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Star Trek: The Animated Series
BD - Star Trek: The Animated
Series is often referred to as Star Trek's "fourth season"
because it was created in 1973, four years after the third and
final season of the original series, and because most of the
original cast provided the voices. William Shatner, Leonard
Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George
Takei, and Majel Barrett reprised their characters, and some
contributed other voices as well. The only major omission was
Walter Koenig's Chekov, who was replaced at the navigation
console by Lieutenant Arex, the three-armed alien who most
prominently represented the series' freedom to create
non-humanoid characters. (Koenig did write an episode.) And
while the animation is crude at best, the stories are solid
sci-fi (penned by some of Star Trek's veteran writers including
DC Fontana and David Gerrold, all of whom received prominent
opening credits), explored the Star Trek mythos, and elevated
the series above typical Saturday-morning fare.
Blu-ray
Release Date: November 15th-28th, 2016
The Chase (1966)
BD - The Chase consequently boasts a formidable
pedigree on all fronts. It was adapted–in theory at least–by
Lillian Hellman from Horton Foote's novel and play though it was
reportedly taken out of Hellman's hands early and rewritten
extensively. The legendary Sam Spiegel produced and Penn had
already developed an impressive reputation thanks to his
television work and films like The Miracle Worker. Then there's
the cast: Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Robert
Duvall, James Fox, Angie Dickinson, E.G Marshall and even a
young Paul Williams, who looks disconcertingly like a lesbian
midget in one of his earliest roles. Blu-ray Release date:
October, 2016
The Human Condition
BD - Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist
drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese
cinema. Originally filmed and released in three parts, the
nine-and-a-half-hour The Human Condition (Ningen no joken),
adapted from Junpei Gomikawa’s six-volume novel, tells of the
journey of the well-intentioned yet naive Kaji (handsome
Japanese superstar Tatsuya Nakadai) from labor camp supervisor
to Imperial Army soldier to Soviet POW. Constantly trying to
rise above a corrupt system, Kaji time and again finds his
morals an impediment rather than an advantage. A raw indictment
of its nation’s wartime mentality as well as a personal
existential tragedy, Kobayashi’s riveting, gorgeously filmed
epic is novelistic cinema at its best. Blu-ray Release Date:
September 19th, 2016
Burial Ground
BD - Italian zombie flick with more than its fair
share of good times. When a scientist unearths the tombs of the
dead, walking stiffs rise en masse to plague the visitors of a
nearby estate. What does each side have going for it? Let's
see...the living have poor organization, misplanning, bad
timing, but lots of running around screaming. The zombies have
teamwork, ingenuity, and loads of patience. Highlights include a
homemade masectomy, and the zombies' one-two punch on the
household maid. And Peter Bark wins the award for
creepiest-looking child this side of the Tiber River. Severin
Films Blu-ray Release Date: October 25th 2016
Runaway Train
BD - Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky's second
American film may well be the only existential adventure flick
in Hollywood history. Two prisoners, Manny (Jon Voight) and Buck
(Eric Roberts), escape from a desolate Alaskan maximum-security
facility. They hop aboard a speeding train, making a clean
escape. But the engineer has suffered a heart attack, and the
train goes out of control. To prevent a disastrous head-on
collision, the railroad heads decide to derail the runaway
train, killing its occupants to save the lives of hundreds of
others. Once Manny catches on to what's happening, he tries to
jump off the train, only to be talked out of such a foolhardy
act by railroad employee Sara (Rebecca DeMornay). As doom
approaches, Manny apparently goes mad, viciously preventing any
attempts to stop the train or rescue its passengers: if he's to
die, and if the others are to be saved, it will be on his terms,
or no terms. Runaway Train was slated as a project for Akira
Kurosawa in 1970, but for various creative and scheduling
reasons, it remained on the back burner for 15 years.
Twilight Time Blu-ray Release date: October, 2016
Boxcar Bertha
BD - Boxcar Bertha, Martin
Scorsese's first studio film for Hollywood, shot on the limited
budget of $600,000, is slightly better than its formulaic
offering. It comes off as a fair imitation of the recent box
office smash
Bonnie and Clyde. This impersonal Scorsese project,
based on the memoirs of the real Boxcar Bertha Thompson, shuns
anything heavy or smacking of politics, and instead concentrates
on the farcical nature of the work. There are set comedy and
almost hard-core sex pieces, that seemed more commercially
intended than artistic. This is not one of Scorsese's stronger
films. But it gets by on the charms of its stars, Barbara
Hershey and David Carradine, and it's filled with the latest
cinematic tricks such as quick fades and dreamy soft-focuses.
There are also some breezy characters who are easy to handle and
add a certain corny charm. It gets away with its mix of hayseed
comedy antics and some bloodshed, as it all appears as harmless
fun until the murders start coming-- culminating in, of all
things, a crucifixion. Twilight Time Blu-ray Release date:
October, 2016
Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte
BD - When he successfully
teamed fading film goddesses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), director Robert Aldrich
kicked off a cinema cycle waggishly referred to as "Grand Dame Guignol," wherein aging leading ladies reclaimed the box-office
clout of their youth by headlining shock films that were
modestly budgeted and, by the prevailing standards of the day,
surprisingly lurid. First to capitalize was Aldrich himself, who
sought to reunite Davis and Crawford for another adaptation from
the oeuvre of Baby Jane author Henry Farrell. Crawford would
bolt in mid-production, and Olivia de Havilland hurriedly signed
as a replacement. Still, the finished product, Hush...Hush,
Sweet Charlotte (1963), stands as one of the better examples of
the genre... Twilight Time Blu-ray Release date: October,
2016
Stella Cadente - Stella Cadente (in English
Falling Star ), Lluís Mińarro s lavish, lascivious story of the doomed Spanish
King Amadeo I in the early 1870s, is unlike any cinematic
historical portrait before it. Taking this little-known episode
of Spanish history, the film functions as a metaphor for
contemporary Spain and by extension, Europe - and its ongoing
state of crisis. Both historical film and camp melodrama, this
richly layered film is suffused with absurdist asides, surreal
interludes and sexually explicit reverie. Its bold and beautiful
tableaux are filled with casual references to art and
literature, colourfully and radiantly filmed by Jimmy Gimferrer
(cameraman for fellow Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra, among
others). Wonderfully performed, sumptuously designed, sometimes
shocking and playfully anarchic, Stella Cadente is one of the
most original and transcendent works to emerge in contemporary
European cinema. DVD Release Date: October 31st, 2016
Sleepers - The Complete Series - Amidst the thaw of glasnost,
the Kremlin discovers that two Soviet agents, sent to England
under deep cover in 1965, have been "lost." A beautiful and
ambitious Russian agent, sent to London to track them down,
becomes embroiled in a tangle of CIA, KGB and MI-5 plots and
counter-plots as the two lost agents, now utterly assimilated,
try to avoid detection. DVD Release Date: October 24th, 2016
Meet the Wife - Plumber Freddie Blacklock lives with his wife
Thora in the north of England. Freddie is a down-to-earth bloke
who likes to take things easy whereas his wife has ambitions for
the couple to improve their social standing. Snobbish Thora
often put on a 'posh voice' in an attempt to impress those she
was speaking to. One of the BBC's earliest domestic sitcoms,
Meet the Wife affectionately dissects the trials and comforts of
mid-life marriage after the kids have flown the nest. Written by
Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe, and running to five seasons
from 1960 to 1966, the series was immortalised in The Beatles'
'Good Morning, Good Morning': It's time for tea and Meet the
Wife. DVD Release Date: October 24th, 2016
Tandoori Nights - Saeed Jaffrey (My Beautiful Laundrette) stars
in this spicy, groundbreaking Channel 4 comedy about an
embattled curry house owner and his wayward family. Jimmy Sharma
(Jaffrey) is making a comfortable living running upscale Indian
restaurant The Jewel in the Crown until one of his ex-waiters
opens rival outlet The Far Pavilions right across the street.
The new place may be downmarket, with flock wallpaper and chips
on the menu, but Jimmy's takings soon take a hit. Jimmy is both
supported and given the runaround by his feisty daughters Asha
(Rita Wolf) and Bubbly (Shelley King), who in turn are watched
over by a domineering Gran (Zohra Segal) whose dearest wish is
of course to marry each of them off to a suitable boy. Created
by prolific writer, producer and activist Farrukh Dhondy, and
producer and co-founder of Picture Palace Films, Malcolm
Craddock, the series addresses provocative issues around sexual
and racial equality, and takes a wry look at interracial
tensions between London's Indian and Bangladeshi communities,
sassy, politicised Asian women, mixed-race relationships and
grasping business methods. First broadcast in 1985, and now on
DVD for the first time, the series is also notable for featuring
two episodes written by a 20-something Meera Syal. DVD
Release Date: October 24th, 2016 |
