Category: Reviews

Bruce Force (1947) & The Naked City (1948)

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I review a lot of movies for Cinema Sentries. Sometimes I get stacks of them, and I have to push out reviews fairly quickly. Once in a while, I decide it is easier to bundle my reviews up, reviewing two or three movies in a single post and letting them bounce off each other a little bit.

So was the case with these two film noirs from Jules Dassin. Brute Force is a down-and-dirty little prison escape film, while The Naked City is the precursor to a lot of by-the-books procedurals like Dragnet and even Law & Order. You can read my reviews here.

V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayals

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I grew up in the late 1980s/early 1990s and I have many, many fond memories of going to the video rental store looking for something interesting to watch. I went enough that I had generally seen all the big new releases so I often went digging through the old stuff. I loved finding weird, low-budget genre films full of sex, and violence, and goofy action.

In Japan these straight-to-video releases were called V-Cinema and Arrow Video has just put out a cool little boxed set full of them. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

The Last of Us: Season One

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Just in time for Season Two hitting the small screen Season One of this terrific television series dropped a couple of weeks ago in a swell looking 4K UHD steelbook.

If you don’t know, The Last of Us is based on a popular video game series about a zombie like apocalypse and how two people – a middle-aged man and a teenage girl – survive it. I’ve never played the game but I love the series. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Sadie McKee (1934)

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Sadie McKee is a Pre-Code film starring Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone. It is a weird film in that is profers Crawford three bachelors to choose from, but it seems to want her to love the one most ill-suited to her. He’s a jerk, one who literally leaves her at the altar, but hey its true love so its all okay, I guess.

It isn’t a great film, but Crawford is great in it. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXV Blu-ray Review

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I’ve reviewed so many of these sets I don’t know what else to say about them. This one has three films from Republic Pictures directed by John H. Auer, whom I’d never heard of before.

The films are The Flame (1947) a melodramatic Double Indemnity-esque caper with too many characters and a couple of blondes I couldn’t tell apart. City That Never Sleeps (1953) is a docu-style drama filled with loads of interesting characters and some terrific noir cinematography. Hell’s Half Acre (1953) is an exotic noir set on the mean streets of Honolulu.

They are all pretty good, actually, and you can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Career Opportunities (1991)

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If you are of a certain age and a certain persuasion the you’ve probably got an image of Jennifer Connelly riding a mechanical horse in a white tank embedded in your brain. The image is from a lesser known John Hughes scripted movie, Career Opportunities. Kino Lorber just dropped the 4K UHD on us and I’ve got the review.

It isn’t a great movie, but it is definitely more than that endlessly Gif’ed image.

You can read the review here.

Naked Alibi (1954) Blu-ray Review

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In my review of Naked Alibi which was written for Cinema Sentries back in 2019 I noted that Gloria Grahame was “…one of those actresses I’ve seen in numerous films, but never remember. Whenever she appears in a movie I’m watching, I’m always glad because I know it is going to be a good performance. But then when it’s over I forget who she is. After watching her in this, I think she’ll stick.”

She absolutely did stick. She’s one of the great femme fatales of film noir history and I’m a huge fan.

This film is a good one too, you can read my full review here.

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974) Blu-ray Review

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As a kid I knew Walter Matthau from silly comedies like Grumpy Old Men and The Odd Couple, it was only later in life that realized he was a very fine actor indeed. He generally stayed in the comedic lane, but once in a while, he’d take on something more dramatic.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a terrifically taut little thriller about some dudes hijacking a New York Subway car. Matthau plays a transit cop trying to catch them. It is a wonderful encapsulation of New York in the 1970s.

You can read my full review here.

Dario Argento’s Deep Cuts Blu-ray Reivew

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I’ve talked about Dario Argento, the Italian horror director, many times on this site. He’s one of my favorite horror directors, and certainly my favorite director of Gialli. For a time, during the 1970s and 1980s, he styled himself as something of an Alfred Hitchcock figure – a persona bigger than the movies he made. He produced and hosted several different television series for Italian TV and Severin Films has boxed them all together in this nice little set.

You can read my full review of everything inside over at Cinema Sentries.

Microwave Massacre (1979)

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One of the things I absolutely love about the abundance of Boutique Blu-ray labels we have now is that they sometimes find these ridiculous, obscure, weirdo movies and clean them up, restore them, and release them on Blu-ray with loads of extras.

Microwave Massacre is a terrible film. It is a movie about a serial killing cannibal, and it is a comedy. Or at least it is supposed to be a comedy. But according to my review (which was written in 2016 which you can read here), there are no laughs to be found.

And yet, it got a killer release from Arrow Video. You gotta love the audacity of that.