Mulheres da Beira (1923), Os Lobos (1923) 2 x DVD9

Version restored by the Portuguese cinematheque. Fantastic masterpiece of European silent film.

Mulheres da Beira (1923)
Ana, a beautiful young peasant woman, never cares for the love Andre showers on her. Dreaming of a wealthy future ahead, she finds herself caught in the web of a sinister seduction of Fidalgo da Mo…

Os Lobos (1923)
Cabreira Hill. A village dominated by patriarchal tradition: the woman takes care of the household or picks up wood; the man takes care of the cattle or chops down trees to produce coal. After doing time for a crime of passion, a sailor arrives, becoming an element of fascination, changing things.
It is a very realistic film where we can see how people lived on the 20's on the country side in Portugal and how a man can change the life of so many different people just because of his way of seeing love and life.

2 x DVD9 | PAL 16:9 | 01:28:14 + 01:20:14 | 5.72 Gb + 7.06 Gb
Language: Portugues intertitles
Subtitles: English
Genre: Drama, Romance, Silent

Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Kollektivet / The Commune (2016) DVD9

An emotional and intensely focused lead performance from Trine Dyrholm carries this new movie from Danish director and Dogme 95 veteran Thomas Vinterberg, shot on HD digital video.

The setting is 1975, the location a well-heeled coastal suburb north of Copenhagen. A little bored with her staid midlife routine, TV newsreader Anna (Trine Dyrholm) persuades her stuffy college lecturer husband Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) to turn his newly inherited family home into a commune. Together with their 14-year-old daughter, Freja (Martha Sofie Wallstrom Hansen), they fill the house with bohemian friends and eccentric strangers. Soon this rambling suburban mansion is abuzz with rowdy dinner parties, domestic power struggles and — this being Scandinavia — full-frontal nudity.
Predictably, sunny utopian idealism takes a stormy turn when infidelity and sexual jealousy cloud the picture.

DVD9 | PAL 16:9 | 01:47:10 | 5.29 Gb + 3% rec
Language: Dansk
Subtitles: English
Genre: Drama

Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Cast: Ulrich Thomsen, Fares Fares, Trine Dyrholm
Country: Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands
Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Tower of London (1962) DVD9 and Blu-Ray Arrow Video

Having made their mark on American horror cinema with three colourful adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall of the House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum and Tales of Terror – Vincent Price and director Roger Corman enjoyed a brief hiatus from the macabre author with Tower of London. Shot in black and white, the film was loosely based on the Universal horror picture of the same name as well as two Shakespeare plays: a dash of Macbeth and a dollop of Richard III.

The film opens in April of 1483. England's King Edward IV lies on his deathbed, and, surrounded by his family and several loyal subjects, declares his brother, the Duke of Clarence, the Protector of the Realm, which makes him the legal guardian of the two young princes, future king Edward V and Richard. In turn, the king asks his other brother Richard (Price) to be Clarence's closest advisor and right-hand man. But Richard is ambitious, and instead leads Clarence into a wine cellar and plunges a dagger into his back. As a result, Richard is proclaimed Protector the moment Edward IV dies, and aided by Sir Ratcliffe, he eliminates all those who stand between him and the throne of England. But as Richard will discover, the path to the monarchy is not without its perils, and each and every day, he is haunted by the spirits of those he's killed, pushing him to the brink of insanity.

Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

The Informer (1929) DVD9 and Blu-Ray

This rare silent adaptation of Liam O'Flaherty's famous novel is set among Dublin revolutionaries in the early days of the newly independent Irish Free State, formed in 1922.
It is a tale of revolution and betrayal, with an underground cell of activists torn apart when one of their member accidentally kills a police officer.

The dense narrative develops in a short time heightening the intensity of emotional effect. Our sympathies are challenged to deal with the complexity of personal versus political loyalties, where no-one is entirely innocent and the implications of seemingly minor or impulsive decisions create inescapable moral dilemmas for all the protagonists.

The story of "The Informer" has been made into feature films a few times over the years. The 1929 film was the first.

This Dual Format Edition includes the silent version alongside the rare sound version which was produced at the same time. The sound version of the film was restored in 2005 from the picture camera negative while the silent version was restored in 2014. The sound version has a good but lesser restoration while the silent version is simply amazing.
Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

La pirogue / The Pirogue (2012) DVD9

Baye Laye is a Senegalese fisherman who reluctantly agrees to navigate and pilot a boat carrying over thirty people illegally from the African coast to the shores of Spain where they can all live our their dreams of becoming athletes, rock stars, or reuniting with their families. Not only is the boat drastically overweight and the equipment faulty at the best of times, but not even all of the passengers speak the same language, some of which have never even seen the ocean before. He seems to be the only one capable of keeping a level head since the trip's organizer is more fashionable than reasonable and the ship's back-up "captain" is nothing more than a boy.
Senegalese director Moussa Toure gives us the sympathetic perspective of those who take that risky journey, and relives what it's like for his countrymen who travel almost a thousand miles from West Africa to Spain's Canary Islands.

DVD9 | PAL 16:9 | 01:24:13 | 6.94 Gb + 3% rec
Language: Wolof
Subtitles: English, Francais
Genre: Drama

Director: Moussa Toure
Cast: Souleymane Seye Ndiaye, Laity Fall, Babacar Oualy
Country: France, Senegal, Germany
Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse: Flunky, Work Hard! (1931), No Blood Relation (1932), Apart from You (1933), Every-Night Dreams (1933), Street Without End (1934) 3 x DVD Criterion Collection

It's sad to read in the liner notes for the Eclipse set, Silent Naruse, that of the twenty-four films that the Japanese writer/director Mikio Naruse made in his first years of filmmaking, only the five contained here still exist. An early cinematic pioneer whose career spanned nearly half a century, he made eighty-nine films in total, and only about half of them have survived the decades since. In an age when film seems so permanent, and even the worst box office dud gets preserved in high-definition for future generations to suffer through, we can't forget that, once upon a time, the art of movies was mutable.

Thus, Mikio Naruse is a director that more of us probably know by name rather than by his work. He was an artist whose specialty was what was termed the "woman's picture." Like Douglas Sirk in the U.S., Naruse made movies that, for the most part, focused on family drama with a female center. Many of his films were emotional tales that explored the unique struggle of women in Japanese society--particularly those who lived on the fringe, either economically or socially, or sometimes both, one dictating the other. This peek into his earliest work confirms that these were issues he was concerned with from pretty much the get-go, though the core ideas would be ones that would develop over time, along with his style.
Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws

Vitaphone Varieties: Volume Two (1927-1931) 2 x DVD9

Starting in 1926, a year before "The Jazz Singer," Warner Bros. started producing a series of sound shorts, usually musical or comedy acts, mostly taken from the vaudeville stage. These shorts have been difficult to see and much coveted by aficionados. Last year saw the release of a magnificent four-disc collection of these shorts, "Vitaphone Varieties." Now comes "Vitaphone Varieties: Vol. 2," a two-disc collection of 35 short films, which originally played in theaters in the years 1927 through 1931 and haven't been seen since.

Viewers will find several novelty acts in this set, and we can be thankful that their performances were recorded for posterity.

Nestled in among 35 Jazz Age gems to be found on this 2-Disc collection are appearances by Edgar Bergen, Fred Allen, Fred Waring, Blanche Sweet, Bert Lahr, Pat O'Brien, Joe E. Brown and a (very) young Natalie Schafer – the future Mrs. Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island.

2 x DVD9 | NTSC 4:3 | 02:24:42 + 02:51:54 | 7.40 Gb + 7.57 Gb
Language: English
Subtitles: none
Genre: Short, Comedy, Music

Читать дальше...

Read more / Download movie Originally published at MovieWorld.ws