Szalency / Madmen / Daredevils (1928) Blu-Ray

The year is 1914. Filipek loses his job as a sommelier and joins the Polish Legions. At the recruitment center, he meets former university student Jerzy. Some time later, they are joined by landowner kazik. But these young "daredevils" buoyed by patriotism are going to face some challanges.

Leonard Buczkowski's feature debut in 1928 is the first Polish film super-production - made with the participation of many military formations, with innovative battle scenes, epoch-making weapons and the latest technical achievements.

BD25 | 1080p AVC | 02:12:59 | 21.9 Gb + 3% rec
Language: English / Polish Intertitles
Subtitles: English

Director: Leonard Buczkowski
Cast: Boleslaw Szczurkiewicz, Irena Gawecka, Aleksander Starza, Marian Czauski, Jerzy Kobusz, Marek Ozog
Country: Poland
Genre: Drama, War
Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

The Victim / Out of Contention (1972) Blu-Ray Kino Lorber

Elizabeth Montgomery (TV's Bewitched, The Legend of Lizzie Borden) gives a brilliant dramatic performance in the nerve-jangling made-for-TV thriller The Victim.

Wealthy San Franciscan woman Kate is concerned about her sister Susan after their last conversation: Susan has just requested a divorce from her husband Ben and things aren't going well. Kate gets in her car and drives close to 30 miles in treacherous stormy weather and is warned by police on the road that mudslides and flooding have closed most of the roads and that it would be best to turn back, but she forges ahead anyway. When she gets to Susan's home – a big house on at least an acre of woodland – she's perplexed that Susan appears not to be home, but it's made clear to the audience that Susan is dead in a box in the basement. As a storm rages outside, Kate tries to figure out where her sister could have gone and places her own life in great danger...the killer is still on the premises!

Director: Herschel Daugherty
Cast: Elizabeth Montgomery, Eileen Heckart, Sue Ane Langdon, George Maharis, Jess Walton, Richard Derr, Ross Elliott
Country: United States
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Thieves Like Us (1974) DVD9, Blu-Ray

Director Robert Altman has directed a remake of Nicholas Ray's thriller In the Shadow of the Night, based on the 1949 novel by Raymond Chandler. "Thieves like us" is an authentic drama, gangster film and love story at the same time - a sincere story of actually quite ordinary people who cannot free themselves from the crime trap because crime is the only thing they can control. Into this crook plot, Altman incorporated a "Romeo & Juliet" radio show as an ironic and humorous contrast to what was happening on screen.

Thieves Like Us opens with T-Dub, Chicamaw and Bowie, meeting up on a rural Mississippi backroad after breaking out of jail. Faced with no employment options under the circumstances, the trio take up bank robbing again and stay on the move constantly. While the threesome are not particularly skillful in their robberies and often wound or kill people in their raids (most of which occur off-screen), they seem to enjoy reading about their own exploits in the newspapers as much as they enjoy the freedom of their routine. When Bowie is seriously wounded in a car accident and forced to recuperate while his partners fend for themselves, he falls in love with Keechie, the niece of Chicamaw, who nurses him back to health. Their romance is short-lived, however, once Bowie teams up with his former partners for one last bank job...

Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema V: Because of You (1952), Outside the Law (1956), The Midnight Story (1957) 3 x Blu-Ray Kino Lorber

Kino Lorber dives back into the Universal vaults for three more noirs making their Blu-ray debut in Volume V of their Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema series. This set has three stories of people hiding their true identities: one to get away from her past life with her gangster ex-fiancee (Because of You), one to break up an international counterfeiting ring (Outside the Law) and one to learn the truth behind a beloved priest's murder (The Midnight Story).

Though the labeling of some of these titles "noir" is highly debatable, and the majority of films in this series are mostly just average, it's still enormous fun to catch up with these largely forgotten, generally lesser films.

3xBD25 | 1080p AVC | 266 min | 62.6 Gb + 3% rec
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Genre: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir, Mystery, Thriller, Romance

Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Luchino Visconti’s The Damned / La caduta degli dei (Gotterdammerung) (1969) Blu-Ray Criterion Collection

Sex and swastikas! — that combo shows up in both trash cinema and high art. Luchino Visconti's searing look at Nazi corruption sees an industrialist family torn apart by murderous greed and ambition worthy of the Borgias. The fiendish Countess Ingrid Thulin has raised a twisted son (Helmut Berger) to serve her deadly schemes; her path to power involves framing one heir for a killing while another rival is sacrificed in an SS massacre for the good of the Reich. The chilling treachery plays out at family dinner tables, in the offices of a steel mill, and in various bedrooms; Nazi fervor is equated with sex perversion.

The heightened performances and Visconti's luridly expressionistic use of Technicolor conjure a garish world of decaying opulence in which one family's downfall comes to stand for the moral rot of a nation.

Decadence and depravity abound in Luchino Visconti's scathing The Damned, the first in the filmmaker's so-called German Trilogy, followed by Death in Venice and Ludwig, each of which delineates a different era and style of German psychopathology.

Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Out of the Blue (1980) 2 x Blu-Ray BFI

Like James Dean, Linda Manz appeared in many television shows before starring in three movies by famous directors. The actress was Generation X's Dean, and Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue was her Rebel Without a Cause. Both embodied the spirit of cinematic youth rebellion wrapped in black leather. The 1980 drama started out as a weepy made-for-TV, got hi-jacked by an infamous dope fiend, and became a feral punk masterpiece.

Cebe (Linda Manz) is a teenage rebel obsessed with Elvis and the Sex Pistols. Her trucker father, Don (Dennis Hopper) is in prison after drunkenly smashing his rig into a school bus, and her mother, Kathy (Sharon Farrell) is a junkie waitress who takes refuge in the arms of other men, including Don's best friend, Charlie (Don Gordon). With Don's release, the family struggles to reconnect and the trauma of the past looms large as dark secrets slowly begin to emerge.

Initially only hired as an actor in the family-friendly drama 'Cebe', Hopper took over directing duties a week into production, rewriting the script and starting principal photography from scratch. The bleak punk epic that resulted - Out of the Blue - arguably represents Hopper's strongest outing as a filmmaker and features an astonishing performance by Manz.
Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

The Long Goodbye (1973) Blu-Ray Kino Lorber

Elliott Gould gives one of his best performances as a quirky, mischievous Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman's 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 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.

Despite cries of outrage from hard-line Chandler purists, this is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all screen adaptations of the writer's work.

Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Elliott Gould, Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Marty Augustine, Henry Gibson, David Arkin, Jim Bouton, Warren Berlinger, Jo Ann Brody, Stephen Coit, Jack Knight
Country: United States
Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Early Universal Vol.1: Skinner’s Dress Suit (1926), The Shield of Honor (1927), The Shakedown (1929) 2 x Blu-Ray Eureka – Masters of Cinema

It's a depressing fact that a great many of the films produced during the silent era have been lost. Not only have masters and prints been destroyed, gone missing or disintegrated over time, but critics and distributors tend to keep most of their focus on big-name directors and stars from the era, such as Lang, Murnau, Chaplin and Keaton. As such, there's a huge chunk of cinematic history that is either gone forever or is at least hard to come by for anyone without access to studio vaults or historical archives.

Eureka Video and Universal Pictures attempt to redress the balance somewhat with this handsome package of three obscure but worthy silent movies.

None of these films offer anything that will rocket them to the status of 'lost gem' but as curios from a long distant time and as examples of early innovation they have a lot to offer.

Complemented by excellent new original scores and commentaries, this box-set provides a compelling taste of an era when Hollywood was finally producing fully-fledged movie-making in the modern sense, hardly held back by the lack of sound.
Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Big Screen British Comedy: Dad’s Army (1971), Steptoe & Son (1972), Steptoe and Son Ride Again (1973), Are You Being Served? (1977) 3 x Blu-Ray

The first radio comedies were adapted into big screen hits as early as the 1940s, but the 70s saw the golden age of the phenomenon, with successful TV series ranging from Till Death Us Do Part to Dad's Army and Man About The House to Father Dear Father all crossing to the silver screen. A brand new box set collects together four of the most famous - three in high definition for the very first time anywhere.

Covering three brilliant sitcom smash hits, the films are: Dad's Army (1971); Steptoe & Son (1972); Steptoe And Son Ride Again (1973); and Are You Being Served? (1977).

Alongside the four restored films is an eye-watering surfeit of extra features: archive interviews, new commentaries, reproductions of original publicity materials, image galleries, isolated soundtracks, archive TV segments, and much more - making this a box set that any classic comedy fan has to own.
Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws