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7 articles
Dead Or Alive
26 January 2017 10:00 PM, PST
Director Takashi Miike brings his take-no-prisoners style to this hard-nosed Yakuza film released in 1999. Miike plays by the genre rules (almost) most of the time, keeping purists happy, but his natural inclinations for the provocative gesture thankfully take over, making way for one of the great gonzo finales of all time… right up there with its main influence, Tex Avery’s 1947 cartoon, King-Size Canary.
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- TFH Team
The Dead Zone
24 January 2017 10:00 PM, PST
Screenwriter Jeff Boam’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novel is one of the best: a multi-layered psychic/political thriller with an end-of-the-world subplot. King’s crowd-pleasing theatrics help leaven the director’s clinical approach, resulting in one of Cronenberg’s most accessible (and financially successful) films. Christopher Walken is the doomstruck psychic who can foretell the future, supported by a solid cast including the great Herbert Lom and Martin Sheen (whose venal, two-faced politician seems to have anticipated several subsequent real-life candidates).
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- TFH Team
The Yakuza
24 January 2017 11:46 AM, PST
Blu-ray
1975 / Color / 2:40 widescreen / 112 & 123 min. / Street Date February 14, 2017 / available through the WBshop / 21.99
Starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Brian Keith, Eiji Okada, Richard Jordan, Keiko Kishi, James Shigeta, Herb Edelman.
Cinematography: Kozo Okazaki, Duke Callaghan
Production Design: Stephen Grimes
Art Direction: Yoshiyuki Ishida
Film Editor: Don Guidice, Thomas Stanford
Original Music: Dave Grusin
Written by: Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader, Robert Towne
Produced by: Michael Hamilburg, Sydney Pollack, Koji Shundo
Directed by Sydney Pollack
The Warner Archive Collection is on a roll with a 2017 schedule that has so far released one much-desired library Blu-ray per week. Coming shortly are Vincente Minnelli’s Bells are Ringing, Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend and Val Guest’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and that only takes us through February. First up is a piercing action drama from 1975.
There are favorite movies around Savant central, »
- Glenn Erickson
Wagon Tracks
24 January 2017 11:41 AM, PST
Blu-ray
1919 / B&W / 1:33 Silent Ap / 64 min. / Street Date January 24, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98
Starring William S. Hart, Jane Novak, Robert McKim, Lloyd Bacon, Leo Pierson, Bert Sprotte, Charles Arling.
Cinematography: Joseph H. August
Art direction: Thomas A. Brierley
Titles: Irvin J. Martin
Written by: C. Gardner Sullivan
Produced by: William S. Hart, Thomas H. Ince
Directed by: Lambert Hillyer
Last year we were gifted with an excellent Blu-ray of a silent John Ford western, 3 Bad Men, which turned out to be a satisfying sentimental action tale. This month we get a much older silent western that’s almost as interesting. Its star is William S. Hart, the silent icon most of know through a still of a man in a ten-gallon hat brandishing two pistols in a barroom. Hart frequently played gunslingers, but not always. Olive’s presentation of Wagon Tracks sees him »
- Glenn Erickson
The Sicilian Clan
24 January 2017 11:32 AM, PST
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1969 / Color B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 122 min. (French, without exit music); 118 min (American) / Le clan des Siciliens / Street Date February 7, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring Jean Gabin, Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, Irina Demick, Amedeo Nazzari, Danielle Volle, Philippe Baronnet, Karen Blanguernon, Elisa Cegani, Yves Lefebvre, Leopoldo Trieste, Sydney Chaplin.
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Production design: Jacques Saulnier
Original Music: Ennio Morricone
Written by: Henri Verneuil, José Giovanni, Pierre Pelegri from a novel by Auguste Le Breton
Produced by: Jacques-e. Strauss
Directed by Henri Verneuil
American crime fanatics wary of European imports now have access to a fully Region-a disc of a big-star, big budget French-Italian-American gangster film from 1969, Henri Verneuil’s exciting The Sicilian Clan. It was filmed in two separate versions, a multi-lingual European original and a less exciting, English language cut for America. A huge hit overseas, The Sicilian Clan didn’t »
- Glenn Erickson
Watch Us Pull a Rabbit Out of our Hat
23 January 2017 7:10 AM, PST
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A quick look at the slinky sleight-of-hand involved in making movies about magic.
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Categories Not categorized 0% Your result has been entered into leaderboard Loading Name: E-Mail: Captcha: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Answered Review Question 1 of 10 1. Question
In 1932’s Chandu The Magician, Edmund Lowe plays the titular wizard. What famous boogie man plays his adversary?
Bela Lugosi Boris Karloff Peter Lorre Correct
Lugosi is a lot of fun but the real star of this movie is director William Cameron Menzies whose distinctive visual style graces every scene.
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Question 2 of 10 2. Question
1953’s Houdini »
- TFH
Dead-Alive
22 January 2017 10:00 PM, PST
A pure id gore-fest from Peter Jackson circa 1992. Jackson’s story, about a small-town schlub dealing with his monkey-bit zombie grandma, is clearly farcical and just as clearly indebted to the gooey, gross-out humor of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and Monty Python’s more extravagantly gruesome gags. Though it flew under the radar on its first release, it’s picked up steam due to Jackson’s ever-expanding fanbase. The film itself remains a ton of icky fun.
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- TFH Team
7 articles