There's no question that Streets of Vengeance is a labor of love. It's absolutely incredible to think that this movie was made on a budget of only $4,000. What might seem convoluted or somewhat incoherent is actually relatively impressive once you find out that the filmmakers unexpectedly found themselves changing what was meant to be a two-part short film into a feature when the opportunity presented itself. However, all this can be true, and the finished product still can be less than satisfactory. This newest entry into the sub-genre of throwback exploitation films has some good ideas in it, but most of them fail to come together in a picture that can't settle on what it wants to be tonally, thematically, or dramatically.

Mila (Delawna McKinney) is one of the top performers for adult film producer Ivan Dark (Bryan Hurd), but she's ready to call it quits and look for something new. Althoug...Read the entire review

Five years is a long time. That's how long Corky (Gina Gershon) spent in prison after her partner on her last job screwed her over. Now she's got a legit gig restoring an empty apartment, one right next door to mid-level gangster Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) and his gorgeous wife Violet (Jennifer Tilly). Violet's also feeling the weight of five years: five years married to Caesar, who cares more about his place in "the business" than whether or not Violet is happy with him. Corky and Violet lock eyes in the elevator, and it's not long before they're sleeping together, but things change when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity drops in their laps: Caesar brings home $2 million in cash skimmed and almost stolen from his boss, Gino Marzzone, in order to clean it up and prepare it to be returned to Gino. $2 million could easily buy freedom for the new couple...but can they trust one another?

For most mainstream...Read the entire review

The Film:

Writer-producer-director Norman Lear - still going strong at 95 - may be best known for his game-changing sitcoms of the 1970s, most famously All in the Family, but his masterpiece is a barely-released, largely forgotten satire of late-1960s Americana, Cold Turkey, finished in 1969 but not in movie theaters until early '71.

Though rough around the edges, Cold Turkey is brilliantly funny, quite daring for the time and original. Its plot primarily revolves around cigarette smoking, nicotine addiction, and the scurrilous tactics of big tobacco companies, but Lear's wide net of scorn and wicked satire also includes television news and advertising, the military, religious hypocrisy, alcoholism, right-wing extremism and militia groups, the medical profession, sex, advertising, small town life, and greed, among other things.

Watching Olive Films' new Blu-ray, I was struck by <...Read the entire review

Until literally the final 90 seconds or so, director Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) is a taut, subtle, and original crime thriller, made at the very tail end of the classic film noir cycle. Its premise resembles other great noirs like The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and The Killing (1956), but Wise's execution of the material is uniquely his. Watching Olive Films' excellent HD transfer, licensed from MGM, I kept noticing visual and aural devices that, peculiarly enough, Wise would turn to again for The Haunting (1963), his classic ghost story. For instance, much of the film is shot using infra-red black-and-white film stock, creating moody dark skies looming oppressively over the landscape, much as they do in The Haunting's exterior scenes. The often discordant jazz score adds to the effect, and in one sense Odds Against Tomorrow is a kind of crossroads m...Read the entire review

Fresh off a bus from Oklahoma, Claude Hooper Bukowski (John Savage) hasn't been in New York City for more than a few minutes when he first encounters Berger (Treat Williams). Berger lives a hippie, bohemian lifestyle, appearing to be homeless, and he leads a band of equally carefree oddballs around, including Hud (Dorsey Wright), Jeannie (Annie Golden), and Woof (Don Dacus). Although Claude is a country boy who seems to have no experience with drugs or the counterculture, with plans to hit up a few touristy attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building on his last couple days before he joins the Army in hopes of fighting in Vietnam, he falls right in with the band of rebels, smoking the night away and sleeping in the streets. He also catches the eye of a young woman from an upper-class family, Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), who takes a liking to both Claude and Berger right away. Bef...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

The Movie:

Directed by John G. Avildsen, the man who gave us Rocky and The Karate Kid for Cannon Films in 1970, Joe begins with a scene in which a junkie forces his girlfriend, Melissa Compton (a young Susan Sarandon in her big screen debut!), to get high with him. A short time later, as she's stoned and wandering the makeup section of a store, the cops grab her and drop her off at the local hospital for treatment. After this happens, her father, Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick), heads to the junkies house to grab Melissa's belongings and while he's there, he kills him.

Understandably rocked about what just happened, Bill stops at a local watering hole on the way home to calm down. Here he meets Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), who is clearly three sheets to the wind, where he admits that not only does he hate junkies, but that he just killed one.

When Joe hears about...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Belle Epoque is a frothy sex comedy from director Fernando Trueba (The Artist and the Model, Chico & Rita) that won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1994, besting more serious-minded critical faves like Farewell, My Concubine and The Scent of Green Papaya.

Set in 1931, with Spain on the verge of becoming a democratic republic and the Spanish Civil War still a few years off, Belle Epoque makes some satiric...Read the entire review

Allow me to save you a lot of time, trouble, and money: Olive Films' new Blu-ray release of The Hallelujah Trail (1965) is a travesty that should never have been released.

Intended as an epic comedy-Western, sort of How the West Was Won meets It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, the picture originally ran as a roadshow, filmed as it was in the Ultra Panavision 70 format, and initially exhibited on Cinerama's huge curved screens.

Shot on 65mm film stock and utilizing an anamorphic lens rendering a 2.76:1 super-wide aspect ratio, Ultra Panavision was, visually and aurally, a very impressive process, rendering a razor-sharp and insanely wide image coupled with six-track magnetic stereophonic sound. Because of the high cost of cameras, lenses (each weighed more than a bowling ball), film stock, and theatrical prints, Ultra Panavision was used on but a handful of movies, notably Ben-H...Read the entire review

The Film:

The Movie:

I remember Bigas Luna's 1992 film Jamón Jamón on my local video store's VHS rental shelf distinctly. The cover featured a couple feigning a passionate mingling of their bodies -- the man standing, the woman with her arms and legs wrapped around him -- with a cartoon pig flying in the air above them. (According to what I have found online, stores were allowed to opt for a no-flying-pig option; my local chain clearly went for the pig.) The Spanish film's leads, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, were not international stars at the time, so no one was likely to be bugged by the fact that the entwined couple on the video box were models re-enacting a darkly lit moment from the movie.

Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72868 Fri, 16 Mar 2018 23:42:08 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

No person can be judged as being one thing or the other, especially when it comes to their moral compass. Even the worst of us can engage in acts that can surprise us. Look at the real life story of Robert Stroud, by all means a murderer and quite a psychopath who spent a majority of his life behind bars, in solitary confinement no less. Perhaps spurred by his crushing loneliness, perhaps as a blip in his psyche pushing him towards some sense of redemption, Stroud made it his mission in life to raise birds and study their anatomy, to a point where he became the leading authority on bird diseases. He became so famous, that Thomas E. Gaddis wrote a bestselling book about him, which in turn was adapted into a tender but a bit bloated drama directed by the great John Frankenheimer.

The real Stroud was one bad cookie, apart from his fascination with bird anatomy. Apparently ...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72717 Sun, 14 Jan 2018 01:56:17 UTC Highly Recommended

The Movie:

At this point, the unjustly neglected 1976 film Stay Hungry is possibly best known as the film that proved Arnold Schwarzenegger could act. Sure, he made his debut in Hercules in New York, but no one who enjoys that film is looking for good acting. Stay Hungry doesn't stunt-cast Arnold as something he's not -- he plays a foreign bodybuilder, training for competition and living it up in his off hours -- but the film also doesn't just use him as a muscly prop. There's a disarming, emotionally full-blooded dimension to Arnold's performance as Joe Santo that he rarely gets to exploit in his later films, apart maybe from the old-man gravit...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72694 Wed, 03 Jan 2018 12:56:53 UTC Highly Recommended

The Movie:

Max Ophüls will always have a spot in the cinematic canon, if only for his sumptuous swan song, Lola Montès. Ophüls has directed plenty of acclaimed films, but this work exists in a weird corner of cinephilia where it is probably more often publicly championed than privately watched. His most famous films exist in a rarefied space -- period settings, aristocratic characters, meticulously realized mise-en-scène -- that make them appear unduly demanding of viewers. These are melodramas, but not "low art."

The story of Ophüls's newly reissued Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) is simple and economical, but also maddeningly oblique an...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72693 Tue, 02 Jan 2018 20:46:14 UTC Recommended

Director: Carroll Ballard
Starring: Vanessa Sharp, Hugh Bigney, Patricia Barker
Year: 1986

As the holiday season winds up, I wanted to visit one of my favorite traditions, The Nutcracker, a marvelous ballet whose music always gets me in the Christmas spirit. I've seen it done on stage, I've danced around my living room to cassette tape, and I'm ready to watch the twisted Disney version when it comes out, but I've never experienced the classic on screen, nor have I ever seen it done quite this way before. This 80s take is as strange as it is beautiful, an artistic interpretation that won't fail to surprise, while also bringing to life the expected wonder of the story, a tale that never ages out of enjoyment.

The MovieRead the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72682 Wed, 27 Dec 2017 13:10:46 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

When reviewing Elaine May's directorial debut A New Leaf (1971), it's tempting to review not just the film on the screen, but the fabled three-hour version that May turned in to Paramount Pictures, which they promptly seized from her and then essentially cut in half. The version that we have now is an offbeat, sometimes biting romantic comedy with a sprinkling of dark jokes about murdering one's wife for money. May's original concept -- based on a story by mystery writer Jack Ritchie -- was supposed to go the full Kind Hearts and Coronets route, with even darker humor and an actual body count. However, no one dies in the release version, ...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72673 Fri, 22 Dec 2017 15:24:39 UTC Recommended

"23 December, 1941: Sighted tanker, sank truck." Set in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, Blake Edwards' Operation Petticoat (1959) remains an enjoyable WWII-themed comedy in which war takes a distant second. Like Ralph Nelson's Father Goose (also starring Grant, and released five years later), Petticoat's real battle is between the sexes, as our ...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72629 Tue, 05 Dec 2017 16:39:26 UTC Highly Recommended As the second-to-last film in Cary Grant's long and illustrious career, Ralph Nelson's Father Goose (1964) found both the actor and his character, professional alcoholic Walter Eckland, in unfamiliar territory. Grant famously played against type here: sporting rumpled clothes, a week's worth of facial scruff, and a grumpy demeanor, Eckland is far from the dashing, debonair image Grant carved out for himself during the previous three decades. Eckland's unfamiliar territory, ...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72585 Thu, 16 Nov 2017 07:22:49 UTC Recommended In the field of "Poverty Row" horrors, Return of the Ape Man (1944) is perhaps the most unwittingly amusing. Bela Lugosi and John Carradine star as bickering scientists who bring a galumphing caveman (Frank Moran) back from the dead in this 60-minute wonder. Many Poverty Row horror films have fallen into the public domain and were staples of late-night local television for decades, later turning up on VHS and DVD. Return of the Ape Man was a bit more elusive, though the unrelated The Ape (1940), starring Boris Karloff, and The Ape Man (1943), with Lugosi, were readily available. Lugosi's star had fallen precipitously since about 1934. By the early 1940s he was relegated to small, menial parts in bigger studio horror movies and horror spoofs, while headlining cheap Monogram programmers. The Devil Bat (1940), on Blu-ray, is immensely enjoyable for such a crummy mo...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72580 Wed, 15 Nov 2017 12:23:04 UTC Recommended A peculiar hodgepodge of discordant components, S.O.S. Tidal Wave (1939) is entertaining because it's so bizarre. Built around a familiar morality play of journalists fighting political corruption, the screenplay incorporates an activist radio ventriloquist, experimental early television, car crashes, a calamitous tidal wave, and, indirectly, Orson Welles. Virtually unknown, S.O.S. Tidal Wave comes to Blu-ray via Olive Films, licensing the Republic Pictures title, in pristine condition, from Paramount. Maybe Olive thought they were licensing an early, big-scale disaster movie (their text on the back cover suggests this) but it's a real curio regardless. News commentator Jeff Shannon (Ralph Byrd) is a huge TV personality thanks to his wildly popular infotai...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72569 Sat, 11 Nov 2017 19:26:58 UTC Recommended Rock 'n roll makes the world go 'round. [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] No, wait; the sun rises (and maybe sets?; I dunno) with rock 'n roll. Look, it has some kind of effect on celestial bodies. That's what the anthropomorphic critters on the farm believe, anyway. Hunka hunka burnin' rooster Chanticleer...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72562 Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:10:01 UTC Rent It Based on the turbulent early relationship between tutor Anne Sullivan and her blind, deaf student Helen Keller (which was itself rooted in Keller's 1902 autobiography, The Story of My Life), Arthur Penn's The Miracle Worker (1962) runs a close second behind David Lynch's Eraserhead as "most terrifying film to watch if you're an expecting parent". Boasting two extremely committed performances by pre-Graduate Anne Bancroft (as Sullivan) and newcomer Patty Duke (Keller), as well as styl...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72559 Wed, 08 Nov 2017 18:40:45 UTC Recommended The Movie Directed by Lesley Selander for Republic Pictures in 1945, The Vampire's Ghost takes place in Africa. Here a British man named Webb Fallon (John Abbott) runs a night club where the locals gamble and drink and enjoy performances by a beautiful dancing girl named Lisa (Adele Mara). When a sailor gets out of hand after losing all of his money to Webb, a fight breaks out and his friend Roy Hendrick (Charles Gordon) jumps into the fray. Before it can get too serious, however, the sailor puts his knife away seemingly because Fallon starred at him… very intensely. Later that night, Hendrick takes Fallon to his place for dinner with his beautiful fiancé Julie (Peggy Stewart) and the local reverend Father Gilchrest (Grant Withers) in attendance. When a servant notices that Webb has no reflection in the mirror that suddenly smashes to pieces, he tells Hendrick that it was e...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72442 Mon, 02 Oct 2017 18:47:05 UTC Rent It Wai-Tung Gao (Winston Chao) and Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein) are a gay couple living in New York City. Wai-Tung is a realtor, while Simon is a physical therapist. Although they may not be completely "out" in public (perhaps more to do with their quiet lifestyle than a personal choice), they don't seem to trying to hide their feelings either, with one major exception: Wai-Tung has yet to reveal to his traditional Chinese parents that he is gay. His mother (Ya-Lei Kuei), mails him cassette tapes instead of letters (which seem to fuel the determined energy of his workout routine), reminding him of his responsibility to her and his father (Sihung Lung), to give them a grandchild. Although Wai-Tung successfully strings them along (save the occasional awkward arranged date), news of Mr. Gao's declining health puts pressure on him to do something, and when Wei-Wei (May Chin), a mutual friend of Wai and Simon...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72436 Sat, 30 Sep 2017 19:43:23 UTC DVD Talk Collector Series Director: Don Taylor Starring: Michael York, Burt Lancaster, Barbara Carrera Year: 1977 The Island of Dr. Moreau is a film based on an H.G. Wells novel published in 1896, a sci-fi classic written by a legendary author that spawned a sci-fi classic directed by a talented filmmaker. Don Taylor oversaw more television episodes and made-for-TV movies than you can count, but he also directed films in the Planet of the Apes and Omen franchises, as well as The Final Countdown, a Kirk Douglas/Martin Sheen action/time travel flick. There's more than enough genius to go around behind this 70s take on the timeless story of Dr. Moreau, and the result is one of the better genre films you are likely to see, a co...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72391 Mon, 18 Sep 2017 12:05:26 UTC Rent It Orson Welles's The Stranger (1946) has long been the bastard child of the director's oeuvre. Long-held conventional wisdom, a lot of it perpetrated by Welles himself, is that Welles deliberately set out to prove to Hollywood that he was capable of making an "ordinary" movie, on-time and on-budget, and that he succeeded in this aim. As such, The Stranger has a reputation as above average Hollywood movie (specifically: film noir) but minor Welles. That was certainly my opinion for years, having seen it probably six or seven times through the years, including a new 35mm print MGM either struck or screened when I worked there nearly 20 years ago. But each time I see more and more I'm struck by how un-ordinary The Stranger really is, even within the mid-‘40s film noir field. It's really an extraordinary accomplishment, a more personal film for Welles than most imagine. And Welles w...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72393 Mon, 18 Sep 2017 12:05:26 UTC Recommended "They call him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning, No-one you see, is smarter than he, And we know Flipper, lives in a world full of wonder, Flying there-under, under the sea!" Flipper, the 1964-67 family television series about a "aquatic Lassie"-type title character, a bottlenose dolphin kept as a pet by a family at the (fictitious) Coral Key Park and Marine Preserve in Florida, is fondly remembered by those who saw it when it was new. Other than a few snippets here and there through the years I never saw it until Olive Films unexpectedly opted to license it from MGM and release its first two of three seasons to, surprisingly, Blu-ray. Flipper was produced by Ivan Tors, a Hungarian Jack-of-all-trades who first produced comparatively science-based science fiction films and a TV series (Science Fiction Theater) before shifting his interests to animal-base...Read the entire review ]]>