Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF June 19th, 2017

Χαίρετε!! A fabulous week with Blu-ray reviews of packages by Criterion, Masters of Cinema, Kino Lorber, Signal One, Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome, Shout! Factory, Olive of films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Roberto Rossellini, Luis Buñuel, Nicholas Ray, André De Toth, Fritz Lang, Albert Brooks, Hal Ashby, Ib Melchior, Jess Franco and two Marx Brothers films!. Our Calendar has last week's massive updates of films-to-Blu-ray by Nicholas Ray, Josef von Sternberg, Sidney Lumet, Mario Bava, Robert Aldrich, Fred Zinnemann, Segio Martino, Jean Grémillon, Ermanno Olmi, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Abel Gance, King Vidor, Joe Dante, Carl Th. Dreyer, Vittorio De Sica, Dziga Vertov, Luigi Cozzi, Lucio Fulci, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, David Cronenberg, Tonino Valerii, Dario Argento, Takashi Miike, Michael Apted, Takeshi Kitano, Alfred Hitchcock, Andrew V. McLaglen, William A. Wellman, Ewald André Dupont, Werner Herzog, Elio Petri and more. Please visit our listing pages. Our Feature Blu-ray and DVD is posted for JUNE and a CONTEST with another BRAND NEW CRITERION Blu-ray prize. Enjoy!!

NEW PAGES:

Giallo on Blu-ray!

Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.FR (France)

ESSENTIAL NOIR on Blu-ray!

Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.DE (Germany)

LATEST ARTICLE: The Beauties of Star Trek (TOS)

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Feature Blu-ray and DVD chosen for the Month of JUNE!

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(Week of) June 19th CONTEST  identify the clip HERE to win a prize of a BRAND NEW Criterion Blu-ray of Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night Best of luck!

If there are DVD or Blu-ray titles you'd like us to cover - please feel free to recommend!

Gary at 2ze dot com

Lost in America BD - In this hysterical satire of Reagan-era values, written and directed by Albert Brooks, a successful Los Angeles advertising executive (Brooks) and his wife (Julie Hagerty) decide to quit their jobs, buy a Winnebago, and follow their Easy Rider fantasies of freedom and the open road. When a stop in Las Vegas nearly derails their plans, they’re forced to come to terms with their own limitations and those of the American dream. Brooks’s barbed wit and confident direction drive Lost in America, an iconic example of his restless comedies about insecure characters searching for satisfaction in the modern world that established his unique comic voice and transformed the art of observational humor. Blu-ray Release date: July 25th, 2017

Stalker BD - Andrei Tarkovsky s final Soviet feature is a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide the Stalker leads a writer and a scientist into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one s most deeply held desires. Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself Stalker envelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings. Criterion Blu-ray Release Date: July 18th - 24th, 2017

The Savage Innocents BD - Nicholas Ray's epic 1959 film about Eskimo life was unfairly victimized on release, censored at the UK cinema, and neglected by both TV and home video for decades. The Savage Innocents continued Ray's fascination with alternative lifestyles — examining the life of Eskimos and their remoteness from "civilized" values. It represents Ray's first and most ambitious attempt to break free from Hollywood and forge his own route. Blu-ray Release Date: June 27th, 2017

The Angry Red Planet BD - With Martians like the leggy and very hairy "batratspidercrab, ", plus flesh-eating plants and a rolling amoeba with rotating eyes, you’ll think twice before jumping into a spaceship: no matter where it’s headed. When an Earth rocket lands on Mars, the crew finds the planet not entirely dead. As these well-armed scientists begin to explore, they are attacked by unbelievably horrific and demented creatures at every turn. Battling for their lives, the survivors make it back to their ship only to discover intelligent life - and a warning they’ll never forget! Blu-ray Release Date: June 27th, 2017

8 Millions Ways to Die BD - Jeff Bridges plays Matthew Scudder, an LA sheriff who loses his job due to his inability to stay away from booze. While attending an AA meeting, Scudder is invited to attend a party, where he meets the beauteous Sunny (Alexandra Paul). Also at the party is druggie Chance (Randy Brooks), an old enemy of Scudder's. It doesn't take long for Scudder to figure out that Chance is a pimp and Sunny is one of his hookers. She begs Scudder to help her break away from Chance. Not long afterward, Sunny is killed, and Scudder crawls back into the bottle. Eventually sobering up, he vows to avenge Sunny's death. Much blood is spilled before the killer is revealed; along the way, Scudder gets a new lease on life when he falls in love with ex-hooker Rosanna Arquette. Blu-ray Release date: June 20th, 2017

Death in the Garden BD - After the relatively commercial Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Luis Buñuel returned to the surrealist and political style of his earlier works with Death in the Garden [La mort en ce jardin] the middle film in what has been described as his revolutionary triptych , a trilogy of films that study in the morality and tactics of armed revolution against a right-wing dictatorship . Amid a revolution in a South American mining outpost, a band of fugitives a roguish adventurer (Georges Marchal), a local hooker (Simone Signoret), a priest (Michel Piccoli), an aging diamond miner (Charles Vanel), and the miner's deaf-mute daughter (Michèle Girardon) are forced to flee for their lives into the jungle. Starving, exhausted, and stripped of their old identities, they wander desperately lured by one deceptive promise of salvation after another. Filmed in stunning Eastmancolor, Death in the Garden is both a rousing adventure film, and a surrealist tour de force. Blu-ray Release Date: June 19th, 2017

Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy BD - Roberto Rossellini is one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. And it was with his trilogy of films made during and after World War II—Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero—that he left his first transformative mark on cinema. With their stripped-down aesthetic, largely nonprofessional casts, and unorthodox approaches to storytelling, these intensely emotional works were international sensations and came to define the neorealist movement. Shot in battle-ravaged Italy and Germany, these three films are some of our most lasting, humane documents of devastated postwar Europe, containing universal images of both tragedy and hope. Criterion Blu-ray Release Date: July 11th, 2017

Don't Answer the Phone BD - Vietnam War veteran and sometime photographer Kirk Smith (Nicholas Worth) is stalking women in their Hollywood, Calif., homes and strangling them to death. While Lt. Chris McCabe (James Westmoreland) begins a rather unsuccessful investigation, psychologist Lindsay Gale (Flo Gerrish) starts getting disturbing phone calls from Smith. Eventually, the psychotic Smith starts going after Gale's patients, killing them one by one. The stakes get even higher when Gale herself is kidnapped. Blu-ray Release date: January 31st, 2017

Female Vampire BD - Countess Irina (Lina Romay) lives on the island of Madeira, Portugal, where she must drain the ''life force'' of men and women for her own survival. One of her lovers/victims is a poet (Jack Taylor) who believes the undead countess is meant for him. Prolific exploitation director Jess Franco filmed this influential erotic chiller -- which established Romay (who Franco later married) as an erotic and horror film icon -- on location on Madeira. Blu-ray Release Date: October 16th, 2012

Duck Soup BD - From my favorite Sternberg to my favorite Marx Brothers is less of a leap than it might initially appear to be, especially because both deal with national issues in abstract and rather absurdist terms. Leo McCarey’s only encounter with Chico, Groucho, Harpo, and Zeppo is memorable for many other reasons: it has fewer distractions (i.e., gratuitous musical and romantic sequences) than any of the other Marx Brothers movies, more purely visual delights with links to silent cinema (above all, the sequence with multiple Grouchos), and as a wholesale ridicule of everything that leads to and justifies warfare, it has the most bite as satire as well as the most free-wheeling spirit. Arrow Blu-ray Release Date: June 26th, 2017

Horse Feathers BD - The title means bunk or baloney, a fitting epithet for the Brothers' second screen original for Paramount, where the lads and their writers threw sanity to the winds with a wildly disorganised parody of academic life. Groucho is president of Huxley College, where no student appears to be under thirty-five. Chief subjects on the curriculum seem to be football, sex, the delivery of heinous puns (haddock/headache) and the refurbishing of old vaudeville routines (the biology lecture). The Brothers have never been so chaotic or so aggressively funny. Arrow Blu-ray Release Date: June 26th, 2017

Man Hunt BD - Director Fritz Lang's political thriller follows a British hunter's attempts to outrun Nazi agents after he targets Adolf Hitler. While on holiday in Bavaria, willdlife hunter Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) stumbles upon the Fuhrer's country retreat, eventually spotting Hitler in the gardens. After lining up the leader in the crosshairs of his empty rifle, Thorndike is arrested by members of Hitler's Gestapo bodyguard, who try to beat a confession out of him. After eventually escaping and navigating a tortuous route back to Britain, Thorndike is forced to seek help from local seamstress Jerry Stokes (Joan Bennett) when he discovers German agents are hunting him down. Signal One Blu-ray Release Date: June 19th, 2017

The Indian Fighter BD - A revisionist western before the term was struck, this 1955 film by Andre de Toth begins with a Sioux chief warning that gold prospectors will pollute streams and cause other ecological ruin. Kirk Douglas plays a scout with similar views, but his plan to rendezvous with an Indian girl (Elsa Martinelli) causes him to lead the wagon train he's escorting into a shoot-out. The film's multiple betrayals are typical of de Toth, and his 'Scope imagery, which minimizes close-ups in favor of relatively dark long shots with faces obscured, favors fate over individual will. Blu-ray Release Date: May 9th, 2017

The Mephisto Waltz BD - The Mephisto Waltz is an amazing triumph of style over content. The screen swims in an elegant palette of purples, scarlets, golds, oranges and blues and the sumptuous richness of its set dressings. Paul Wendkos draws a menacing array of imagery – a masque with animal-masked partygoers and a dog wearing a human face, drug-induced nightmares shot through fisheye lenses, and some exquisitely showoffy shots through wine glasses or reflected off the big pendulum of grandfather clock – to often sensational effect. The film develops a palpable aura of evil and lurking menace. There is also an excellent score. Kino Blu-ray Release Date: April 18th, 2017

Assassin For Hire - A taut, noir-ish crime thriller produced by Primetime Emmy nominee and future Avengers lynchpin Julian Wintle, Assassin for Hire stars Sydney Tafler as a hitman who nurtures his younger brother s musical talent with blood money; Ronald Howard is the Scotland Yard inspector who doggedly pursues him using any means at his disposal. DVD Release Date: March 2nd, 2015

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