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Shock Waves
BD - In the dark days of
World War II, the Nazi High Command ordered its scientists to
create a top secret race of indestructible zombie storm
troopers- undead, unfeeling, unstoppable monstrosities that
killed with their bare hands. They were known as The Death
Corps. No member of this horrific SS unit was ever captured by
the Allied Forces and, somewhere off the coast of Florida, they
have survived.
Blu-ray Release Date:
November 25th, 2014
Pete Kelly's Blues
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- Pete Kelly's Blues is
arguably the most stylish of director/star Jack Webb's
theatrical features. Beginning with a brilliantly evocative
pre-credits prologue, wherein we see how WWI vet Pete Kelly
(Webb) came into possession of his precious trumpet, the film
traces Kelly to his 1927 gig at a Kansas City speakeasy. Most of
the film concerns Kelly's efforts to keep his "Big Seven"
aggregation together, his off-and-on romance with socialite Ivy
Conrad (Janet Leigh), and his frequent confrontations with mob
boss Fran McCarg (Edmond O'Brien).
Blu-ray Release Date:
November 4th, 2014
Judgment at Nuremberg
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- Producer-director Stanley
Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), considered by many to be
the legendary filmmaker’s masterpiece, is a grave,
near-documentary attempt to deal with the Holocaust, war crimes,
the complex moral-political impact of the Nuremberg Trials, and
the very nature of justice, itself. With a thoughtful,
intelligent screenplay by Abby Mann (based on his own
award-winning Playhouse 90 television play), the film features
wrenching performances by Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster,
Maximilian Schell, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery
Clift, and Judy Garland.
Blu-ray Release Date: November, 2014
Witness to Murder
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- A woman fights to convince the
police that she witnessed a murder. One sleepless night, Cheryl
Draper (Barbara Stanwyck,
Double Indemnity) witnesses a young woman being
strangled to death in an apartment across the street. She
reports the killing to the police, but when the police arrive
there's no body to be found. The policemen are convinced that
Cheryl probably dreamt the murder and leave ignoring her pleas.
Similar to Alfred Hitchcock's
Rear Window, which opened less than a month later
and overshadowed this top-notch film noir featuring great
direction by Roy Rowland (The
Girl Hunters) and beautiful black-and-white
cinematography by legendary John Alton (He
Walked by Night). Co-starring George Sanders (A
Shot in the Dark) and Gary Merrill (All
About Eve).
Blu-ray Release date: December 2nd,
2014
The Long Goodbye
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- Elliott Gould (Busting)
gives one of his best performances as a quirky, mischievous
Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman's (Thieves
Like Us) fascinating and original send-up of Raymond
Chandler's classic detective story. Co-starring Nina Van
Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell and Henry Gibson with a
screenplay Leigh Brackett (The
Big Sleep), The Long Goodbye is a gloriously
inspired tribute to Hollywood with an ending that's as
controversial as is it provocative. Private eye Philip Marlowe
(Gould) faces the most bizarre case of his life, when a friend's
apparent suicide turns into a double murder involving a sexy
blonde, a disturbed gangster and a suitcase of drug money. But
as Marlowe stumbles toward the truth, he soon finds himself lost
in a maze of sex and deceit - only to discover that in L.A., if
love is dangerous... friendship is murder. Kino Lorber
Blu-ray Release Date: November 25th, 2014
Ida
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- In this austere black-and-white character study
— framed in the boxy aspect ratio of another era — Poland is a
country and culture locked in the twin tragedies of World War II
and postwar communism. As a place painfully suspended in time,
it makes the perfect backdrop for people weighed down by
personal and political histories so heavy and oppressive that
they threaten to crush them not just psychically, but also
physically. Artificial Eye Blu-ray Release date: November
24th, 2014
The Night Porter
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- In this unsettling drama from
Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani, a concentration camp survivor
(Charlotte Rampling) discovers her former torturer and lover
(Dirk Bogarde) working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna.
When the couple attempt to re-create their sadomasochistic
relationship, his former SS comrades begin to stalk them.
Operatic and disturbing, The Night Porter deftly examines the
lasting social and psychological effects of the Nazi regime.
Blu-ray Release Date: December 9th, 2014
Thieves Like Us
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- Perhaps Altman's most persistently
charming film, a remake of Nicholas Ray's
They Live By Night (or rather, second adaptation of
Edward Anderson's novel), in which a trio of semi-competent bank
robbers attempt to emulate the big-time gangsters publicised by
the media, comics, and radio serials, and finally get their
come-uppance after a brief respite from prison and poverty.
Altman adheres to Ray's conception of the youngest criminal
(Carradine) and his plain-Jane lover (Duvall) as innocents all
at sea in an uncaring world, although the tone here is one of
bitter-sweet irony rather than romantic pessimism. And while
casting a critical eye on Depression America, with a New Deal
being promised that would keep democracy safe, there is none of
the cynicism that has occasionally flawed some of Altman's
fascinating genre parodies/tributes. Never portentous, never a
mere spoof, this is a touching, intelligent, and - in its own
small way - rather wonderful movie.
Blu-ray Release Date:
November 25th, 2014
Bunny Lake is Missing
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- Bunny Lake is Missing
(1965) offers us director Otto Preminger’s dark view of a London
less swinging than it is sinister; the script by John and
Penelope Mortimer presents a dodgy kind of thriller, in which
the central damsel in distress (Carol Lynley) — a mother who
claims that her child has been snatched from school — may be
mad, joining the ranks of eccentrics who surround her. Also
starring Keir Dullea as the heroine’s devoted brother, and
Laurence Olivier as a steady-on police inspector, giving one of
the more sneakily larcenous performances of his illustrious
career. The whole film is wrapped in a seductive score by Paul
Glass, available on this Twilight Time release as an isolated
track.
Blu-ray Release Date: November, 2014
The Conformist
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- In Mussolini's Italy, repressed
Jean-Louis Trintignant, trying to purge memories of a youthful,
homosexual episode--and murder--joins the Fascists in a
desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to
his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist
mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an
insane asylum in a stadium; and wife Stefania Sandrelli and
lover Dominique Sanda dancing the tango in a working class hall.
But those are only a few of this political thriller's anthology
pieces, others including Trintignant's honeymoon coupling with
Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their
window; a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary,
glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office; a murder
victim's hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a
wintry forest. Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece, adapted from
the Alberto Moravia novel, boasts an authentic Art Deco look
created by production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a score by
the great Georges Delerue (Contempt,
Jules and Jim, and That Man From Rio) and
breathtaking color cinematography by Vittorio Storaro.
Blu-ray Release Date: November 25th, 2014
Safe
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- Julianne Moore gives a breakthrough
performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late
1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the
doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to
believe that she has frighteningly extreme environmental
allergies. A profoundly unsettling work from the great American
director Todd Haynes, Safe functions on multiple levels: as a
prescient commentary on self-help culture, as a metaphor for the
AIDS crisis, as a drama about class and social estrangement, and
as a horror film about what you cannot see. This revelatory
drama was named the best film of the 1990s in a Village Voice
poll of more than fifty critics.
Blu-ray Release Date:
December 9th, 2014
Diary of a Lost Girl
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- Louise Brooks plays Thymian
Henning, an unprepossessing young woman seduced by an
unscrupulous and mercenary character employed at her father s
pharmacy (played with gusto by Fritz Rasp, the degenerate
villain of such Fritz Lang classics as
Metropolis,
Spione, and
Frau im Mond). After Thymian gives birth to his
child and rejects her family s expectations for marriage, the
baby is stripped from her care, and Thymian enters a purgatorial
reform school that seems less an institute of higher learning
than a conduit for fulfilling the headmistress s sadistic sexual
fantasies.
Blu-ray Release Date: November 24th, 2014
Spione
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- Setting in stone for the first time many
elements of the modern spy thriller, Spione remains
remarkably fresh and captivating over 75 years since its first
release. Lang carefully reveals the elaborate methods of the
spies as they move through his unknown city, no doubt creating a
mirror of troubled Weimar Germany. Made by Lang's own production
company and, like M and Metropolis, written by Lang with his
wife Thea von Harbou, Spione is "the Grandaddy of decades of
intrigue epics. In its rigorous austerity it remains the most
modern of the bunch."
Blu-ray Release Date: November 24th,
2014
Les Blank: Always For Pleasure
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- An uncompromisingly
independent filmmaker, Les Blank made documentaries for nearly
fifty years, elegantly disappearing with his camera into
cultural spots rarely seen on-screen—mostly on the peripheries
of the United States, but also occasionally abroad. Seemingly
off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed, these films are humane,
sometimes wry, always engaging tributes to music, food, and all
sorts of regionally specific delights. This collector’s set
provides a diverse survey of Les Blank’s vast output, including
fourteen of his best-known works and eight related short films.
Blu-ray Release date: November 25th, 2014
The Lusty Men - The titular Lusty Men are rodeo
riders in this modern-day western, assembled with a touch of the
offbeat by director Nicholas Ray. Former rodeo star Robert
Mitchum, disabled by a series of accidents, hobbles back to his
Oklahoma hometown in hopes of replenishing his bank account.
Aspiring bronco-buster Arthur Kennedy hires Mitchum to train him
for an upcoming rodeo, promising that they'll split the
winnings. It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict that Mitchum
will soon fall hard for Kennedy's wife Susan Hayward; she can
take Mitchum or leave him, but decides to take him so that he'll
continue to train Kennedy. After a falling out, Mitchum quits
his job and enters the rodeo himself, hoping to win the prize
from the arrogant Kennedy. He proves he still has what it takes,
but does so at the price of his life. The Lusty Men was
co-adapted by one-time cowboy David Dotort from a Life magazine
story by Claude Stannish. DVD Release Date: November 11th,
2014
Inspector Nardone - Post-war Milan is the ideal breeding
ground for a new wave of criminal activity. A crime-scene that
is very different from what we are used to today: an
old-fashioned system of organized crime, made up of thieves and
outlaws who share a specific moral code, which absolutely
condemns homicide. A new chief officer is assigned to the Milan
Police Department, as if to settle a score for having exposed
his corrupt colleagues. This is just one of the various
difficulties that Mario Nardone, an authentic Neapolitan, must
face in the sophisticated and urbane Milan. A city which,
nevertheless, Nardone loves unconditionally, and where he plans
to bring up his beloved, albeit somewhat neglected, children.
Based on a real figure, Mario Nardone was a true legend in Milan
during the 50 s and 60 s. Straightforward, persistently stubborn
but also endowed with a strong moral code and a great sense of
humanity, Nardone has deep loves; including his long-suffering
family, good cuisine and cracking jokes at every opportunity.
DVD Release Date: October 27th, 2014
Abuse of Weakness - Inspired by director Catherine
Breillat's (FAT
GIRL,
ROMANCE) true life experiences, her latest film,
ABUSE OF WEAKNESS, is an exploration of power and sex.
Isabelle Huppert (THE
PIANO TEACHER,
8 WOMEN) stars as Maud, a strong willed filmmaker
who suffers a stroke. Bedridden, but determined to pursue her
latest film project, she sees Vilko (Kool Shen), a con man who
swindles celebrities, on a TV talk show. Interested in him for
her new film, the two meet and Maud soon finds herself falling
for Vilko's manipulative charm as their parasitic relationship
hurdles out of control. DVD Release Date: November 11th, 2014
5 Fingers - An elegantly witty espionage movie, founded
on fact but no slave to the facts as recounted by German
military attaché LZ Moyzisch in his account (Operation Cicero)
of an Albanian-born valet to the British ambassador in Turkey in
1944 who hawked top secret allied documents to the Germans. In
Mankiewicz's hands, characteristically elaborated into a teasing
rondo of political and sexual intrigue where each new
doublecrossing move is mated by a totally unexpected irony of
fate, the tale becomes an irresistibly dry, cynical comedy of
manners in which the crafty gentleman's gentleman (a marvellous
performance from Mason), scheming to secure the means to promote
himself as a member of the leisured classes, falls victim to his
own pretensions when a beautiful but unprincipled refugee
Countess (the equally marvellous Darrieux) trails a heady
promise of romance across his path. DVD Release Date:
February 13th, 2014
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