THE FILM:

If you've seen Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, then you largely know what to expect with Orchestra Rehearsal, albeit on a much smaller scale. Lots of characters; plenty of local charm. Released after several years of diminishing returns for the Italian director, the film came to be after an Italian television production company offered Fellini creative control over a limited-budget production. The result is a satirical film shot like a documentary about an orchestra that revolts during a rehearsal. An obvious allegory to the socioeconomic climate of Italy in the 1970s, Orchestra Rehearsal sees the various members of the orchestra standing in for certain ideologies and proclivities. There is little plot, per se, but Fellini does offer moments of amusement. This is a minor work ...Read the entire review

Following the commercial and critical success of MASH (1970), emboldened maverick filmmaker Robert Altman embarked on a hit-and-miss jumble of experimental, genre-subverting, and frequently uncommercial studio-financed features. Up to his greatest success, Nashville (1975), Altman directed five movies in-between, including the revisionist Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and the radical neo-noir The Long Goodbye (1973), with Raymond Chandler's story reimagined in present-day Los Angeles with hipster Elliot Gould improbably cast as private eye Philip Marlowe

Nearly forgotten from this period is Images (1972), a small-scale quasi-experimental psychological drama with horror movie trappings, filmed in Ireland. Starring Susannah York (Tom Jones) as a disturbed children's author plagued by hallucinations while staying at a remote vacation home with her hus...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

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

The Movie:

Just one of the anthology films that were popular in Italian arthouse circles in the late sixties, 1967's The Witches is made up of four separate short films that all revolve around beautiful actress/model/dancer (and one time wife of Dino De Laurentiis, who just so happened to produce this particular film) Silvana Mangano.

The first chapter, The Witch Burned Alive, was directed by Luchino Visconti and written by Cesare Zavattini. It tells the story of an actress named Gloria (Mangano) who has left Rome to spend time at the Austrian vacation home of her friend Valeria's (Annie Girardot) and her husband Paolo (Francisco Rabal). Things get odd when guests show up for a party. The men are clearly all intrigued by Gloria's presence, the women less so. When Gloria passes out, they take the opportunity to take off her jewelry, makeup and wig to see who she really i...Read the entire review

The Film:

The Film:

The Movie:

Jean Grémillon is a French filmmaker who is not totally unknown to U.S. film fans -- Criterion devoted an Eclipse box set to his WWII-era work a few years ago -- but he's certainly not a household name. Arrow Video, through their arthouse-minded Arrow Academy imprint, continue to do the Lord's work (so to speak) by reviving Grémillon's final film, a low-key character piece flecked with melodrama called The Love of a Woman (1953).

Set in a secluded town on an island near Brittany, The Love of a Woman stars Micheline Presle as Marie, a young doctor newly hired to serve this close-knit seaside community. It will be an adj...Read the entire review

The Collection:

The Jacques Rivette Collection box set from Arrow arrives at last for US viewers, minus the 13-hour mega-film Out 1 and the 4 1/2-hour recut, Out 1: Spectre that UK viewers got in their set, since Carlotta Films already put out a stand-alone version of Out 1 in the US last year. Bargain hunters may gripe, but, in terms of effective curating, I'm glad we got the three films which make up the US Jacques Rivette Collection as a separate release.

Around 1976, Rivette got a notion to speed up his productivity and decided to shoot four films back-to-back which would form a stylistically diverse but thematically linked cycle, t...Read the entire review

Terror in a Texas Town (1958) is a peculiar Western, so peculiar, in fact, that even its admirers often can't adequately explain what makes it so effective. Some are drawn to the unusualness of its hero, a Swedish whaler (Sterling Hayden), who in the film's climax uses a harpoon as a weapon. Others insist what makes Terror in a Texas Town is the direction of cult filmmaker Joseph H. Lewis, whose last feature this was. Still others point to the script, credited to Ben Perry, but who was actually a front for blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (and similarly blacklisted Howard Lawson and Mitch Lindeman, apparently uncredited co-writers).

All of these factors contribute to the movie's uniqueness somewhat, but a great deal of the movie's appeal appears to have been accidental. It was a low-budget production, probably made for around $125,00-$150,000 (the TCM Database reports 10 shooting days ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Arrow Video's new limited edition box set Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism presents an unofficial trilogy of films about Japanese political radicalism, as refracted through the lens of the set's titular subjects. In these three films, director Kiju Yoshida (known alternately as Yoshishige, for reasons not totally made clear in my online research) demolishes narrative expectations while emphasizing an unbalanced graphic style that is striking and unnerving. He is considered a member of the Japanese New Wave, but even by their avant-garde standards, the films in Love + Anarchism are brazenly experimental. Some readers will take that description as a warning, but I hope you're the kind of viewer who boldly takes it as a challenge, beca...Read the entire review

Reviews of Georges Franju's Spotlight on a Murderer (Pleins feux sur l'assassin, 1961) often compare it to works of Agatha Christie. It resembles Ten Little Indians a bit, but mostly the impetus, rather than the stylistic concerns, seems to have been West Germany's hugely successful Edgar Wallace movies made by Rialto Films between 1959-1972. Those hugely entertaining films weren't exactly spoofs, but stylishly embraced an older style of murder mystery and adapted them in contemporary terms. The early Edgar Wallace films were slightly more serious and less stylized but by the early ‘60s they were gaining in popularity and were increasingly bold in their direction.

Franju's approach to similar material is as uniquely his and as specifically French as the Wallace movies were emphatically German in their attitudes. Spotlight on a Murderer, Franju's immediate follow-up to h...Read the entire review

The Film:

The Movie:

The second pairing of director Luchino Visconti with Austrian actor Helmet Berger was 1973's historical bio-pic, Ludwig, a film that was one of the most expensive pictures made in Europe at the time of its production. Visconti had previously worked with him on The Damned in 1971 and the two were partners/companions until the director's death in 1976 (he suffered a stroke during the making of this picture).

In this film, Berger plays King Ludwig II of Bavaria. We are first introduced to him while he is in the midst of confessing to a priest. The man of the cloth urges Ludwig to try to remain humble but Ludwig knows that his position in life will allow him to become the ultimate patron of the arts. From here, we see the director play around with the actual timeline of events in Ludwig's life. Different characters deliver very heartfelt soliloquies, offering up ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Elio Petri's Property Is No Longer A Theft tells the story of Total (Flavio Bucci), a young man who works day to day as a bank clerk. He doesn't have much in the way of prospects or opportunity and when he asks his employer (Julien Guiomar) for a loan and is subsequently denied, he decides to do something about. Irritated by the corruption and greed that he sees around him on a nearly constant basis, Total decides to take out his frustrations on the town butcher (Ugo Tognazzi). While he is one of the bank's biggest and most important customers, he's also a greedy rat bastard with a penchant for violence.

Soon enough, Total quits his job at the bank and basically dedicates all of his time to an increasingly risky life of petty crime. He makes a point out of going back to the butcher time and time again to get at him, eventually taking everything that is his, includin...Read the entire review

Walerian Borowczyk's short animated films always interested me; his work popped up frequently at festivals, where his strange animations and inventive soundtracks frequently drew applause. In 1975 or 1976 I was a volunteer at the Los Angeles Film Exposition, FILMEX. I slipped into a screening of Borowczyk's Story of Sin and was blown away. The maverick director filmed almost all of his movies in France but returned to Poland for just this one feature, a remake of a classic Polish novel by Stefan Zeromski. Written in 1908, it had been filmed twice previously, in 1911 and 1933.

Story of Sin is nothing like the director's soft-core sex fantasies. Steeped in period detail, it is the oft-told story of The Fallen Woman, told without moralizing lectures. There are no lessons to be learned, except that society's injustice to women knows n...Read the entire review

Released in the US in 1990, Italy's Cinema Paradiso was a movie that truly celebrated the love of movies. It was especially significant to me as I had seen it right before I began working at a movie theater and soon became a projectionist which I still regard as the most satisfying job I've ever had. The story begins in present-day Rome (circa 1988, when the movie was shot) when successful filmmaker Salvatore (Jacques Perrin) returns home late one night and is told by his female companion that she just received a phone call from his mother, whom he hasn't visited in about 30 years. She had called to let him know that someone named Alfredo had recently died and his funeral is the next day. Salvatore then gets into bed and begins processing this news, prompting a lengthy humorous and sentimental flashback that makes up the bulk of the movie.

Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/67650 Sun, 26 Jun 2016 22:09:16 UTC DVD Talk Collector Series

Occasionally a remastered Blu-ray presentation comes along that can make you completely re-evaluate a film. Warner Bros. disc of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Synapse Films' Steelbook of Lamberto Bava's Demons come to mind. Now, with Arrow Video's long-awaited disc of Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964), there is another Blu-ray to add to that list as this edition made me appreciate the movie for the seminal masterpiece that it is.

Beginning on a rainy and windy night, a series of murders begin at a fashion house in Italy. Beautiful young models are viciously killed by a faceless man in a trench-coat and fedora. Could it be that the killer is trying to hide secret information contained inside a mysterious red journal? This fashion house is built on top of an old castle and the dark dungeons below reveal that under the surface of glitz and glamour, humanity's bas...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/70677 Fri, 03 Jun 2016 14:52:15 UTC Recommended

The Movies:

Nikkatsu's ‘Diamond' line was a showcase for their contract stars, a series of modestly budgeted pictures in which some of their top talent was given the chance to shine in films made for a younger audience. Arrow Video offers up their second installment in their series of Nikkatsu Diamond Guy collections, bringing these pictures to a western audience in their proper aspect ratio and language and in very nice quality.

Tokyo Mighty Guy:

The first feature tells the story of Jiro (Akira Kobayashi), a bold young man recently trained in the culinary styles of French cuisine! Armed with this knowledge, he returns to his native Japan where he hopes to open up a new restaurant in the Ginza district of Tokyo. And so as our hero sets out to do just that, he meets and falls for a pretty girl named Hideko (Ruriko Asaoka).

As things progress for Jiro, he fi...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/70564 Wed, 18 May 2016 17:00:19 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

Nico Mastorakis' trash action epic Hired To Kill was shot in the late eighties, when movies like this were still possible. These days? Well… the story introduces us to Frank Ryan (Brian Thompson), a mercenary by trade. He's woken up one fine morning on his house boat when his phone rings. So displeased is he to have been awoken from his slumber that he actually shoots his phone. He's not a morning guy.

With that out of the way, he's off to rendezvous with Thomas (George Kennedy), a businessman of some sort with connections of some sort. He wants to hire Ryan to lead a team of fashion models on an undercover mission to a random island in the Mediterranean. Why? So that he can free the rebel leader, Rallis (Jose Ferrer), who has been locked up there by the corrupt dictator who runs the place, Michael Bartos (Oliver Reed). But there's a catch… in order to successfu...Read the entire review

]]>