| |
Daughter of the Nile
BD - Taiwanese auteur Hou
Hsiao-hsien (The
Assassin,
Three Times,
Flight of the Red Balloon)
followed up his highly acclaimed Coming of Age trilogy of films
with Daughter of the Nile, a rich and poignant drama about a
young woman struggling to support her family amidst the violent
and neon-soaked milieu of 1980's Taipei. Lin (Lin Hsiao-yang)
works as a waitress in a fried chicken restaurant, attends night
school and pines after her brother s friend, local gigolo
Ah-sang (Fan Yang). Increasingly constrained by the casual
brutality of the world around her, Lin finds escape imagining
herself as the titular Daughter of the Nile, a character from
her favourite manga series. Blu-ray
Release date: May 29th, 2017
Spotlight on a Murderer
BD - When the terminally ill
Count Hervé de Kerloquen (Pierre Brasseur,
Goto, Isle of Love)
vanishes without trace, his heirs are told that they have to
wait five years before he can be declared legally dead, forcing
them to devise ways of paying for the upkeep of the vast family
château in the meantime. While they set about transforming the
place into an elaborate son et lumière tourist attraction, they
are beset by a series of tragic accidents if that's really what
they are... Blu-ray Release
date: May 29th - 30th, 2017
Fu Manchu Double Feature
BD - The first of several
collaborations between cult director Jesus Franco and British
producer Harry Alan Towers, this horror-tinged adventure is full
of jungle action, creative murders, and violent sexual sadism.
Christopher Lee portrays the mysterious Asian madman Fu Manchu,
plotting world domination from his secret headquarters
underneath the Amazon rainforest. Fu has discovered a rare
poison which affects only men, and uses it as lipstick for ten
beautiful women, who are to deliver a kiss of death to each of
10 public officials. Blu-ray
Release date: May 30th, 2017
First Men in the Moon
BD - Special effects maestro
Ray Harryhausen’s First Men in the Moon (1964) posits a
modern-day U.N. lunar mission which discovers – lo and behold! –
that a motley little 19th-century human crew has beaten them to
it. Edward Judd, Martha Hyer and the inimitable Lionel Jeffries
are the intrepid explorers, encountering everything from a giant
centipede to some particularly nasty oversize insectoid
creatures. Koch Media Blu-ray
Release Date: February 23rd, 2017
The Salesman
BD - With the camera’s
sidelong glances at its characters and lingering shots of its
settings, that atmosphere of anxiety in the face of
half-perceived or ill-explained events hovers over the whole
film. The protagonists are the high-school teacher Emad and his
wife Rana (played by Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti),
both of them amateur actors appearing as Willy and Linda Loman
in Death of a Salesman. Now desperate to find a new
apartment, they accept an offer from a colleague and move into a
place where the previous tenant mysteriously refuses to remove
her belongings. The neighbours imply that she’s a prostitute but
the apartment is also filled with evidence of her and her
child’s apparently happy existence. Artificial Eye
Blu-ray Release date: May 29th,
2017
Tough Guys
BD - Burt Lancaster and Kirk
Douglas team up one last time in Tough Guys. Harry Doyle
(Lancaster) and Archie Lang (Douglas) are two old-time train
robbers, who held up a train in 1956 and have been incarcerated
for thirty years. After serving their time, they are released
from jail and have to adjust to a new life of freedom, now as
old men. Harry and Archie realize that they still have the
pizzazz when, picking up their prison checks at a bank, they
foil a robbery attempt. Blu-ray
Release date: May 30th, 2017
The Earrings of Madame de...
BD - French master Max
Ophuls's most cherished work, The Earrings of Madame de . . .
is an emotionally profound, cinematographically adventurous tale
of false opulence and tragic romance. When the aristocratic
woman known only as Madame de (the extraordinary Danielle
Darrieux) sells her earrings, unbeknownst to her husband
(Charles Boyer), in order to pay personal debts, she sets off a
chain reaction, the financial and carnal consequences of which
can only end in despair. Ophuls adapts Louise de Vilmorin's
incisive fin de siècle novel with virtuosic camera work so
elegant and precise it’s been called the equal to that of Orson
Welles. BFI Blu-ray Release
Date: May 22nd, 2017
Speed Racer (Complete Series)
BD - One of the most iconic
shows of the 60s and 70s. Now for the first time on Blu-ray, you
can share the beloved classic with friends and family from all
generations. On your mark, get set, GO! GO! GO! Speed Racer is
an 18-year-old boy who dreams of driving his car, the incredible
Mach 5, in professional races around the world. When the going
gets tough and meddling crooks keep him from the finish line, he
always finds a way to make it through. Join Trixie, Pops,
Spritle, Chim Chim, and the whole gang as they root for Speed in
the most nail-biting, death-defying races in history!
Blu-ray Release date: May 30th,
2017
The Lodger (1927)
BD - All of London is in an
uproar due to recent attacks by a Jack the Ripper-style serial
killer known as "The Avenger" who targets blonde women. During
this time, a pale, hypersensitive stranger arrives at a
family-owned boarding house to take up lodging. He becomes
attracted to the proprietor's pretty blonde daughter Daisy, who
is already engaged to a policeman. Daisy, in spite of her
parents' objections, returns the lodger's overtures. When the
trail of the killer leads to the same district in which the
boarding house is located, the lodger's strange behavior places
him under suspicion by the family. Criterion
Blu-ray Release Date: June 27th,
2017
Downhill (1927)
BD - Superlative technique
from the 27-year-old Hitchcock almost – but not quite –
compensates for the major script problems.
Camerawork is consistently imaginative and ahead-of-its-time,
including some startling hand-held sequences towards the end as Roddy staggers, fever-stricken, off a boat. Most breathtakingly
virtuouso touch is a complex shot pulling back from Roddy
adjusting his tie – we think he's dressing up for a fancy
evening out, then realise he's working as a waiter, and then
realise he's playing a waiter on stage. Brilliantly done.
Criterion Blu-ray Release Date:
June 27th, 2017
Straw Dogs
BD - Sam Peckinpah examines
the instinctual capacity for violence in his controversial 1971
film, loosely based on the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm.
To avoid the Vietnam-era social chaos in the U.S., American
mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) moves with his
British wife, Amy (Susan George), to the isolated Cornish town
where she grew up, but their presence provokes antagonism among
the village's men. As the hostilities escalate from routine
bullying to the gang rape of his wife, David finds his
pacifistic self backed into a corner. When the hooligans attack
his house, David finally resorts to the gruesome violence that
he abhors. Criterion Blu-ray
Release Date: June 27th, 2017
Inferno (2D + 3D)
BD - Tough business tycoon
Donald Whitley Carson III (Robert Ryan) tests his own mettle
when left to die in the Mojave Desert following a riding
accident, which broke his leg. When he realises that his
scheming wife Geraldine (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover Joseph
Duncan (William Lundigan), his business partner, have left him
to perish, he is determined to best them and survive to wreak
his revenge. Twilight Time Blu-ray
Release date: May 2017
King Kong (1976)
BD - The movie Dino De
Laurentiis wanted to sell with the line "When Kong dies,
everybody cries" is a camp-infested update of the 1933
classic. With a script by Lorenzo Semple Jr., creator of the
similarly tongue-in-cheek Batman television series, this version
of Kong is loaded with silly dialogue and situations. On this
occasion, the sea voyage is reconfigured as executive Charles
Grodin leads his crew in search of oil deposits. Star Jeff
Bridges, as well as the big ape's love interest, Jessica Lange,
and the rest of the cast all seem to be in on the joke. Special
effects artist Rick Baker certainly succeeded in his efforts to
give the face of Kong some emotive qualities, and at the time of
the film's release, the special effects were state-of-the-art.
Studio Canal DE Blu-ray Release
date: January 19th, 2017
The Paradine Case
BD - Based on a novel by
Robert Hichens, The Paradine Case concerns Anna Paradine (Alida
Valli), on trial for the murder of her wealthy husband. British
barrister Anthony Keane (played by the aggressively American
Gregory Peck) takes on the case-and in the process, falls in
love with Anna, despite being married himself. Despite his
client's protests, Keane summons Anna's lover, unkempt stableman
Andre Latour (Louis Jourdan), hoping to prove in court that
Latour was the killer. Only after a series of stunning upsets
does Keane realize that, for the first time in his career, he
has allowed his heart to rule his head. In a typically perverse
Hitchcockian development, the film's most unpleasant character,
an autocratic, vindictive judge played by Charles Laughton, is
one of the few who can see through Anna's facade.
Blu-ray Release Date: May 30th,
2017
Fahrenheit 451
BD - An underrated film,
perhaps because it is less science fiction than a tale of 'once
upon a time'. Where Ray Bradbury's novel posited a strange,
terrifyingly mechanised society which has banned books in the
interests of material well-being, Truffaut presents a cosy world
not so very different from our own, with television a universal
father-figure pouring out reassuring messages, and the only
element of menace a fire-engine tearing down the road. A bright,
gleaming childhood red, the engine is like a reminder of toyhood
days; and as Werner's fireman hero goes about his task of
destroying literature, his growing awareness of the almost human
way in which books curl up and die in the flames gradually
assumes the dimensions of a quest for a legendary lost treasure
- movingly glimpsed as he slowly and painfully deciphers the
title-page of David Copperfield. Koch Media
Blu-ray Release Date: September
13th, 2013
The Jacques Rivette Collection
BD - In 1975, Jacques
Rivette reunited with Out 1 producer Stéphane Tchal
Gadjieff with the idea of a four-film cycle. He would create a
quartet of interconnected films, each in a different genre. One
was to be a love story, another a Western, and there was to be a
fantastical thriller and a musical comedy starring Anna Karina
and Jean Marais too. Ill health intervened, and only two of the
films were completed. Duelle (une quarantine) sees
Rivette in fantasy territory, cross-pollinating Val Lewton, Jean
Cocteau and film noir as the Queen of the Sun (Bulle
Ogier) and the Queen of the Night (Juliet Berto) search
for a magical diamond in present day. Its parallel film,
Noroît (une vengeance), is a pirate tale and a loose
adaptation of The Revenger's Tragedy starring Geraldine
Chaplin (Nashville,
Cría cuervos). A third
film began production Marie et Julien starring Albert Finney and
Leslie Caron but Rivette succumbed to nervous exhaustion and
shooting was abandoned. When he did return to filmmaking,
Rivette borrowed some of the elements of Duelle and Noroît and
came up with Merry-Go-Round. Joe Dallesandro (Flesh
for Frankenstein) and Maria Schneider (Last
Tango in Paris,
The Passenger) are
summoned to Paris, which leads to one of the most surreal and
mysterious tales in a career that was dominated by surrealism
and mystery. Arrow US Blu-ray
Release Date: May 23rd, 2016
The Mist
BD - The Mist is what
a horror film should be - dark, tense, and punctuated by just
enough gore to keep the viewer's flinch reflex intact. In fact,
that movie's ending is so uncompromising that one must assume
director Frank Darabont had final cut so the studio couldn't
interfere. (It's worth noting that the ending is not the same as
that of Stephen King's novella, but I won't mention how it has
changed.) Darabont has fashioned a tense motion pictures that's
ultimately more about paranoia, religious fanaticism, and the
price of hopelessness than it is about monsters. But the
creatures are present and accounted for, lurking in the
white-out that is the mist. Blu-ray
Release Date: September 16th, 2008
Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer
- Eoudong is one of the most famous erotic dramas in Korean
cinema history, and lead actress Lee Bo Hee took home the Best
Actress award at the Korean Film Awards for her role as the
eponymous heroine. During the Chosun dynasty, the strict laws of
Confucianism permeated an already male-dominant society. Eo
Wu-Dong was born into a respectful, aristocratic family, but
when she falls in love with a man of obscure birth, society
tears them apart. DVD Release Date: January 19th, 2006 |
