established themselves as a filmmaking team
par excellence, adept at mining America’s cultural memory for
comedy and adventure with a winning mixture of sweet nostalgia
and playful irreverence. Blu-ray Release Date: March 26th,
2019
A Severed Head
BD - This sophisticated black comedy sex romp is
based on the novel by Iris Murdoch, which she also turned into a
stage play (with J.B. Priestley). Ian Holm, is hapless
wine-taster Martin Lynch-Gibbon who has both a mistress (Jennie
Linden) and a nymphomaniac wife, Antonia Lynch-Gibbon (Lee Remick). His best friend, psychiatrist Palmer Anderson (Richard
Attenborough), is having an affair with Antonia. Palmer's
half-sister Honor Klein (Clair Bloom) is having sexual relations
with him also, which he is slightly apologetic about. The wine
taster has had a lifelong antagonism for his friend's
half-sister, but after his wife and mistress leave him, he takes
up with Honor. Blu-ray Release Date: December 4th, 2019
Der Hund von Baskerville
BD - Richard Oswald’s
Der Hund von
Baskerville, the last silent film starring Sherlock Holmes, has
been less a legend than a rumor among cinephiles and Sherlockians. This seven-reel film, with its long pedigree
extending back to a German stage play written while Germany was
at war with England, has been regarded as the most important of
the ‘Hound’ made in Europe. Long considered lost, it was the
last silent Sherlock Holmes film ever made, produced when German
studios were the envy of the world. Seen here in two versions,
one with English titles and one entirely in German with titles
based on the original German censor records, Hund lives again
accompanied by a new ensemble score from the incomparable Günter
Buchwald, Frank Bockius and Sascha Jacobsen.
Blu-ray Release
Date: February 12th, 2019
The Third Secret
BD - TV commentator Stephen Boyd doesn't
believe the official verdict of suicide in the death of a famed
London psychiatrist. Boyd tries to get to the truth by studying
a list of the shrink's patients. While interviewing three of
these worthies (Jack Hawkins, Diane Cilento and Richard
Attenborough), Boyd discover that each has a deep dark secret
that the psychiatrist was privy to. The best-kept secret
concerns the schizophrenia of the dead man's teenaged daughter
(Pamela Franklin)--a fact that provides the key to mystery. The
Third Secret originally featured Patricia Neal as one of the
suspects, but her scenes were cut from the final release print.
Blu-ray Release Date: February 25th, 2019
The Triple Echo
BD - When a young soldier (Deacon) deserts his
outfit and hides in a remote farm, the farm owner (Jackson) and
he fall in love. But their idyll is shattered by the arrival of
a boorish, violent army sergeant (Reed) searching for his AWOL
recruit. Unconventional and superbly played, The Triple Echo is
one of the finest British films of the 1970s. Long overlooked
and unjustly neglected, this powerful drama is now ripe for
rediscovery. Blu-ray Release Date: March 25th, 2019
Take A Girl Like You
BD - The great satirist/writer/director Jonathan
Miller’s only venture into cinema, Take a Girl Like You (1970)
is an adaptation of the Kingsley Amis novel about a virginal
young woman, Jenny (Hayley Mills, in one of her first “adult”
roles), and the men who pursue her, particularly Patrick (Oliver
Reed), who finds that deeper feelings may overtake his genial
caddishness. Also starring Noel Harrison, John Bird, and Sheila
Hancock, and featuring a score by Stanley Myers. Blu-ray
Release Date: February 25th, 2019
Human Desire
BD - Adapted from the same Émile Zola novel
previously filmed by Jean Renoir in La Bête humaine (1938),
Lang's gripping thriller has Ford as train engineer Jeff, just
home from the Korean War. He's instantly attracted to passenger
Vicki (Grahame), not yet realizing that she's the abused wife of
Jeff's alcoholic railroad yard superior Carl (Broderick
Crawford) -- or that Vicki was just entangled in a
jealousy-fuelled murder committed by Carl. As Jeff and Vicki
embark on a steamy affair, she tells him about the crime, and
Carl's blackmail hold on her. If only Carl could be taken out of
the picture... Blu-ray Release Date: February 18th, 2019
Psyche 59
BD - Patricia Neal plays Allison Crawford, a woman who
has suffered psychosomatic blindness for a number of years. Upon
psychological examination, Allison seems to have a gap in her
memory which may reveal the cause of her emotional distress.
When she and her husband Eric (Curt Jurgens) move in with her
provocative younger sister (Samantha Eggar), Allison uses her
ailment as an excuse to do some of her own investigative
research. Slowly gaining back her eyesight, Allison finds the
missing pieces of her memory. Julian Halevy based her screenplay
on Francoise des Ligneris's novel, Psyche 63. Though the titular
number is never explained, it has been suggested that it refers
to the year in which the lead character suffered her traumatic
experience. Blu-ray Release Date: February 25th, 2019
The Kid Brother
BD - Silent-comedy legend Harold Lloyd goes west
in this irresistible blend of action, romance, and slapstick
invention. The bespectacled everyman is at his inimitable best
as Harold Hickory, the gentle son of a prominent lawman who
lives in the shadow of his rough-and-tumble brothers. When a
traveling medicine show rolls into town, it brings with it
excitement, the possibility of love, and a chance for Harold to
prove his mettle. Deftly balancing Lloyd’s brilliant sight gags
and thrilling set pieces—including an epic, knock-down, drag-out
fight aboard an abandoned ship—with one of the actor-filmmaker’s
most fully realized, root-for-the-underdog narratives, The
Kid Brother is a hilarious and heartwarming high-water mark
of early screen comedy. Blu-ray Release Date: March 12th,
2019
Japón
BD - A man on the brink of suicide regains the will to
live under decidedly unusual circumstances in this drama from
Mexico. A quietly despondent man (Alejandro Ferretis) leaves
behind the city for a journey into a quiet village in the
valley, telling anyone who cares to know that once he's settled
in, he intends to kill himself. The man takes a room with Ascen
(Magdalena Flores), and elderly woman who lost her husband some
years ago. Keeping to himself, the man paints, thinks, and
prepares himself for death, while Ascen slowly becomes aware of
the depth of his depression. Blu-ray Release Date: March
19th, 2019
Wanda
BD - With her first and only feature film—a
hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara
Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent
cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen
on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and
shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up
with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her
husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself
alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls
prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who
ropes her into his next criminal scheme.
Blu-ray Release
Date: March 19th, 2019
The Return of the Vampire
BD - Bela Lugosi rises from
the crypt in this blood-curdling horror classic! In 1918, Armand
Tesla (Bela Lugosi), a 200-year-old Hungarian Vampire, prowls
the English countryside, feeding from the jugulars of the
villagers. But Tesla’s reign of terror is interrupted when a
pair of scientists, Lady Jane (Frieda Inescort) and Sir John
Ainsley (Roland Varno), drive a railroad spike through his
heart. The "un-dead", Tesla remains safely entombed for two
decades until the impact from a stray Nazi bomb accidentally
releases him. Along with his werewolf servant Andreas Obry (Matt
Willis), the resurrected vampire now plots vengeance on the
family that put a halt to his nocturnal feasting.
Blu-ray
Release Date: February 19th, 2019
Detour
BD - From Poverty Row came a movie that, perhaps
more than any other, epitomizes the dark fatalism at the heart
of film noir. As he hitchhikes his way from New York to Los
Angeles, a down-on-his-luck nightclub pianist (Tom Neal) finds
himself with a dead body on his hands and nowhere to run—a
waking nightmare that goes from bad to worse when he picks up
the most vicious femme fatale in cinema history, Ann Savage’s
snarling, monstrously conniving drifter Vera. Working with
no-name stars on a bargain-basement budget, B auteur Edgar G.
Ulmer turned threadbare production values and seedy, low-rent
atmosphere into indelible pulp poetry. Long unavailable in a
format in which its hard-boiled beauty could be fully
appreciated, Detour haunts anew in its first major
restoration. Blu-ray Release Date: March 19th, 2019
Stranger in the House
BD - Once an eminent barrister,
John Sawyer (James Mason) has become a cynical, reclusive drunk,
long deserted by his wife, baffled by the burgeoning youth
culture and held in contempt by his daughter, Angela (Geraldine
Chaplin). But when her boyfriend is wrongfully accused of
murder, Sawyer must confront his demons and a changing world in
order to defend him. BFI Blu-ray Release date: February 25th,
2019
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