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The Time Machine
BD - Set in the Victorian era, George
Pal's production of The Time Machine (1960) is a faithful
adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel in most respects except one -
it omits the author's cynical observations about the British
class system. Yet it's the main premise that has captivated
audiences for years: A scientist (Rod Taylor) creates a
time-traveling machine that carries him forward into the year
802,701 where he finds a strange new world populated by the
Elois, a passive, peace-loving race, and their predators, the
Morlocks, a cannibalistic tribe that lives underground and is
light sensitive. Blu-ray Release Date: July 8th, 2014
Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid
BD - The film stars William
Powell as Arthur Peabody, who is undergoing a mid-life crisis as
he approaches his 50th birthday. Much of the story is shown in
flashback as Peabody tells his skeptical doctor the source of
malaise. Peabody goes on vacation with his wife Polly (Irene
Hervey) to a Caribbean resort. While there, he hears singing
coming from a distant key (small island) and takes his boat to
do a little fishing. To his surprise, he reels in Lenore, a
beautiful mermaid played by Ann Blyth. Although mute, Lenore is
mischievous and childlike and more than a little bit alluring –
so much so that before long Peabody has taught her to kiss.
Blu-ray Release Date: July 8th, 2014
Point Blank
BD - Lee Marvin is the unstoppable Walker,
cheated out of $40,000 and left for dead by his treacherous
business partner and ex-wife. He’ll stop at nothing to recover
his loot, leaving a bloody trail in his wake as he ploughs
through the various levels of the shady Organization in search
of an elusive Mr Big. Countless British directors have headed
west to Hollywood, but Boorman’s vision of America in general,
and Los Angeles in particular, has never been surpassed. LA
becomes a vital character in the plot, a tough, flashy
background for the brutal machinations of Marvin and his prey.
Blu-ray Release Date: July 8th, 2014
The Man From Laramie
BD - Once again Anthony Mann
creates a classic tale of the old West with complex characters
and rugged, primitive justice. Will Lockhart is a strong man -
not looking for trouble, but certainly not afraid to confront
it. This, Anthony Mann's fifth and final collaboration with
Stewart is another quintessential revenge story with beautiful
New Mexico vistas as the backdrop. Blu-ray Release Date:
June, 2014
The Train
BD - Discount some self-conscious talk about
Art as a national heritage, as well as clumsy dubbing of the
supporting cast, and you have a rattling good thriller about a
World War II German general (Scofield) determined to flee Paris
just before the liberation with a trainload of Impressionist
paintings. One obsession runs headlong into another as a French
railway inspector (Lancaster), once unwillingly started out in
opposition, finds he cannot stop, and must go on finding new
ways and means of delaying the train for an hour here, a day
there. In Frankenheimer's hands, the whole paraphernalia of
trains, tracks and shunting yards acquires an almost hypnotic
fascination as the screen becomes a giant chessboard on which
huge metallic pawns are manoeuvred, probing for some fatal
weakness but seemingly engaged in some deadly primeval struggle.
Blu-ray Release Date: June, 2014
The Mechanic
BD - Director Michael Winner’s The
Mechanic (1972) stars his long-term collaborator, the sui
generis Charles Bronson, as a hardened professional hitman who’s
feeling the strains of his profession. He joins forces with a
ruthless up-and-comer (Jan-Michael Vincent) in a partnership
that wavers between sustaining and profoundly dangerous. The
Twilight Time Blu-ray Release Date: June, 2014
I Vinti (The Vanquished)
BD - Commonly and to some
extent unjustly written off as a failure, in part because of
alterations imposed by censorship pressures that marred the
first two episodes, Michelangelo Antonioni's daring second
feature (1952), originally released in England as Youth and
Perversion, consists of three separate sketches chronicling
senseless murders committed by young men in France, Italy, and
England--a contemporary existentialist document that could
almost have been co-scripted by Albert Camus. What's most
striking in all three parts of the film is the integration of
incident with landscape without psychologizing--something of an
Antonioni staple--and the last and best segment strikingly
anticipates Blowup by offering not only a corpse found in a park
but a tennis match glimpsed in the final shot. Jean-Pierre Mocky,
later a New Wave director, plays one of the French youths in the
first section, and Fay Compton plays the murder victim in the
last. Blu-ray Release Date: July 8th, 2014
Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 + 2
BD - Nymphomaniac is the
wild and poetic story of a woman's journey from birth to the age
of 50 as told by the main character, the self-diagnosed
nymphomaniac, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg). On a cold winter's
evening the old, charming bachelor, Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard),
finds Joe beaten up in an alley. He brings her home to his flat
where he cares for her wounds while asking her about her life.
He listens intently as Joe over the next 8 chapters recounts the
lusty, branched-out and multifaceted story of her life, rich in
associations and interjecting incidents. Magnolia
Blu-ray
Release Date: July 8th, 2014
Bloody Birthday
BD - Three babies are simultaneously
born in the same hospital at the peak of a full solar eclipse.
Ten years later, these adorable youngsters suddenly begin a kiddie killing spree of stranglings, shootings, stabbings,
beatings and beyond. Can the town's grown-ups stop these
pint-sized serial killers before their blood-soaked birthday
bash? K.C. Martel (E.T., Growing Pains), Joe Penny (Jake
And The Fat Man), Michael Dudikoff (American Ninja),
screen legends Susan Strasberg and José Ferrer... Severin
Blu-ray Release date: July 8th, 2014, 88 Films
Blu-ray
Release date: July 8th, 2014
It Always Rains on Sundays
BD - So this is modern life,
warts and all. A snapshot of working-class reality over 24
hours. But what makes ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’ special
is its humour and energy. The thriller element is taut and
clear, and the comedy is served sparingly but pointedly: ‘Nice
weather for ducks and aspidistras,’ quips a neighbour as Rose
tries to hide her fugitive. There are no lessons learned, no
easy answers. You feel next Sunday could be just the same for
someone across the street. A real gem. Blu-ray Release date:
November 12th, 2012
Enemy
BD - Enemy, based on José Saramago’s 2002
novel The Double, is about Adam’s obsessive stalking and
pursuit of his mysterious doppelganger, a kind of existential
detective mystery that plunges straight into the deep end of
murky psychic disintegration. Best to take a deep breath before
immersing yourself in Denis Villeneuve’s (Incendies,
Prisoners) extended exercise in suggestive,
first-person paranoia, because it never comes up for air.
Blu-ray Release date: June 24th, 2014
So, This Is New York
BD - Radio humorist Henry Morgan
made his film debut in So This is New York. Based on
The Big Town, a collection of stories by Ring Lardner, the
film traces country bumpkin Morgan's progress as he uses an
inheritance to take a trip with his wife Virginia Grey and
sister-in-law Dona Drake to the New York of the 1910s. He
encounters numerous oddball characters, the most colorful of
which is a drunken jockey Leo Gorcey. The boxer and at least
four other Broadwayites Hugh Herbert, Rudy Vallee, Bill Goodwin
and Jerome Cowan complicate Morgan's life when they court his
wife's sister--most of them hoping for a slice of that
inheritance. Blu-ray Release date: July 1st, 2014
Rapture
BD - Rapture (1965) is a dark fairy tale:
set against the rugged beauty of the Brittany seacoast, it tells
the story of a young girl (Patricia Gozzi) whose lonely
isolation under the watchful eye of her stern and bitter father
(Melvyn Douglas) is abruptly shattered by the arrival of a
seductive fugitive from the law (Dean Stockwell). With stunning
CinemaScope images from director John Guillermin and
cinematographer Marcel Grignon. Eureka Blu-ray Release Date:
July 28th, 2014
Bloody Moon
BD - As the body-count genre stabbed its way
into audiences hearts in the early 80s, EuroTrash auteur Jess
Franco (Sadomania, Mansion Of The Living Dead) was asked to
create his own saga of slaughtered schoolgirls complete with
gratuitous nudity, graphic violence, and gory set pieces. But
just when you thought you'd seen it all, Franco shocked the
world by delivering surprising style, genuine suspense and a
cavalcade of depravity that includes incest, voyeurism and
roller disco. Blu-ray Release date: July 8th, 2014
The Baby
BD - TV-movie perennial Ted Post served as
director for the low-budget theatrical feature The Baby. Ruth
Roman plays a boozy nutcase who, out of hatred for the husband
who ran out on her years earlier, forces her teenaged son (David Manzy) to dress and behave like an infant. Social worker Ann
Gentry (Anjanette Comer), understandably put off by the sight of
a fully grown boy chewing on his toes in a playpen, sets about
to rescue him. When sinister forces try to claim the "baby" from
Ann, she resorts to murder. Blu-ray Release date: July 8th,
2014
Cousin Jules
BD - This unusual documentary chronicles
five years in the grim, silent life of an elderly French couple
(the husband was nearly eighty). In it, not one word is spoken.
They live in a rural area, and the film follows their daily
routine in extraordinary detail. Though the man's wife died
during the filming, the filmmakers continued and show the old
man doing his chores alone, awaiting his own death.
Blu-ray
Release date: June 3rd, 2014
The Rocket
BD - Laos: A ten year old boy, Ahlo, who is
believed to bring bad luck, is blamed for a string of disasters.
When his family loses their home and are forced to move, Ahlo
meets the spirited orphan Kia and her eccentric uncle Purple: an
ex-soldier with a purple suit, a rice-wine habit and a fetish
for James Brown. Struggling to hang on to his father s trust,
Ahlo leads his family, Purple and Kia through a land scarred by
war in search of a new home. In a last plea to try and prove he
s not cursed, Ahlo builds a giant explosive rocket to enter the
most lucrative but dangerous competition of the year: the Rocket
Festival. As the most bombed country in the world shoots back at
the sky, a boy will reach to the heavens for forgiveness.
Blu-ray Release date: June 30th, 2014
Operation Petticoat
BD - After the end of WWII, Adm.
Matt Sherman (Cary Grant) reads over his log from the USS Sea
Tiger, the submarine he captains. Sherman is about to turn over
the command of the sub to Lt. Nick Holden (Tony Curtis), who is
assigned to squire it until it is destroyed and replaced by a
nuclear vessel. The movie unwinds in flashback as Sherman
recalls some of the events in the sub's life--particularly how
that life was renewed when he became determined to raise the Sea
Tiger in the wake of an attack in Manila Bay.
Blu-ray Release date: July 1st,
2014
The Past
BD - Following a four-year separation, Ahmad
returns to Paris from Tehran, upon his French wife Marie's
request, in order to finalize their divorce procedure. During
his stay, Ahmad quickly discovers the conflicting nature of
Marie's relationship with her daughter, Lucie. But Ahmad's
attempts to build bridges between the two soon begin to encroach
on Marie's new partner, Samir (Tahar Rahim,
A Prophet), and as tensions begin to mount it soon
becomes clear that the past is only close behind.
Blu-ray
Release date: June 9th, 2014
Birds, Orphans and Fools - Shot immediately after the
Soviet invasion of 1968, Jakubisko's long-repressed feature
focuses on the the three-way relationship that develops between
two male friends and a female Jewish orphan as they travail a
world ravaged by death and destruction, a war-torn landscape of
bombed-out churches and wrecked homes occupied, it seems, only
by themselves and birds. Their triangular relationship recalls
Truffaut's Jules et Jim, but Jakubisko's heroes have no romantic
ideals - they are all orphans, products of an absurd world in
which their parents killed each. DVD Release Date: June 23rd.
2014
Noose For a Lady - Simon Gale returns from Uganda to
find his cousin, Margaret, has been convicted of poisoning her
husband, and her execution is only seven days away. Refusing to
believe in her guilt, Simon and Margaret's stepdaughter Jill set
out to find the real killer, questioning everyone remotely
connected with the dead man. As far as Simon is concerned,
everyone is a suspect, and when the man who had promised him
vital information is found poisoned, he believes he has solved
the mystery... DVD Release Date: May 5th, 2014 |
