Mafioso

Nino Badalamenti is a supervisor in a car manufacturing plant who hasn't taken a vacation in over two years. On his way out the door to visit his beloved childhood hometown of Sicily -- with his blonde wife and daughters -- Nino is handed a package by his boss and asked to deliver it to a powerful and influential Sicilian gangster named Don Vincenzo. Once in Sicily, Nino has a hoot seeing friends and family, but his wife has trouble fitting in and is unfairly dismissed as a snob by Nino's family. Even more worrisome, Nino finds himself entangled in an intricate web of secret mafioso dealings and is eventually sent on an unexpectedly... elaborate errand.

Okay, I know that plot synopsis leaves a lot to be desired, but Mafioso...Read More

There Will Be Blood
2-Disc Collector's Edition

As rich, daring, detailed, emotional, complex, and original as any film released in 2007, There Will Be Blood is that rare film that actually earns the label "instant classic." Unlike its gloriously cinematic (but inferior) awards season rival, No Country For Old Men -- which is marred by one-too-many goofy supporting characters, several structural mishaps, and an overall sensibility that feels slight by comparison -- There Will Be Blood is a film that proudly depicts real, flawed, contradictory, and mysterious people living in the real world with none of the Coens' winking detachment or genre shortcuts. While most filmmakers are content to play around with the same old tricks, Paul Thomas Anderson is quietly inventing a new cinematic language.

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Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals

Fans of classical Hollywood comedy appropriately revere Ernst Lubitsch as one of the greatest and most influential comic directors of all time. Billy Wilder had a sign in his office that asked "what would Lubitsch do?" and, while Lubitsch's influence isn't always evident in today's comedies, few of the great Hollywood comedies of recent decades would have been possible without the Lubitsch-influenced work of Wilder. Familiar with Lubitsch's numerous comedy classics (Ninotchka, Trouble in Paradise, and The Shop Around the Corner...Read More

4 by Agnes Varda

One major weakness of the auteur theory is its tendency to engender career-wide support (or dismissal) of a director based on a few celebrated works, rather than encourage a more thorough consideration that takes into account their most eccentric, personal, and disreputable efforts. This has an averaging effect, leaving canonical films overpraised and much greater achievements undervalued or even forgotten. If aspiring Godard fans are taught to reduce his filmography to Breathless, Masculin feminin, and Contempt (great films, one and all), they could very well miss the even more innovative and radical work found in Les Carabiniers, Pierrot le fou, Weekend, and Tout va bien. Auteurism blurs films together and prevents individual films from receiving the scrutiny that their unique efforts deserve.

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Two-Lane Blacktop

Eight or nine years ago, Monte Hellman's reputation was a bit of a mess. He hadn't made a film in ages and his most recent effort was the third entry in the increasingly forgettable Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise. It was around this time that Anchor Bay issued Two-Lane Blacktop on DVD for the first time, instantly reviving Hellman's rep and opening the floodgates for a series of wonderful Monte Hellman special editions, including The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind, Cockfighter, and Iguana. The latter two were also Anchor Bay releases. Hell, they even released the Shaw Brothers/Hammer Films co-production Shatter with a commentary by Hellman, even though his work on that film was uncredited.

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Help!

Once upon a time, boys and girls, there were these mopheads from Liverpool. They made these songs that made everybody happy. Then these men in suits said, "There's even more gold in them there boys." And a movie was begat real fast cause everybody knew they were flashes-in-the-pan. An American expatriate, Richard Lester, was chosen to make it because he had made It's Trad, Dad! and knew all about quickly fading musical fads. And behold, A Hard Day's Night was a masterpiece and everybody was very, very happy. And the suits said, "Dick, do it again" and Help! was born. It also made people happy... but not as happy.

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Shoot the Moon

Marriages disintegrate every day and, while there have been many movies about this subject, most are trite or hysterical or both. Despite some melodramatic touches, Shoot the Moon -- the 1982 film written by Bo Goldman, directed by Alan Parker, and famously praised by Pauline Kael -- is neither. George Dunlap (Albert Finney) is an award-winning writer living in northern Marin County, California with his wife, Faith (Diane Keaton), and their four daughters (Dana Hill, Viveka Davis, Tracey Gold, and Tina Yothers). The movie begins with the Dunlap marriage obviously strained and, following an argument, George leaves to live with his mistress, Sandy (Karen Allen).

The rest of Shoot the Moon...Read More

Becoming John Ford

Nick Redman's Becoming John Ford is intended as a supplement to the massive 24-film Ford at Fox set. Aimed at those who already believe in Ford's greatness, it has some deficiencies -- primarily random comments that seem divorced from any context -- but Becoming John Ford is generally a pleasant way to spend 93 minutes. The commentators are Joseph McBride (author of Searching for John Ford), Rudy Behlmer (editor of Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck...Read More

Blades of Glory [HD DVD]

As you may already know, Paramount (and Dreamworks) no longer caters to the Blu-ray crowd. Instead of supporting both high-def formats, the studio has decided to release their catalogue exclusively on HD DVD. Whether or not this was a rational business decision (probably not) or bribery (probably), the much-anticipated high-definition release of Blades of Glory was, at the eleventh hour, cancelled for Blu-ray. At the time, this may have seemed like a minor triumph for HD DVD supporters, but now that Warner has jumped ship, it's little more than a punchline.

In spite of the last minute recall of the Blades of Glory...Read More

Music For the Movies: The Hollywood Sound, Bernard Hermann, Georges Delerue, and Toru Takemitsu

These four 1990s documentaries attempt to give the layman some understanding of how film scores work. One does so magnificently, while the others have problems, though each has something for anyone interested in the history of movie music. Such a person should watch the four in the following order.

Joshua Waletsky's The Hollywood Sound...Read More

Pretty Things

The main reason to see Pretty Things is Marion Cotillard. If you've seen her in La Vie en rose, you know she's a terrific, possibly great actress. Pretty Things offers the chance to see her tackle a similar role six years earlier and she's almost equally riveting. Written and directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, Pretty Things is the story of identical twins (both played by Cotillard) with opposite personalities. Lucie is carefree and outgoing, the favorite of her father (Olivier Granier), while Marie is withdrawn and considered ugly by la pere. Naturally, Lucie becomes a coke-sniffing nympho, running off to Paris to do anything she can to survive, including performing in a porno film.

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Macbeth (2006)

With the notable exception of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Shakespeare's Macbeth has had a rather spotty film history. Welles' 1948 version is compromised by budgetary restrictions. In Roman Polanski's 1971 adaptation, the violence is handled wel l-- big surprise, huh? -- and then there's Francesca Annis' nifty nude stroll down a corridor. Which brings us to Geoffrey Wright's 2006 endeavor, which relocates the setting to contemporary Australia and changes the characters to gangsters. As might be expected from the director of Romper Stomper, Wright's take is heavy on the old ultraviolence.

Re-imagining Shakespeare's characters as criminals is nothing new. Men of Respect...Read More

Chinatown and The Two Jakes

We all know where we stand on Chinatown and The Two Jakes. For many of us, Chinatown is one of the landmark American films -- and arguably the summit of director Roman Polanski's distinguished career -- while The Two Jakes is its flawed, but occasionally worthwhile successor (sadly, the latter film's commercial failure prevented Robert Towne and Jack Nicholson from making their planned third installment in the series). But I'm not here to write about the films, I'm here to write about the new DVDs. On the surface, this appears to be a pointless double-dip, designed to cash-in on a new pair of matching DVD covers. And yes, to some extent, that's precisely what this is. However, short list of supplements notwithstanding, these discs offer a bounty of fascinating new material.

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Hostel: Director's Cut and Hostel: Part II [BLU-RAY]

Many of you probably own or have experienced the more than satisfactory uncut DVD incarnation of Hostel that was released in April '06. There is likely no need at all to upgrade to the director's cut (I guess there's a difference between director's cut and uncut) unless of course you're planning on picking it up on Blu-ray. The sum of a better transfer, slightly crisper audio, an optional (but arguably inferior) alternate ending, and a handful of new extras -- including 19 minutes of very decent deleted/extended scenes, a Takashi Miike interview, four brief featurettes, and a not-brief-enough clip of Eythor Gudjonsson (who plays Oli) eating a cooked sheep's head, eyeball included -- make this release totally worthwhile for any self-respecting fan. And if you haven't seen Hostel...Read More

Poltergeist

Released only one week prior to E.T., Poltergeist (not to be confused with Troma's Poultrygeist) is a pretty unique marriage of family-friendly spooks and disturbingly grown-up frights. What kind of a family film features a man ripping his own melting face off in gruesome -- albeit horrendously low-budget -- detail? Okay, so it was just a guy's hallucination of ripping his facial flesh off, but it's still enough to scare the bejesus out of anyone under the double digit demographic, which was roughly my age when first experiencing this film. Another thing that you'll also likely never see again is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Tobe Hooper directing a feature co-written and produced by Steven Spielberg (there has also been speculation that he ghost-directed much of the film). And don't even get me started on the Poltergeist...Read More

From Beyond

From Beyond is one of the most outlandishly gruesome good movies I've ever seen. Reuniting most of the cast and crew from Stuart Gordon's critically acclaimed cult classic debut, Re-Animator -- including producer Brian Yuzna, stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, and Gordon's favorite literary source, H.P. Lovecraft -- From Beyond failed to have the impact of its predecessor, either critically or commercially. This is due in large part to the MPAA's hostility toward Gordon (they were mad because he and Yuzna dared to release Re-Animator unrated), which resulted in a theatrical cut of From Beyond that featured little of the surreal excess that inspired Gordon to make the film in the first place. Sadly, the deleted footage was lost and it seemed that the real From Beyond...Read More

Who Can Kill a Child?

For the first time in North America, Quien Puede Matar A un Nino? (aka Island of the Damned, aka Who Can Kill A Child?) is available on DVD uncut and uncensored. This is an unusually complex and disturbing Spanish horror movie from director Narcious Ibanez Serrador. The film opens with several minutes of newsreel footage highlighting the suffering of real children at the hands of adults. We see images of children being brutalized in Nazi Germany, burned in Vietnam, and starved-to-death in Africa, which is difficult to watch -- and arguably exploitative -- but serves two important functions. First, this answers the film's title-question in a rather potent way. Who can kill a child? We all can. We are all complicit, to varying degrees. Second, it offers a sort of twisted defense of what is about to unfold. Read More

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

I had my opening line all ready for this one: "Canadians shouldn't play with movie cameras." Generally that's true, but trouble is the late, great director Bob Clark wasn't Canadian. It's an honest mistake, as Clark improved Canada's national cinema immeasurably by shooting Deathdream, Black Christmas, A Christmas Story, and Porky's in Canada. But yeah, he wasn't Canadian. More importantly, Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things...Read More

The Amicus Collection

The Amicus Horror Collection proves that English manors host chilling secrets among the decadence, that everyone drives on the passenger side, and that mystery -- the unknown terror -- perfectly accents horror to haunt the audience well. The following three mystery-horror DVDs are examples of some fine genre work that was once done across the pond. Dig one final introductory remark: these movies prove that nothing complements a good scare like a great score. Douglas Gamley is a master of punctuating vision with original sound and his stand-out work is perhaps the best thing about this fine set of re-mastered DVDs.

Asylum is a singular character study, like a Citizen Kane of B-film English horror with "Who is Dr. Starr?" functioning as the movie's motivating "What is Rosebud?" However, Asylum's ending is better than Kane...Read More

Witchfinder General

The Witchfinder General, aka The Conqueror Worm, aka Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General, aka Suffolk Nights: The Ballad of Matthew Hopkins, aka Rancorman: The Legend of Matt Hopkins. I don't even know why I'm making fun of this movie, as it's really, really good. Vincent Price plays a witch hunter taking advantage of English civil war in the mid-1600s. Self-appointed, Hopkins and his side-kick travel the countryside from town-to-town sating locals' paranoia and bigotry by torturing and murdering eccentric local citizenry.

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