Steven Spielberg's intelligent, exciting and even frightening 2005 re-think of the original H.G. Wells book seems to have been produced because of the timeliness of its war theme -- the Josh Friedman & David Koepp script makes numerous references to the idea of a technologically advanced society militarily occupying another country. The parallels with the then-hot war in Iraq were obvious.

Hollywood remakes of sci-fi/fantasy classics often feel unnecessary. The new War of the Worlds (no 'the') shows Spielberg doing what he does best, pumping new energy into an established genre. H.G. Wells' diary-like account of life under the heel of Martian invaders anticipated 20th century wars fought with terrible technological weapons. Spielberg ignores the gee-whiz, bigger explosions clichés and instead embraces the events and atmospher...Read the entire review

One of the most enthralling silent movie experiences at UCLA Film School was seeing David Bradley's print of The Love of Jeanne Ney, a 1927 melodrama starring two greats from Metropolis in secondary roles, Brigitte Helm and Fritz Rasp. Every scene is rich in atmosphere and fluid in camerawork. The first act of director G.W. Pabst's movie takes place during the Russian Civil War (1919-1921 or so), with great detail in scenes of crowded entertainment halls and revolutionary headquarters. The least significant extra or prop made a contribution to the atmosphere.

Scenes in The Love of Jeanne Ney flow as smoothly as do the silent dramas of Josef von Sternberg. The suspenseful romantic melodrama Jeanne Ney makes no particula...Read the entire review

A funny thing happened on the way to the Oscars this year -- the Academy voted for what may have been the best, most original feature in the stack of nominees. Bong Joon Ho's South Korean movies have been piercing the American market for years now, if on a specialized genre level. But even his monster movie The Host features a deeply-rooted social comment. A good part of Seoul is driven from their homes by a crazy fish-monster, and the family on view must spend time in a poorly-organized government shelter. The same thing happens in Bong's brilliant black comedy Parasite, which s...Read the entire review

Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club didn't get a fair shake when it was new, but corrections have been made... 35 years later. This year's The Cotton Club Encore is an exception to the rule that filmmakers revising their own movies is a bad idea. Back in 1984, the positive reviews were not enthusiastic, and the negative reviews wanted us to believe that Coppola had surrendered his crown as America's most creative, commercial director. Was there some kind of Hollywood backlash against Francis Coppola?

Perhaps Apocalypse Now was a hard act to follow, both creatively and financially. Francis took on more commercial projects, and simply applied the stylishness he thought they needed. Robert Evans was behind The Cotton Club, a gangster/musical hybrid that was never going to be as historically realistic a...Read the entire review

Looking for a movie about a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil?  Better experiences than Marvel superheroes and Star Wars fantasies can be found, if you know where to look. John Sayles' riveting true story of a violent labor confrontation in the 1920s has the outline and the action of a classic western. Matewan is no simplistic law 'n' order fantasy, no 'Shane in the Coal Country.' We instead witness a core drama of the real American experience, and a lesson that needs to be re-learned.

The rise of the middle class after WW2 made too many people forget what labor struggles had achieved, back in a time when powerful business interests had even more freedom than they do now. As the old movie studios were mostly anti-Union as wel...Read the entire review

Where there's a Wim, there's a way.

Science fiction films of classic stature haven't been that frequent since 1968, when 2001: A Space Odyssey raised the bar for what audiences expected to see in futuristic special effects. Century City has torn down some of the buildings that represented the far future in the Planet of the Apes sequels. Jetsons- like architecture went out of style, anyway: when post-apocalyptic scenarios became the norm, it was replaced by rubble, blast craters and recycled muscle cars.

But the most ambitious film of post-modern sci-fi prognostication is a pure original, not part of either of those trends. Made just as CGI was transf...Read the entire review

Back in the early 1970s I was crazy about Depression-Era Warner Bros. movies, but they weren't shown on TV and only a few circulated in repertory theaters. I bought record albums commemorating a studio anniversary, that had music and dialogue clips. In that climate of deprivation, a documentary that used substantial film clips from the period would have been very welcome. And Philippe Mora made one.

The film sees 1930s America through the movies, through music, and the evasions of newsreels. Franklin Delano Roosevelt preaches prosperity while James Cagney slugs out the decade as a smart-tongued everyman -- in a dozen different roles. Director Philippe Mora investigates what was then a new kind of revisionist info-tainment formula: applying old film footage to new purposes.

Philippe Mora was an accomplished artist and documentary fi...Read the entire review

What's the appeal of our favorite comedy teams?   Why do we invest so much love in Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges, or Hope & Crosby?  Why is it such joy to see so many comedians piled together in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World?  Are these funny people are closer to us than our own friends and family?

Fans whose idea of nirvana is the timeless 'Who's on First?' comedy routine, will find the joy of a lifetime in Shout! Factory's Abbott & Costello - The Complete Universal Pictures Collection. The giant set is a Blu-ray upgrade of a DVD set that arrived some years ago. As we discovered with Universal's line of classic horror films, when remastered for picture and audio, the studio product looks sensational on today's digital equipment.

The show contains all 28 of the films Ab...Read the entire review

Back in the heyday of DVD it must have been simple for Warner Home Video to assemble boxes of Bette Davis and Errol Flynn movies, as almost all of those actors' older films were made by the same studio and controlled by the same rights-holders. That doesn't work when an actors' career is spread out over the map. And that's what makes this new The Anne Bancroft Collection such a nice surprise: Shout Select has found eight full Bancroft features spanning 35 years, and licensed them from multiple rights-holders. It's like different kinds of birds flocking together -- there's even a Criterion disc in the mix, with all of its extras intact.

Ms. Bancroft began as a Fox 'starlet.' She certainly did better than most at that studio, although this collection spares us from things like Gorilla at Large, which is great fun but h...Read the entire review

1968's The Devil Rides Out stacks up high on many a Hammer fan's list of favorites -- it's one of the most respected of latter-day Hammer Films. Fans love its big role for favorite Christopher Lee, whose leading character dominates the proceedings and (gasp) is unequivocally heroic. He called it his favorite Hammer role as well. The show is also the last major picture by the core production team that had broken through with Technicolor horror ten years before. Although the good times were on the wane, Hammer had enjoyed co-production deals with Columbia, Paramount, Universal-International, Warners and MGM -- practically every Hollywood studio.

The Americans re-titled the show The Devil's Bride), with the reason that U.S. fans might think 'Rides Out' indicated a western -- original author Dennis Wheatley wasn't well ...Read the entire review

In 1977, ABC's miniseries Roots made TV history, distilling a big American history lesson into just under ten hours of must-see TV. That precedent surely helped ignite the next year's CBS presentation of Holocaust, an almost eight-hour account of the murder of millions of European Jews during WW2. Judging by the news and editorial features of the day, Americans in general knew even less about the Holocaust than then they did about slavery. The miniseries would remain controversial, as pundits debated the merits and pitfalls of turning the darker corners of the human condition into network TV entertainment. This show may not be perfect, but it made a positive, educational impact.

We also knew this series as a career springboard for three great actors. James...Read the entire review

Fourteen years ago Universal released a Bela Lugosi Collection on DVD, featuring five much-desired horror items not aligned with any of the studio's 'name' monster franchises. Four out of the five starred both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and those four have been restored, remastered and reunited for this Universal Horror Collection Vol. 1. But that doesn't mean that the equally classic Murders in the Rue Morgue, a Lugosi solo effort, will top-line an eventual Vol. 2.. The titles tagged for that are The Mad Ghoul, The Strange Case Of Dr. Rx, The Mad Doctor Of Market Street and Murders In The Zoo. The last film in the list is actually a Paramount Picture, however.

Scream Factory initially announced that the disc set would be called the 'Karloff and Lugosi Collection,' but somebody stepped...Read the entire review

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

1966's The Quiller Memorandum is a low-key gem, a pared-down, existential spy caper that keeps the exoticism to a minimum. Michael Anderson directs a classy slice of '60s spy-dom. In West Berlin, George Segal's Quiller struggles through a near- existential battle with Neo-Nazi swine more soulless than his own cold-fish handlers. Harold Pinter supplies the circular dialogue, Alec Guinness the charming insincerity and Max von Sydow a devilish menace. Quiller is mesmerized by the seductive ambiguity of lovely Senta Berger. Does she love Quiller? Or is love dead in this brave world of deceit and subterfuge?

To do his job, George Segal's hapless Quiller must set himself out as bait in the middle of a pressure play in West Berlin. It's quiet and civilized and a little artsy, and Harold Pinter's semi-stylized dialog...Read the entire review

The Universal Sci-Fi thriller The Land Unknown comes through with high marks for things that were scarce in late-'fifties sci-fi: convincing hardware, an impressive prehistoric world, and rather good special optical effects. Yet it fails to give us an engaging story. Not even eighty minutes long, it lacks forward momentum and feels like a slow two hours. We're told that it was the most expensive of Universal's fantasy films of this time -- racking up higher bills than even the Technicolor This Island Earth. Yet the clunky, half-baked The Mole People from the year before is more entertaining.

Tom Weaver's audio commentary illuminates the shaky factory setup at Universal, with department heads worried about losing their jobs, and the house producer al...Read the entire review

A fun shocker for monster fans everywhere, William Alland's titanic hairy spider provides plenty of chills for 1950s drive-ins, delivering exactly the naïve monster thrills teenagers craved. Five years after its debut on a Region B German Blu-ray, Universal's biggest monster creeps and crawls across the Arizona desert and into our hearts. Jack Arnold seems in to much of a rush to do anything interesting with his actors, but they make an impression anyway; Reynold Brown's spectacular poster art (which adds an exclamation point to the title) is one of the top monster One-Sheets of the 1950s.

This trend-follower of Warners' 1954 hit Them! plays out in a budget version of the desert town from Read the entire review

Here's a classic horror picture that we never expected to see in such good condition...  and NOBODY is complaining.

RKO never gave their house producer Val Lewton proper credit for practically saving the studio with Cat People. But on Isle of the Dead and The Body Snatcher they changed his production profile, actually doing him a big favor. Boris Karloff was hired, which pushed the pictures to a higher level of industry respectability. Lewton still rankled at being told what he had to produce, and still remained an intense worrywart that should have been looking out for ulcers and heart attacks. But the producer found that he got along exceedingly well with Karloff, who was grateful...Read the entire review

The prize for odd title of the year goes to The Man Who Killed Hitler and then The Bigfoot, written and directed by Robert D. Krzykowski. Hitler/Bigfoot's sub-title should read, 'what must a movie do to attract attention these days?'  Krzykowski goes in a completely unexpected direction, presenting an absorbing personal story directed in a formalist style, that takes itself entirely seriously. In other words, it's a real movie that resists preconceived assumptions. The title might be awkward, but it's better than 'The Man Who Saved the World, Twice,' or something arty or obscure.

The picture is rather arty and also a very risky mix: any real story these days runs the risk of boring audiences with short attention spans. Krzykowski has the enthusiastic participation of actor Sam Elliott, who was just nominated...Read the entire review

Universal's sci-fi monsters in the second half of the 1950s suffered from a lack of imagination. Their second copycat movie about a big bug was released in 1957 almost neck-and-neck with Bert I. Gordon's micro-production Beginning of the End. Because monster no-budget monster fare literally exploded in 1956-'57, the suits in the front office likely decreed that little or nothing be spent on the show. Why go all-out when the competition's cheapies earned just as much?

The Deadly Mantis sees William Alland's producing unit taking on an epic monster story with next to no budget resources. Martin Berkeley's screenplay regurgitates ideas from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms an...Read the entire review

1956 marked the beginning of the downhill slope for the '50s monster boom at Universal. William Alland was still tasked with putting exciting sci-fi fantasy fare on the screen, but was expected to cut costs. Jack Arnold tells everybody he got sick of sci-fi, but it's more likely that Alland either couldn't afford him or didn't want to fight with him for credit for everything: we don't know if Arnold turned down the Technicolor This Island Earth (1955), or if Alland pushed him aside in favor of Joseph Newman. Veteran assistant director John Sherwood and the much younger editor Virgil Vogel stepped up to the director's chair; Universal's The Mole People was Vogel's first directing credit in a career that lasted 'til his death in 1996.

The Mole PeopleRead the entire review

In the late end of the 1960s Hammer was still producing remakes; before their re-imaginings of Universal's horror and fantasy classics they began with feature versions of popular TV shows. Hammer's 1966 remake One Million Years B.C. and 1965 remake She performed exceedingly well, boosting the careers of their female stars Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress.

H. Rider Haggard's book She has never fully faded from the public consciousness. Haggard's supernatural myth connects our world to long-lost civilizations that possessed occult powers of magic: the immortal white queen Ayesha rules over a savage tribe and seeks the reincarnation of her lost love. Noted silent film versions of She wer...Read the entire review

John Cassavetes springs forth as a major 1950s talent in these two 'Primetime Special' dramatic plays broadcast live on ABC and CBS. Crime in the Streets is the Reginald Rose classic directed by Sidney Lumet; No Right to Kill is a 'culture for the masses' adaptation of Crime and Punishment. Cassavetes' co-stars are Robert Preston, Glenda Farrell, Terry Moore and Robert H. Harris.

So far the best set of 'classic' Live TV greats is a Criterion disc called The Golden Age of Television, which includes Marty, Patterns, No Time for Sergeants, A Wind from the South, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Comedian and Days of Wine and Roses. Just last year, VCI and Jeff Joseph/Sabucat launched a new Blu-ray project called ...Read the entire review

Luis Puenzo's Oscar-winning The Official Story is a South American cinema classic about political oppression, lies and the kind of high crimes and atrocities that were common occurrences in the cold war years, whene dictatorships were encouraged to fight communism with whatever means they could. Unlike the conspiracy thriller "Z" and others of its kind, this absorbing drama shows how a family seemingly above reproach can be revealed to be rotten to the core. This film from the director of Old Gringo is a serious history lesson and a warning to any country divided along political lines.

Argentina in the 1970s. Alicia (Norma Aleandro) teaches secondary school in Buenos Aires; her husband Roberto (Héc...Read the entire review

Because I was hooked on the mind-stretching science fiction books of the visionary Philip K. Dick, I was ready for 1995's Screamers to be a special sci-fi experience: Dick stories set on off-world planets were some of his best. The fact that it stars RoboCop's Peter Weller didn't hurt either.

Author Dick's source story "Second Variety" hails from 1953. Its setting is a post-apocalyptic battlefield, not another planet. The basic idea extrapolates the function of a military land mine, those nasty mechanical-explosive traps that wait to blow up under unsuspecting troops. Properly called 'Autonomous Mobile Swords' (in the story, 'Claws'), Screamers are small robotic anti-personnel devices with spinning blades that make piercing sounds. Unlike land mines, they...Read the entire review

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

In terms of importance to American film history, Mr. Capra Goes to War: Frank Capra's World War II Documentaries is the most important compilation disc of the year. Olive has formatted five major wartime documentary/propaganda/orientation films into a package that explains the famous film director Frank Capra's considerable contribution to the war effort. Arguably the most successful director of the 1930s, Capra was also a fervid patriot, a ready volunteer to make films for the government, the Army, etc.. George Marshall and even President Roosevelt recognized that Capra was Hollywood's number one 'communicator' to the public at large.

Capra served as a chief administrator for an entire category of informational films, while concentrating on a series called Why We Fight intended to teach soldiers the natur...Read the entire review

In 1966 Hammer films still had a great deal of appeal, even if we kids looked at the photos in Famous Monsters magazine more than we saw the films, which came and went quickly from local screens. Savant was an ardent Hammer fan as a child. I had actually seen The Mummy new at the age of seven and it was one of the earliest memories of excited kids going nuts in a movie theater. I was also one of a mob of happy kids cheering Horror of Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein when they were reissued in 1964. But I missed most of the '60s Hammer releases because they seemed to play almost exclusively...Read the entire review

Third in Hammer's Dracula series but only the second to star Christopher Lee, Dracula: Prince of Darkness is an effective haunted house thriller that was just what the studio needed: a big horror hit that didn't require enormous sets or a large cast. After several seasons splitting himself between England and the continent, Chris Lee came back in his signature part for the studio that had given him his breakthrough -- but in a rather narrow genre. With Terence Fisher at the helm and much of the same crew that had launched Technicolor Hammer eight years before, Prince of Darkness was the most prestigious and successful of the cluster of 1966 horrors that Hammer turned out to fulfill a new contract with 20th Fox.

The film does not have a strong story. The conclusion of the eight-year-old Read the entire review

Back in 1981 United Artists briefly distributed an amazing French- produced movie by Volker Schlöndorff called Circle of Deceit. For my money it got the story of warfare in Lebanon exactly right, before most Americans had thought much about how upsets in the Middle East might affect the world at large. The ugly conflict is fed by media attention: Bruno Ganz's reporter finds that massacres are being staged so photographers can supply horrific images for readers of German and French magazines to deplore. Even though the show is about Germans caught up in the Lebanese civil war, the focus is on the right thing, a political catastrophe. It's a fine picture that ought to be better known.

This last week was released a sequel to the first Sicario movie, continuing th...Read the entire review

In 1940 little Johnnie Boorman might have been squatting in a dank bomb shelter with his Mum and sisters, waiting out an air raid alert. Writer-director Boorman's personal memory of the working class Brit Blitz is warm & fuzzy affectionate and frequently hilarious, with a keen eye toward slightly bawdy family humor.

John Boorman is hardly a sentimentalist yet his 1987 Hope and Glory came as a big audience-pleasing surprise. A part-autobiographical account of growing up in wartime London, the picture has everything generally thought to be missing in 1980s pictures -- warmth, good humor and an appreciation for things past.

The reasonably calm and secure Rohan family adjusts to the coming of war, which begins with a long period of time where nothing seems to happen ... the 'sitzkrieg,' I believe. Although a veteran ...Read the entire review

Imagine that -- a new movie with almost no characters under thirty years of age.

Steven Spielberg's The Post ends where Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976) begins, at the Watergate break-in. The 1976 movie was a first in political filmmaking -- the U.S. had done its best to ignore political pictures from France and Italy (The Battle of Algiers 1966, "Z", 1969) but President's Men advocated a single political point of view on a political upheaval just a couple of years after the fact. The Post is another paean to American journalism (my favorite, Sam Fuller's Park Row, 1952) but not qu...Read the entire review

Plenty of noteworthy films have been canceled, shelved or otherwise chloroformed before seeing the light of day. The famous 1965 documentary The Epic That Never Was collects dailies from Josef von Sternberg's legendary abandoned I, Claudius, yielding great insight into the working problems of the famous actor Charles Laughton. But we're also curious about another movie that never was, MGM's epic presentation of Andre Malraux's Man's Fate. A regime change wiped out Fred Zinnemann's production literally weeks before shooting was to begin, when the film was entirely cast and giant sets already built.

Clouzot was one of the established French directors that the New Wave tried to sweep away as outmoded, obsolete. The reputation of his tense thrillers -- that seemingly even made Alfred H...Read the entire review

There's a point where unnervingly harsh and disturbingly irrational movies become more trouble than they're worth. This groaner is two hours of jeopardy to children and perversely cruel storytelling that never rewarded this viewer. And director Yorgos Lanthimos chooses a style of performance and presentation that all but bypasses recognizable human values. I hold the film no particular grudge. It may be a masterpiece, but if I didn't need to review it, I wouldn't have stuck it out to the end.

A swanky surgeon named Stephen (Colin Farrell), introduced with an image of a beating heart during an operation, clearly has something going on with a unnaturally polite and proper young man, Martin (Barry Keoghan of Dunkirk). Stephen leads an antiseptic existence in an unnaturally spotless hou...Read the entire review

Reportedly filmed in 1965, released in Italy in 1967 and not really shown much elsewhere, The Witches is producer Dino De Laurentiis' vanity production for his wife and cinematic cash cow Silvana Mangano, the smash sensation from the late 1940s. Mangano remained a notable international star even without sharing the kind of stratospheric career arc enjoyed by some of her contemporaries, notably Sophia Loren.

Mangano's 1949 breakthrough in Bitter Rice made her a legend of Italian cinema; her physical presence working in rice fields and dancing put glamour into what began as a neorealist crime thriller. De Laurentiis married Mangano and showcased her in mostly inferior starring productions. Her best performances are in ha...Read the entire review

Curtis Harrington had as rough a directing career as anyone, but not one without artistic triumphs. Fascinated by fantasy and horror films, he was filming avant-garde short subjects while still a teenager, and wrote what might be the first critical look at screen horror as a genre (Ghoulies and Ghosties, Sight and Sound, 1952). A moody mermaid-terror picture and a trippy space vampire show earned Harrington his ticket to ride. After the highly regarded Games he specialized in horror movies for TV and scare pictures with...Read the entire review

One of the best of the independently produced horror pictures from the early '70s is back in a much- improved transfer. Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby's Canadian-financed Deathdream is one of the many productions inspired by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. It never received the wide theatrical release that made successes of shockers like the notorious Last House on the Left. Originally titled Dead of Night, Clark's picture dribbled slowly onto movie screens under several different names. The English periodical The Monthly Film Bulletin didn't have a chance to praise it until 1977.

The reputation of this creepshow was established on late-night television, where its qualities ...Read the entire review