The Movie:

The 1929 crime drama Thunderbolt is a strange little picture that bears some of the fingerprints of its idiosyncratic director but sadly not enough. It is the first talkie for Josef von Sternberg, best known for his run of Marlene Dietrich vehicles, which would start with The Blue Angel in 1930.

Thunderbolt, on the other hand, is more akin to his silent crime pictures and it's headlined by George Bancroft, previously seen in von Sternberg's Underworld and The Docks of New York. Bancroft is the titular gangster, and he's sore that his lo...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The Bride Comes Home (1935) is one of a trio of Claudette Colbert-Fred MacMurray romantic comedies that Kino Lorber Studio Classics is releasing on Blu-ray this summer. (The others are The Gilded Lily, also from '35, and 1943's No Time for Love.)

As a vehicle for Colbert and MacMurray, The Bride Comes Home shows off their unique and shared charms quite pleasantly. As a movie, it's a forgettable, undercooked trifle with moments of shocking brilliance. The premise in a nutshell is that Colbert is a poor little rich girl whose family has fallen on hard times. She goes out looking for work and enters the ...Read the entire review

Madame Rosa (La vie devant sol, or "The Life Before Us," 1977) is a French drama lauded for Simone Signoret's performance in the title role, a Holocaust survivor and former prostitute in her sixties, caring for the children of current prostitutes in her Belleville, Paris sixth-floor walk-up. Wikipedia and other sources about the film make no mention of it, but the novel from which it was based, Romain Gary's The Life Before Us, was last year adapted again, this time relocated to Italy, for Edoardo Ponti's The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé), starring 86-year-old Sophia Loren, her first starring feature in 16 years. Signoret was only 56 when she appeared in Madame Rosa, but looks significantly older. The original film was a significant success, Signoret winning a César as Best Actress, while the movie won the Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film.

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]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74846 Sat, 26 Jun 2021 16:36:19 UTC Highly Recommended

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]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74841 Thu, 24 Jun 2021 21:31:51 UTC Highly Recommended

...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74829 Thu, 17 Jun 2021 15:27:58 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

NOTE: The images presented here do not represent the quality of the Blu-ray under review.

This month, Kino Lorber is releasing Blu-rays of Mae West's nine films from her star-making run at Paramount Pictures. While not as famous as the two films that preceded it (She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel), 1934's Belle of the Nineties is a solid showcase for West's inimitable talents.

West stars as Ruby Carter, a St. Louis stage sensation who sings and saunters (and we must presume, despite Hays Code-mandated chasteness, strips). Ruby is getting serious with a boxer, Tiger Kid (Roger Pryor), but decides to cool it when the Kid gets jealous. She takes up a contract in New Orleans, where she is the toas...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74822 Mon, 14 Jun 2021 19:53:59 UTC Rent It

For just over a decade, John Hughes was one of the hippest, hottest names in Hollywood. Starting with The Breakfast Club in 1980, his work came to define a generation and launched the careers of several teen stars. That said, not everything he touched turned to gold: Career Opportunities was shot in 1989 and didn't manage to make it to theaters until 1991, following a tumultuous post-production process (and the breakout, career-defining box office success of Home Alone). Although the film eventually garnered a small cult following, it doesn't carry the same kind of respect that even Hughes' less-celebrated work like She's Having a Baby and Some Kind of Wonderful have. Watching it now, it's easy to see why...and why Hughes himself tried to take his name off of it before it was released.

Frank Whaley plays Jim Dodge, a young man out of high school sti...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74791 Thu, 20 May 2021 17:28:06 UTC Highly Recommended

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]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74761 Tue, 27 Apr 2021 16:55:15 UTC Rent It

It's the summer after graduation, and Bill Conrad (Eric Stoltz) is anxious to jump into adulthood. He's saved up enough money from his job at a bowling alley to move into his own apartment, and he's already dreaming of what having a place to himself will do for his dating life. Also dreaming about it: his somewhat unreliable friend and co-worker, Tom Drake (Chris Penn), who eventually convinces Bill to let him move in to help split the rent. Although both of them dream about beautiful women, they retain feelings for their would-be girlfriends: Bill's ex, Anita (Lea Thompson), now getting frisky in the back of the donut shop where she works with a greasy cop (Hart Bochner), and Eileen (Jenny Wright), who is endlessly frustrated by the way Tom's behavior seems to blow back on her instead of him. Meanwhile, Bill's little brother Jim (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) wanders around town getting into trouble, and ob...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74760 Tue, 27 Apr 2021 16:47:29 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

So The Lash Of The Penitentes is the better known version of a film originally released as The Penitente Murder Case that has been, up until this release, ridiculously hard to find. The Lash cut not so much, it was around, but the original version has been tough to come by. Kino Lorber, with some help from both Something Weird Video and the Library Of Congress , have brought to Blu-ray as the ninth installment of their Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age Of The Exploitation Picture series, both cuts, and those with a taste for the bizarre and/or those who appreciate vintage exploitation pictures have every reason to rejoice.

Before the obligatory plot synopsis, a quick bit of background. Producer and supposed co-director Harry Revier bought himself a bunch of footage shot for an abandoned documentary made a couple of years prior about Los...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74740 Tue, 30 Mar 2021 15:14:06 UTC Highly Recommended

The Movie:

Revisiting Ang Lee's 2007 espionage film Lust, Caution on Kino Lorber's new Blu-ray, it becomes all the more infuriating that the film has drifted to the wayside due to its NC-17 rating. The stigma of that rating torpedoed the film at the U.S. box office, where it took in only $4.6 million. The film bounced back a little on DVD, but it is probably still better known by reputation for its sex scenes than for anything substantive about the movie. Arguably, it is Lee's last great film to date (Life of Pi is very good, sure), and it deserves to be remembered on that basis.

While the offending scenes play a pivotal role in the drama of Lust, Caution (and seem to be tease...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74732 Thu, 18 Mar 2021 17:05:38 UTC Highly Recommended

The Movie:

Kino Lorber releases the 1971 revisionist western Doc on Blu-ray, shortly after the company revived some other well-loved but little-seen films from director Frank Perry, Ladybug Ladybug and Diary of a Mad Housewife. The major difference between those films and Doc is that Eleanor Perry wrote the earlier efforts and they are often referred to as films by "The Perrys." Frank and Eleanor divorced after Mad Housewife, and Doc can be seen as Frank's declaration that he is still a major filmmaker even without Eleanor's contribution.

Initial reactions to Doc were mixed, with the b...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74726 Mon, 08 Mar 2021 20:31:04 UTC Skip It

Unbeknownst to his wife Christine (Paula Marshall), the happy home life that Casey (Thomas Jane) has created for the both of them represents his decision to turn over a new leaf. However, his criminal past threatens to blow up his new normal when his old buddy Nick (Aaron Eckhart) unexpectedly calls, claiming to be swinging through town on his way to get married. Reluctantly, Casey allows Nick to drop his bags off and potentially stay for dinner, but becomes furious when he discovers that one of said bags is filled to the brim with heroin. Hoping to keep his house and conscience clean, Casey flushes the drugs down his kitchen sink, only for a succession of increasingly dangerous people, including wannabe rapper Ice (Glenn Plummer), sadistic bombshell Dallas (Paulina Porizkova), torture artist Billy (James Le Gros), and corrupt cop Kasarov (Mickey Rourke), to pop by looking for either the drugs, or $...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74716 Wed, 03 Mar 2021 16:14:12 UTC Rent It

The challenge of any movie based on a real-life person is whether an audience will have any interest in them. Released in 2000, Isn't She Great was a rather high-profile bomb. Its subject is author Jacqueline Susann (played by Bette Midler), most famous for writing the 1966 novel "Valley of the Dolls" and a few other melodramatic works before passing in 1974. Valley of the Dolls of course was adapted into a movie in 1967 (which Susann reportedly hated) and is now regarded as a camp classic.

At 95 minutes, this movie plays like a rushed Cliff Notes biography. We first see her as a stage actress, and quickly learn that she wants to be "somebody"- in other words famous, a household name. Irving Mansfield (Nathan Lane) ...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74703 Thu, 25 Feb 2021 16:33:12 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

I will admit, it takes a little while for The Underneath to start firing on all cylinders. Released in 1995, the film is a remake of the 1948 film noir Criss Cross from writer-director Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh has never been happy with the film -- he had his script credit replaced with "Sam Lowry," the main character from Brazil -- and, watching The Underneath, one can feel the filmmaker fighting with himself.

Many stylistic ideas on display here -- the achronological story structure, the aggressive use of color gels, and the selection of different film stocks to help distinguish different ti...Read the entire review

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