Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF July 29th, 2019

END THIS WEEK!

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Seavus More Blu-rays reviewed this week by Criterion, Kino, Shout! Factory, Camera Obscura, Warner Archive, Grindhouse Releasing... of films by Luis Bunuel, Douglas Sirk, Yasujiro Ozu, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Siodmak, Duccio Tessari, Umberto Lenzi etc. .Our Calendar has new updates of films-to-Blu-ray by directors Benjamin Christensen, Leon Gast, John Sayles, John Waters, Richard Linklater, Michael Apted, Robert Aldrich, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Jim Jarmusch, Fred Schepisi, Yorgos Lanthimos, 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!

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ONE VOICE (not Ellsworth Monkton Toohey): Well, Abbas Kiarostami's Koker Trilogy, available in US, Canada and the UK, on Blu-ray by Criterion is quite an evident for world cinema fans. Not readily available on digital or outside of Festivals this 'Earthquake Trilogy' has threads that run together... floating between between fiction and documentary, these three films; Where is the Friend's House?, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees showcase a brilliant director with a unique language. This Blu-ray set is a must-own. Kino bring us two Luis Bunuel film to Blu-ray. The sublime surrealist, skeptic and human critic, is right on form with Death in the Garden and The Milky Way which can be viewed as humor or biting social indictments. Both Blu-rays offer new analytical commentaries and further supplements. Your digital library is superior with there inclusion. Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession gets the Criterion Blu-ray treatment. One of the most successful of Universal's big-budget "tear-jerkers" of the 1950s by a master poetic of the melodrama. A key Giallo, Duccio Tessari's The Bloodstained Butterfly gets a massive video upgrade with Camera Obscura's new Blu-ray. The colors and contrast and remarkably improved - grasping the 'yellow' genre as a first-rate detective thriller cum-courthouse drama. Delicious. Yasujiro Ozu's simple and human Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice come to Criterion Blu-ray and includes the director's 1937 feature What Did the Lady Forget? Fans of Ozu's gentle social dramas should be very pleased at this a/v transfer. Shout! Factory release Universal Horror Vol. 2 that has four early examples from the genre. I've always been a fan of these short and sweet horror efforts, even marginal ones, from the vintage years. There are two commentaries included on the Blu-ray. Umberto Lenzi's The Tough Ones is a pure 'Polizieschi' - a subgenre of crime and action films that emerged in Italy in the late 1960s and reached the height of their popularity in the 1970. Grindhouse Releasing's Blu-ray is totally stacked - one of the most complete packages of the year-to-date. Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross is a Noir masterwork. The Shout! Factory video transfer is 4K-restored, although can look overly soft, but the Blu-ray sports a new commentary. Warner Archive have transferred 1958's very widescreen Frankenstein 1970 with a hammy Boris Karloff to Blu-ray. The film is a tough recommendation on it's own but the fans of this, more innocent, horror-genre era - they might get some fun out of the Blu-ray and there is a commentary which carries value!

[being shot at] “In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you..” ― Abbas Kiarostami

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Where is the Friend's House? BD - The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing Koker Trilogy takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns, aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility. Sensitive and profound, Where Is the Friend’s House? is shot through with all the beauty, tension, and wonder a single day can contain. Blu-ray Release Date: August 27th, 2019

Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice BD - One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice is a sublimely piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle-aged couple, as the wife’s city-bred sophistication bumps up against the husband’s small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change—in the form of her headstrong, modern niece—sweeps over their household. The director’s abiding concern with family dynamics receives one of its most spirited treatments, with a wry, tender humor and buoyant expansiveness that moves the action from the home into the baseball stadiums, pachinko parlors, and ramen shops of postwar Tokyo. Blu-ray Release Date: August 27th, 2019

And Life Goes On BD - In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that left fifty thousand dead, Abbas Kiarostami returned to Koker, where his camera surveys not only devastation but also the teeming life in its wake. Blending fiction and reality into a playful, poignant road movie, And Life Goes On follows a film director who, along with his son, makes the trek to the region in hopes of finding out if the young boys who acted in Where Is the Friend’s House? are among the survivors, and discovers a resilient community pressing on in the face of tragedy. Finding beauty in the bleakest of circumstances, Kiarostami crafts a quietly majestic ode to the best of the human spirit. Blu-ray Release Date: August 27th, 2019

Through the Olive Trees BD - Abbas Kiarostami takes meta­narrative gamesmanship to masterful new heights in the final installment of The Koker Trilogy. Unfolding “behind the scenes” of And Life Goes On, this film traces the complications that arise when the romantic misfortune of one of the actors—a young man who pines for the woman cast as his wife, even though, in real life, she will have nothing to do with him—creates turmoil on set and leaves the hapless director caught in the middle. An ineffably lovely, gentle human comedy steeped in the folkways of Iranian village life, Through the Olive Trees peels away layer after layer of artifice as it investigates the elusive, alchemical relationship between cinema and reality. Blu-ray Release Date: August 27th, 2019

Frankenstein 1970 BD - There's also a Karloff in the house, a fact that makes 1958's Frankenstein 1970 a must-see for savvy fright fans. Twenty-seven years after scaring the daylights out of everyone as the lumbering monster in Frankenstein, Boris Karloff is at the other end of the laboratory switches and gizmos. He's Dr. Victor Frankenstein, an aging, hulking shambles of dignity and menace who agrees to let a TV crew shoot a horror flick at the family castle. The crew members don't know it yet, but they're just what the doctor ordered: fresh body parts, ready for harvesting! Blu-ray Release Date: April 9th, 2019

Magnificent Obsession BD - Reckless playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson, in his breakthrough role) crashes his speedboat, requiring emergency attention from the town’s only resuscitator—at the very moment that beloved local Dr. Phillips has a heart attack and dies waiting for the life-saving device. Thus begins one of Douglas Sirk’s most flamboyant master classes in melodrama, a delirious Technicolor mix of the sudsy and the spiritual in which Bob and the doctor’s widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), find themselves inextricably linked amid a series of increasingly wild twists, turns, trials, and tribulations. For this release, Criterion also presents John M. Stahl’s 1935 film version of the Lloyd C. Douglas novel, starring Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor. Criterion Blu-ray Release Date: August 20th, 2019

Criss Cross BD - Robert Siodmak was one of the most influential stylists of the 40s, helping to create, in films such as Phantom Lady and The Killers, the characteristic look of American film noir. But most of his films have nothing more than their pictorial qualities to recommend them--Criss Cross being one of the few exceptions, an archly noir story replete with triple and quadruple crosses, leading up to one of the most shockingly cynical endings in the whole genre. Shout! Factory Blu-ray Release Date: July 22nd, 2019

Universal Horror Vol. 2 BD - Undertake four tales of terror from the archives of Universal Pictures, the home of classic horror! This collection includes such horror stars as Lionel Atwill, George Zucco, David Bruce and Evelyn Ankers. A maniacal hunter and collector of wild animals uses them to dispose of rivals and enemies in Murders in the Zoo. An unhinged scientist flees the San Francisco police and continues his bizarre experiments on a remote tropical island in The Mad Doctor of Market Street. A mysterious avenger is murdering acquitted criminals while dabbling in brain transplants in The Strange Case of Doctor Rx. And a doctor's experiments with nerve gas turn his assistant into a grave-robbing freak in The Mad Ghoul. Blu-ray Release Date: July 22nd, 2019

The Bloodstained Butterfly BD - When a young female student is savagely killed in a park during a thunderstorm, the culprit seems obvious: her lover, TV sports personality Alessandro Marchi (Giancarlo Sbragia, Death Rage), seen fleeing the scene of the crime by numerous eyewitnesses. The evidence against him is damning... but is it all too convenient? And when the killer strikes again while Marchi is in custody, it quickly becomes apparent that there s more to the case than meets the eye... Camera Obscura Blu-ray Release Date: July 10th, 2019

The Tough Ones BD - Umberto Lenzi kicked off the Italian police film craze with this hyper-kinetic, ultra-violent, brain-blasting action thriller. Maurizio Meril stars as an Italian DIRTY HARRY, punching and shooting his way through the sleazy drug, sex and crime infested cesspool of mid-'70s Rome, on the trail of a sadistic, machine gun-toting hunchback, played by Tomas Milian. Blu-ray Release Date: July 9th, 2019

The Milky Way BD - While arch surrealist Luis Bunuel never made a secret of his skepticism about the existence of God, he was also raised as a strict Spanish Catholic and remained fascinated with the church's teaching throughout his life, and his obsessions with both faith and the contradictions of dogma provided the basis for this episodic satiric comedy. Jean (Laurent Terzieff) and Pierre (Paul Frankeur) are two threadbare vagabonds who are making their way from Paris to Spain on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of Saint James are believed to be kept. While Jean and Pierre's journey begins in the 20th Century, as they travel they seemingly develop the ability to move through time and space as they pass through a variety of historical scenes taken from a broad range of theological texts -- and all involving heresy in one form or another. Blu-ray Release Date: July 23rd, 2019

Death in the Garden BD - Amid a revolution in a South American mining outpost, a band of ill-starred fugitives-a roguish adventurer (Georges Marchal), a local hooker (Simone Signoret), a priest (Michel Piccoli), an aging diamond miner (Charles Vanel) and his def-mute daughter-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. Shot in brilliant Eastmancolor and featuring a star-studded cast, Death in the Garden is a pulsating adventure film, alive with Surrealist gestures, making it classic Luis Buñuel. Blu-ray Release Date: July 23rd, 2019
 

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