Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF July 8th, 2019

ALL CRITERION 50% OFF at B+N HERE

ALL U.S. ARROW also 50% OFF at B+N HERE

MANY CRITERION UP To 43% OFF AMAZON HERE

PATRON BENEFITS PAGE (INCLUDING 700 'bonus' HIGH RESOLUTION CAPTURES UNAVAILABLE ELSEWHERE) SEE HERE FOR DETAILS.

What do you get? OUR Patreon Benefits Page is HERE.

We are talking about a minimum of $0.05, $0.10 - $0.15 a day, perhaps a quarter (or more) to those who won't miss it from their budget. It equates to buying DVDBeaver a coffee once, twice or a few times a month. You can then participate in our monthly Silent auctions. and have exclusive access to many extra High Resolution screen captures - both 4K UHD and Blu-ray (see HERE). NEW AUCTION ITEMS POSTED!

To those that are unfamiliar, Patreon is a secure/verified third-party service where users can agree to a monthly donation via credit card or PayPal by clicking HERE.

OUR Silent Auction ended last night - NEW Auction this week!

Hawn! More impressive Blu-rays reviewed this week by Criterion, Kino.. of films directed by Anthony Mann, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alan J. Pakula, Spike Lee, Agnieszka Holland, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Radford, Jesús Franco, Herbert Brenon and others. Our Calendar has last week's updates of films-to-Blu-ray by directors Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, Alain Resnais, Samuel Fuller, Abbas Kiarostami, Mario Bava, Herbert Wilcox, Leo McCarey, Bertrand Blier, Gerry Anderson, Sylvia Anderson, Manoel de Oliveira, Peter Collinson, Aldo Lado, Derek Jarman, Harold Pinter, Derek Jarman, Carlos Reygadas and more. We also have our Feature Blu-ray and 4K UHD posted for JULY Enjoy!!

LISTING PAGES:

Cinema of Japan, Discs of the Year for 2018, The TOP 100 DISCS, Ingmar Bergman's Cinema, HAGSPloitation, BLAXPloitation, OZPloitation, 'WOMEN IN PRISON' CINEMA, CREATURE-FEATURES (on Blu-ray!), PRE-CODE FILMs (on Blu-ray!), SILENT ERA FILMs (on Blu-ray!), HAMMER Studios (on Blu-ray!) The 100 BEST Neo-Noirs (on Blu-ray!), The GREATEST 100 Westerns (on Blu-ray!), Giallo on Blu-ray!, ESSENTIAL NOIR on Blu-ray!, Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.FR (France), Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.DE (Germany) and our LATEST ARTICLES: Movies From... the End of the World,  The Beauties of Star Trek (TOS)

Feature Blu-ray and 4K UHD chosen for the Month of JULY!

FOLLOW US on TWITTER! (where we post important reviews, contests - prizes, polls, calendar updates - plus much more...)

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

Gary at 2ze dot com

ONE VOICE (not Ellsworth Monkton Toohey): So great to have Alan J. Pakula's Klute on Blu-ray. The Criterion edition is from a 4K restoration and it remains one of the more memorable films of the 70s. Must own. I was thrilled with Michael Radford's Nineteen Eighty-Four brought to Criterion Blu-ray in a 'Director Approved Special Edition'. It is transferred via a "New 4K digital restoration, supervised by cinematographer Roger Deakins" and sports two scores. It is a brilliant visual experience in 1080P. Also getting the Criterion Blu-ray treatment is Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing via an all-new 4K digital restoration and includes a swath of supplements. Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa comes to Blu-ray, also by Criterion. A brilliant and impacting film of an incredibly true story looking and sounding impressive in HD. I finally found a Jess Franco film that I actually liked. Attack of the Robots (Cartes sur table) has a beautiful black and white image on Blu-ray, a fun, sexy, spy adventure spoof and another excellent Tim Lucas commentary included. Don't miss it! Jean-Pierre Melville's Leon Morin, Priest gets a new Blu-ray transfer thanks to Kino. It differs remarkably from the 2011 Criterion and has a new commentary and other supplements. A fabulous viewing experience of love, survival, conflict... I thoroughly enjoyed Peter Pan (1924) on Blu-ray - it is faithful to the timeless J.M. Barrie’s play, both inventive and very engaging and The Kino BD includes a Kat Ellinger commentary. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy traces the postwar history of West Germany in a series of films told from the perspectives of three remarkable women; Veronika Voss, The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola in the brilliance of high-res Blu-ray. Fans of the director should be absolutely thrilled. Anthony Mann's Thunder Bay has James Stewart and Dan Duryea as oil riggers convinced there is black gold at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. It's available in a new Blu-ray transfer from Kino which includes an audio commentary. Le professionnel has Jean-Paul Belmondo as a French spy given the assignment of killing an African dictator. The new Blu-ray advances handily over the old DVDs. It's a highly exciting film worthy of multiple spins.

"Women think in [Douglas] Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly.” ― Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Buy a friend one coffee this month. Make DVDBeaver the friend, and do it monthly. Please? HERE

Peter Pan (1924) BD - Ingeniously capturing the mysteries and wonder of childhood, J.M. Barrie’s timeless play became one of the most popular films of the 1920s. Betty Bronson stars as Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, who charms Wendy (Mary Brian) and her brothers (Philippe De Lacy, Jack Murphy) to fly with him to Never Never land. On this island of dreams and magic, they rescue the Lost Boys from Captain Hook (Ernest Torrence) and his band of pirates, encountering along the way the delightful fairy Tinker Bell (Virginia Browne Faire), a man-eating crocodile, and a band of natives (led by Anna May Wong). Blu-ray Release Date: July 9th, 2019

Attack of the Robots BD - At once an homage to classical Hollywood thrillers and a playful riff on the newly-popular James Bond films, Attack of the Robots (Cartes sur table) stars Eddie Constantine as a wise-cracking superspy investigating a series of assassinations being performed by ruthless killers with bronze skin and horn-rimmed glasses. The trail of these mindless automata leads him to the lair of a seductive villainess (Françoise Brion, L’Immortelle) who has formulated a computer-powered plot to overthrow the governments of Europe. Constantine, who was popular in France for his two-fisted Lemmy Caution films (including Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville), had begun to tire of playing the hardboiled detective, and welcomed the opportunity to take a more light-hearted approach to the genre film. Reflecting director Jess Franco’s passion for jazz (he appears in two scenes as a nightclub pianist), Attack of the Robots has a spontaneity and playfulness that make it one of his most entertaining films, even as it embraces themes of sadomasochism and mind control that were so integral to his work. Blu-ray Release Date: July 16th, 2019

Le professionnel BD - French secret agent Joss Baumont (Belmondo) has been assigned the treacherous task of killing an African president; but, in a series of drastic political changes, the mission is negated. The tables turn on Baumont, as those who assigned him turn him in to the African authorities. Sentenced to long-term imprisonment, Baumont makes a daring escape with the intention of fulfilling the Secret Service’s murderous request as a reprisal and setting up a thrilling showdown. Blu-ray Release Date: July 2nd, 2019

Veronika Voss BD - A once-beloved Third Reich–era starlet, Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) lives in obscurity in postwar Munich. Struggling for survival and haunted by past glories, she encounters sportswriter Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) in a rain-swept park and intrigues him with her mysterious beauty. As their unlikely relationship develops, Robert comes to discover the dark secrets that brought about the decline of Veronika’s career. Based on the true story of a World War II Ufa star, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss is wicked satire disguised as a 1950s melodrama. Blu-ray Release Date: July 9th, 2019

The Marriage of Maria Braun BD - The sublime Hanna Schygulla stars as a plucky frau perennially separated from her husband, first by war, then by prison, and finally by pervasive capitalist malaise. She channels her frustrated romantic energy into the construction of an industrial empire--a plot that mixes love and money in the manner of Mildred Pierce. Though Fassbinder takes a more open attitude toward his characters, letting them exist as fully developed psychological specimens, his deadly irony continues to operate on the level of mise-en-scene, drawing his actors into an unstable world of seductive surfaces and shifting meanings. Fassbinder argues that happiness delayed is happiness denied, tempering the film's emotion with precise analysis. Blu-ray Release Date: July 9th, 2019

Europa Europa BD - As World War II splits Europe, sixteen-year-old German Jew Salomon (Marco Hofschneider) is separated from his family after fleeing with them to Poland, and finds himself reluctantly assuming various ideological identities in order to hide the deadly secret of his Jewishness. He is bounced from a Soviet orphanage, where he plays a dutiful Stalinist, to the Russian front, where he hides in plain sight as an interpreter for the German army, and back to his home country, where he takes on his most dangerous role: a member of the Hitler Youth. Based on the real-life experiences of Salomon Perel, Agnieszka Holland’s wartime tour de force Europa Europa is a breathless survival story told with the verve of a comic adventure, an ironic refutation of the Nazi idea of racial purity, and a complex portrait of a young man caught up in shifting historical calamities and struggling to stay alive. Blu-ray Release Date: July 9th, 2019

1984 BD - This masterly adaptation of George Orwell’s chilling parable about totalitarian oppression gives harrowing cinematic expression to the book’s prophetic dystopia. In a rubble-strewn surveillance state where an endless overseas war props up the repressive regime of the all-seeing Big Brother, and all dissent is promptly squashed, a profoundly alienated citizen, Winston Smith (thrillingly played by John Hurt), risks everything for an illicit affair with the rebellious Julia (Suzanna Hamilton), defiantly asserting his humanity in the face of soul-crushing conformity. Through vividly grim production design and expressionistically desaturated cinematography by Roger Deakins, Michael Radford’s 1984 conjures a bleak vision of postwar Britain as fascistic nightmare—a world all too recognizable as our own. Blu-ray Release Date: July 23rd, 2019

Do the Right Thing BD - Set on one block of Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy Do or Die neighborhood, at the height of summer, this 1989 masterpiece by Spike Lee confirmed him as a writer and filmmaker of peerless vision and passionate social engagement. Over the course of a single day, the easygoing interactions of a cast of unforgettable characters—Da Mayor, Mother Sister, Mister Señor Love Daddy, Tina, Sweet Dick Willie, Buggin Out, Radio Raheem, Sal, Pino, Vito, and Lee’s Mookie among them—give way to heated confrontations as tensions rise along racial fault lines, ultimately exploding into violence. Punctuated by the anthemic refrain of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Do the Right Thing is a landmark in American cinema, as politically and emotionally charged and as relevant now as when it first hit the big screen. Criterion Blu-ray Release Date: July 23rd, 2019

Klute BD - With her Oscar-winning turn in Klute, Jane Fonda reinvented herself as a new kind of movie star. Bringing nervy audacity and counterculture style to the role of Bree Daniels—a call girl and aspiring actor who becomes the focal point of a missing-person investigation when detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland) turns up at her door—Fonda made the film her own, putting an independent woman and escort on-screen with a frankness that had not yet been attempted in Hollywood. Suffused with paranoia by the conspiracy-thriller specialist Alan J. Pakula, and lensed by master cinematographer Gordon Willis, Klute is a character study thick with dread, capturing the mood of early-1970s New York and the predicament of a woman trying to find her own way on the fringes of society. Blu-ray Release Date: July 16th, 2019

Leon Morin, Priest BD - Aiming successfully for a wider audience in 1961, the neglected French independent Jean-Pierre Melville adapted Beatrix Beck's autobiographical novel, set in a French village during World War II, about a young woman falling in love with a handsome, radical young priest who's fully aware of his power over her. For the starring roles Melville, godfather of the New Wave, ironically selected two talented actors catapulted to fame by that movement--Hiroshima, mon amour's Emmanuele Riva and Breathless's Jean-Paul Belmondo. The poetic results are literary and personal; the heroine's offscreen narration suggests the pre-Bressonian form of Melville's first feature, Le silence de la mer, and sudden subjective shots convey the woman's physical proximity to the priest as she undergoes an ambiguous religious conversion. Kino Blu-ray Release Date: July 2nd, 2019

Thunder Bay BD - A storm of excitement swirls around James Stewart in this dynamic tale of adventurous wildcatters searching for black gold in the Gulf of Mexico. Dan Duryea teams with Stewart as a pair of oil prospectors who must stand up to devastating hurricanes, dangerous love affairs and a hostile town of Cajun fishermen to strike pay dirt. The alluring Joanne Dru co-stars as a Louisiana firebrand who fears Stewart’s exploration will destroy her way of life, but can’t help the attraction she feels for the magnetic fortune seeker. The great Anthony Mann directed this explosive adventure yarn with top-notch cinematography by William H. Daniels. The sterling cast includes Gilbert Roland, Jay C. Flippen and Harry Morgan. Blu-ray Release Date: July 9th, 2019
 

Next 2 weeks on the Calendar