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The White Ribbon
BD - Something is wrong in
the village. Some malevolent force, some rot in the foundation.
This wrongness is first sensed in a series of incidental
"accidents." Then the maiming of a child takes place. This
forces the villagers, who all know one another, to look around
more carefully. Is one of them guilty? How can that be? One
person couldn't be responsible for all of these disturbing
events. Have many been seized in an evil contagion?
Blu-ray Release date: March
15th, 2010
The Heroic Ones
BD - The Heroic Ones
is an epic tale about loyalty and betrayal that was directed by
Cheh Chang one of the Shaw Brothers most influential directors
during the late 1960’s and 1970’s. His most notable films as a
director include
The One-Armed Swordsman,
Golden Swallow,
Crippled Avengers and
Five Deadly Venoms.
Visually The Heroic Ones perfectly combines melodrama
with awe inspiring sword fights. This is an action film first
and foremost with the film’s only weakness being that there are
too many lead characters that never fully get time to blossom.
Blu-ray Release date: April
27th, 2010
Edge of Darkness
BD -
The last time we saw Mel Gibson in a leading role, he was
throwing cold water on alien invaders in M. Night Shyamalan’s
“Signs.” Now after a hiatus spent burnishing his reputation as
the world’s pre-eminent director of ultraviolent dead-language
epics, he tries a return to movie-star form in “Edge of
Darkness,” in which he plays a grieving dad trying to solve and
avenge the death of his daughter. Blu-ray Release date: May
11th, 2010
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
BD - Parnassus has, for some
while, been reduced to putting on a traveling carnival act with
his daughter, a sarcastic but loyal dwarf (Verne Troyer) and a
barely grown up former street urchin named Anton (Andrew
Garfield). Anton hawks customers (of whom there are precious
few) to walk through the Doctor's magic mirror for a voyage into
a unique imagination - "Only one Imagination per customer,
please" – where one's inmost self, for good or evil – their
choice - is manifest. Blu-ray Release date: April 27th, 2010
The Mansion of Madness - Journalist Gaston (Arthur Hansel)
travels to the isolated mental institution of Dr. Maillard
(Claudio Brook) to do a story on his progressive treatment
methods. The patients have the run of the place and are free to
live out their neuroses. Soon Gaston learns from the real
Maillard's daughter Eugenie that the man posing as him lead the
inmates in a revolt against the staff. When they try to escape,
they are captured. Can Gaston lead a revolt against the asylum's
resident Napoleon before he and Eugenie are killed or swallowed
up in madness themselves? Moctezuma's first of three memorable
horror films, MANSION OF MADNESS is loosely based on Edgar Allen
Poe's "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather" but its
baroque visuals are very much in the spirit of Jodorowsky (whose
EL TOPO Moctezuma produced) by way of the more makeshift
surrealism of Fernando Arrabal (who scripted the Moctezuma-produced
Jodorowsky film FANDO Y LIS). DVD Release Date: February 22nd,
2005
Bright Future - Yuji Nimura (Joe Odagiri) dreams of the future
when he's asleep. The future he dreams of may not be the real
future in store for him, but it identifies his simplistic
character and outlook on life. He works with Mamoru Arita at an
oshibori (wet hand towels) plant. With youth on their side they
bond as directionless semi-loners until the boss unusually
befriends them one day. Mamoru bequeaths his pet jellyfish to
Nimura before he commits a heinous crime. This jellyfish
encapsulates the mystery of the film, its meaning and could
easily have symbolic interpretations again relating to society.
Mamoru's father, Shinichiro (Tatsuya Fuji), becomes the focus
figure of the film and his friendly relationship with Nimura
evolves. Palm Pictures DVD Release Date: March 8th, 2005
Merci Pour le Chocolat - Claude Chabrol's
Merci Pour le Chocolat
is a light confection with a tasty Isabelle Huppert performance
at its center. Working from a 1948 recipe by a sometime
scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Chabrol knocks off a
witty psychological thriller—more gothic than noir. MK2 DVD
Release Date: 22 May 2001
Edvard Munch - Following a rough chronology from 1884 to 1894,
when Norwegian artist Edvard Munch began expressionism and
established himself as northern Europe's most maligned and
controversial artist, the film also flashes back to the death
from consumption of his mother, when he was five, his sister's
death, and his near death at 13 from pulmonary disease. The film
finds enduring significance in Munch's brief affair with "Mrs.
Heiberg" and his participation in the society of anarchist Hans
Jaeger in Christiania and later in Berlin with Strindberg.
MoC DVD
Release Date: October 22nd, 2007
Cello - Music teacher Mi-Ju is suddenly experiencing strange
occurrences seemingly related to a car accident ten years before
which killed friend/cellist rival. A mysterious audio cassette
turns up with a recording made of the dead girl's musical
performance, a disgruntled former student threatens her life,
harassing text messages suggest that her current happiness will
be short-lived, and her autistic daughter has started maturing
biologically prematurely and the silent girl is mysteriously
drawn to a cello in an antique shop window (I wonder who it
belonged to). DVD Release Date: 25 July 2006
Natural City - R and Noma are out to retire a group of outmoded
cyborg warriors looking for a way to extend their waning
life-cycles. Noma thinks that R's relationship with Ria is
effecting his job but little does he know that Ria is a cyborg
and R is using their missions to harvest and sell AI chips to
scientist Dr. Giro in order to find another body to house Ria's
memories and the perfect match seems to be fortune teller Cyon
(whose own father requested he be buried with the AI chip of his
own cyborg lover) but another rogue cyborg Cyper is also after
her to extend his own existence. DVD Release Date: April 18th,
2006
The Messenger
BD - In his first leading role, Foster stars as
Will Montgomery, a U.S. Army officer who has just returned home
from a tour in Iraq and is assigned to the Army’s Casualty
Notification service. Partnered with fellow officer Tony Stone
(Harrelson) to bear the bad news to the loved ones of fallen
soldiers, Will faces the challenge of completing his mission
while seeking to find comfort and healing back on the home
front. When he finds himself drawn to Olivia (Morton), to whom
he has just delivered the news of her husband's death, Will’s
emotional detachment begins to dissolve and the film reveals
itself as a surprising, humorous, moving and very human portrait
of grief, friendship and survival. Blu-ray Release date: May
18th, 2010
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
BD - On one level, “Zidane” is a
celebration of the body in motion and an acknowledgment of our
pleasure in watching bodies in motion, a pleasure the movies
have been cultivating since Muybridge’s 19th-century locomotion
studies. (The history of cinema is, in a sense, also a history
of the modern body.) The movie’s close-ups demonstrate that
Zidane’s body is more spectacular than most, though, notably, he
spends much of his time waiting and walking. The game unfolds in
fits and starts, with none of mainstream narrative’s
orchestrated rhythms. For soccer fans, the game is probably
inherently suspenseful; for the rest of us, suspense arises from
our hope (expectation, anticipation) that this body will cease
waiting (like us) and starting moving (like a star).
Blu-ray
Release date: March 22nd, 2010
The
Cantinflas Collection - Leonard has reviewed 7 of the 11
upcoming Sony DVDs with Mexican comedy icon "Cantinflas'.
Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes, aka “Cantinflas,” created a
simple, universal character whose roundabout phrases and
meaningless speeches confounded those around him, but delighted
Spanish-speaking audiences for decades. See reviews of El
Gendarme Desconocido, Los Tres Mosqueteros, El Circo, A Volar
Joven, El Mago, Si Yo Fuera Diputado and El Señor Fotógrafo.
DVD
Release Date: May 11, 2010
Remembrance of Things to Come - Both the title and the witty,
urbane narration delivered by Alexandra Stewart are
quintessential Chris Marker, yet this 42-minute essay (2001)
about the work of photographer Denise Bellon is in fact a
collaboration between Marker and Bellon's sister Yannick, a
director in her own right who has been making films since 1947.
Most of the Denise Bellon photography on-screen comes from
France in the late 30s, and the sense of history is as sharp and
inflected with literary irony as in Marker's other films. DVD
Release Date: September 2nd, 2008
The Sixth Side of the Pentagon / The Embassy -
The Sixth Side of
the Pentagon, documents a landmark event of antiwar activism
that actually occurred in one of the last countries you'd expect
to see staging a leftist uprising: the United States. (All
right, maybe it's harder to buy now in retrospect than it was at
the time, but past and future coexist in the world of Marker's
films, and thus we can expect my surprise to register pre-emptively;
before I was born, even.) The Embassy resembles La Jetee both
stylistically and thematically. The film presents a group of
refugees who flee to an embassy after a coup d’état. The film's
point-of-view is that of one of the refugees: a journalist with
a Super 8 camera. DVD Release Date: September 2nd, 2008
Happiness / The Last Bolshevik - One of the last Soviet silent
movies, rediscovered and restored by French cine-chameleon Chris
Marker in 1971, Happiness proved an easily accessible
counterpoint to the exotic obscurities of The Wishing Tree. For
this rare and often hilarious example of socialist slapstick is
likewise grounded in the seeming eccentricities of Russian folk
culture; but on the less culturally specific dynamics of those
hopes and dreams which forever sustain the exploited, and which
may or may not flourish after the revolution. DVD Release Date:
September 2nd, 2008
The Edge
BD - Few movie spectacles are more satisfying than
great performers playing deadly rivals, than natural-born
antagonists going at it fang and claw, so to speak. "The Edge"
has such a rivalry going, but it's not quite what you might
expect. For though the movie is set up as a conflict between
Anthony Hopkins' remote billionaire and Alec Baldwin's flashy
fashion photographer, the battle that gives "The Edge" its power
and excitement is the one between Hopkins and Bart the Bear, two
consummate professionals who hold nothing back.
Blu-ray Release
date: May 11th, 2010
The Karate Kid
BD - "The Karate Kid" was one of the nice
surprises of 1984 -- an exciting, sweet-tempered, heart-warming
story with one of the most interesting friendships in a long
time. The friends come from different worlds. A kid named Daniel
(Ralph Macchio) is a New Jersey teenager who moves with his
mother to Los Angeles. An old guy named Miyagi (Pat Morita) is
the Japanese janitor in their apartment building. When Daniel
starts to date the former girlfriend of the toughest kid in the
senior class, the kid starts pounding on Daniel's head on a
regular basis. Daniel tries to fight back, but this is a
Southern California kid, and so of course he has a black belt in
karate. Enter Mr. Miyagi, who seems to be a harmless old
eccentric with a curious hobby: He tries to catch flies with
chopsticks. It turns out that Miyagi is a karate master, a
student not only of karate fighting but of the total philosophy
of the martial arts. He agrees to take Daniel as his student.
Blu-ray Release date: May 11th, 2010
Brothers Five
BD - Five brothers are separated after their
father is murdered by a man named Long Zeng Feng. After the
death of their father and with the five brothers in hiding Long
Zeng Feng assumes control over the family’s martial arts academy
known as Flying Dragon Villa. Several years later with the help
of a close family friend named Yen Lai the five brothers regroup
and plan their revenge against their fathers’ murderer. Blu-ray
Release date: April 27th, 2010
The Ghost - On the surface yet another South Korean ghost story,
and even the story looks like some new twist on "Memento Mori",
but even so it is pretty creepy. Of course it depends on the
viewer having a preference for these sort of films, as the
horror very much is based on the ghosts, but they have hit a
nerve and are exploiting style and form. Tartan DVD Release
Date: April 24th, 2007
Killer McCoy - For years Mickey Rooney had portrayed Hollywood’s
all-American teen, but at the age of 27 he was eager to move
into grown-up dramatic roles. So he laced up the gloves as
feisty boxer Tommy McCoy and scored a resounding box-office K.O.
in the hard-hitting Killer McCoy. The story – a retelling of
1938’s The Crowd Roars – traces McCoy’s rise from slum kid to
lightweight title contender. Along the way, he falls under the
sway of a big-time gambler (Brian Donlevy), copes with his
boozed-up pop (James Dunn) and finds forbidden romance with the
gambler’s daughter (Ann Blyth). But will he take a dive in the
big fight? Don’t expect Killer to be some everyday palooka.
DVD
Release Date: September 15th, 2009
Eclipse 21: Oshima's Outlaw Sixties - Often called the Godard of
the East, Japanese director Nagisa Oshima was one of the most
provocative film artists of the twentieth century, and his works
challenged and shocked the cinematic world for decades.
Following his rise to prominence at Shochiku, Oshima struck out
to form his own production company, Sozo-sha, in the early
sixties. That move ushered in the prolific period of his career
that gave birth to the five films collected here.
Unsurprisingly, this studio renegade was fascinated by stories
of outsiders—serial killers, rabid hedonists, and stowaway
misfits are just some of the social castoffs you’ll meet in
these audacious, cerebral entries in the New Wave surge that
made Japan a hub of truly daredevil moviemaking. DVD Release
Date: May 18th, 2010
Institute Benjamenta
BD - The Institute Benjamenta, the
imaginary academy that is the setting of the Quay Brothers'
first live-action feature film, is a decrepit training ground
for butlers situated deep in a misty forest somewhere in central
Europe. It is here that Jakob von Gunten (Mark Rylance), an
aspiring butler, enrolls for instruction in "the divine duty of
servants." Once ensconced, he joins less than a dozen other
dedicated students in repeating the same absurd, monkish rituals
over and over under the stern tutelage of the school's founder,
Herr Benjamenta (Gottfried John), and his sister, Lisa (Alice
Krige). Blu-ray Release date: May 17th, 2010
True Blood Season Two
BD - Buffy for Adults continues with a
second season of HBO's True Blood, based on the Sookie
Stackhouse series of Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine
Harris. Created by Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under),
the series is another successful attempt at re-inventing the
vampire mythology. Blu-ray Release date: May 27th, 2010
Escape From L.A.
BD - The man with the patch is back. Call him
Snake. Kurt Russell rejoins filmmakers John Carpenter and Debra
Hill to do to the Big Orange what they did to the Big Apple in
Escape From New York – with even more futuristic thrills and
slam-bang action! Into the 9.6-quaked Los Angeles of 2013 comes
Snake Plissken (Russell). His job: wade through L.A.'s ruined
landmarks to retrieve a doomsday device. Don't miss the
excitement as Snake surfs Wilshire Blvd., shoots hoops at the
Coliseum, dive bombs the Happy Kingdom theme park, and mixes it
up with a wild assortment of friends, fiends and foes (Stacy
Keach, Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda, George Corraface, Cliff
Robertson, Pam Grier and more). Blu-ray Release date: May
4th, 2010
Escape From New York
BD - Escape from New York is a solidly
satisfying actioner. Impressively produced for $7 million, it
reps director John Carpenter's biggest budget to date. In the
1997 New York City neatly turned out (mostly in St Louis) by
production designer Joe Alves, Manhattan is a walled, maximum
security prison inhabited by millions of felons and loonies. The
president of the US has the misfortune of crash landing on the
island and being taken hostage by the crazies, who demand their
release in exchange for the leader. Into this cesspool is sent
tough criminal Kurt Russell, who is charged with extricating the
prezy within 24 hours. Blu-ray Release Date: August 4th, 2008
9 Songs
BD - What is a relationship, what is love
between two people, and why isn’t it allowed to show to people
in love having sex? Those were the questions which lead Michael Winterbottom to “9 Songs”, a love story told from a sexual point
of view by two people making love. Told from the perspective of
Matt (Kieran O'Brien), who is on an expedition to the Antarctic,
it is his memory of his one year long love affair with Lisa
(Margo Stilley), the memories of her presence, the sex, their
intimate moments and of the music at a club. Palisades Tartan
Blu-ray Release Date: May 18th, 2010
Bon Cop Bad Cop
BD - A dead body is found draped over
the joint "Welcome to Ontario/Bienvenue à Québec" sign. There
are obvious jurisdictional issues in investigating this case
between the Ontario Provincial Police and la Sûreté du Québec,
but neither side really wants the case. Finally, they decide to
work on it jointly, with the two officers assigned being
straight-laced Martin Ward, the "bon cop", and rough and tumble
David Bouchard, the "bad cop". Beyond the organizational and
language differences, Ward and Bouchard have different working
styles that clash with each other. Despite their differences,
they quickly learn that they have to work together to achieve
their end goal of finding the killer. Blu-ray Release date:
March 9th, 2010
The Enchanted Cottage - After a crash disfigures his
face and maims his body, pilot Oliver Bradford (Robert Young)
hides from family and friends in a seaside cottage. There he
befriends homely, gentle Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire). The
two marry for companionship – until some rare magic within the
cottage transforms them into ardent and beautiful lovers.
Director John Cromwell’s delicate, achingly romantic film is
based on Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s play, written in a post-World
War I era of broken men returning to families who could not
recognize them. When history sadly repeated itself, World War II
film audiences likewise embraced a story of the transcendent
power of love. The film so moved Young that he named his own
California home The Enchanted Cottage. DVD Release Date:
March 9th, 2010
Girl Boss Guerilla - Leader of the Red Helmet Gang
Sachiko (Miki Suigimoto of TERRIFYING GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL) rides
into Kyoto with her gang. They beat a competing girl gang lead
by Nami (Reiko Ike) but then discover that the Tsutsui mob group
want to make money from the gang's operations. Boxer Ichiro
comes to their aid and in doing so runs afoul of the Tsutsui and
is beaten. Sachiko and the gang escape to a hotel on the coast
where Ichiro is training for a fight but the Tsutsui are hot in
pursuit. As with TERRIFYING GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL (part of the Girl
Gang's sister series), beneath the exploitable elements there is
an underlying theme of female competition being manipulated by
corrupt males for their pleasure or gain - defeated Nami is just
as resentful of the Tsutsui bid for control even though the
group is led by her brother - and the final battle (whether
against the men or the female villains) as a backlash against
that corruption (here represented by the Yakuza, gynecologists,
and priests). DVD Release Date: October 31st, 2006
Disgrace
BD - In a landmark performance, Oscar nominee
John Malkovich (In the Line of Fire, 1993) stars as Professor
David Lurie, whose world is shattered when he is fired for
seducing a college student. He finds peace at his estranged
daughter's modest farm in South Africa until a horrific incident
of terror and violence forces Lurie to confront his beliefs and
the disturbing racial complexities of the new South Africa.
Based on the Booker Prize-winning novel, DISGRACE stands out as
a gritty, gripping drama of brutality, survival and hope.
Blu-ray Release date: April 27th, 2010 |
