I’ve writtena bout a bunch of these noir sets from Kino Lorber. I love them because they bring us some underseen and rarely heard-of low-budget film noirs. The three in this set are all from Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures. Two of them are quite good, and the other has Raymond Burr. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
It is hot here in Oklahoma. Too darn hot. It has been over 100 degrees every day for the past week or two. That completely zaps all my energy. Today it didn’t help that I did a bunch of cleanup at a house we are building. Which meant blowing out a bunch of cabinets that filled the house with dust. Covered my face with dust and filled my lungs is more like it.
I am knackered. I’ve been staring at this screen for ten minutes, trying to think of something clever to say about MacArthur. I got nothing. But I didn’t write the review today; I wrote it yesterday (or was it the day before.) Whenever it was, I was pretty tired then, too. I’m always tired, it seems.
It’s just too darn hot.
Anyway, you can read my review over at Cinema Sentries (spoiler: I didn’t like the film very much.)
The Island is so close to being a good movie. Or at least an interesting one. Michael Caine stars as a reporter investigating some disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, only to be captured by a gang of pirates. It is as silly as that sounds, but not quite as silly as it should have been. Or fun. There are several things they could have done to push it into “good” territory, but they never quite get there. It is worth a watch if you are bored, but there are plenty of other Michael Caine films that are more worth your time. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
If you spend any time at all watching French cinema, then you will no doubt know the name Jean-Paul Belmondo. He was one of the great actors of the French New Wave and remained a popular favorite for decades.
In what seems like a very strange turn of events, he wound up starring as the same character in two different adaptations of the same book, some eleven years apart. Kino Lorber has just released them, and I watched them back to back. It is a fascinating glimpse into the adaptation process. I reviewed them both over at Cinema Sentries.
I’m fascinated with franchises that never really took off. Like a movie gets made, and the studio expects there will be sequels and spin-offs, but the first film bombs, and so nothing comes of it. Remo Williams is titled The Adventure Begins…but it also ended there because the film bombed and there wasn’t a sequel.
That’s too bad, too, because this film is a lot of fun. Fred Ward stars as Remo Williams, who actually isn’t Remo Williams but a NYC police officer who gets into a scrape and has his face and name changed to Remo Williams to help out a super secret government agency. He’s like James Bond but dumber and less cool. Which pretty much sums up the film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Anthony Mann and James Stewart made a bunch of movies together. Many of them were westerns. Several are some of the best westerns made in the 1950s. Ben of the River is one of those. Stewart plays a man with a past who is trying to find redemption by leading a group of settlers to Oregon, where they will become farmers. He meets a lot of trouble on the way. Mann fills it with a lot of action and some beautiful scenery. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Charles Bronson had such an interesting career. For a while, he was a terrific little character actor in films like The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, and then he became a star and for a time he continued making interesting (if not great) films, and then he got stuck making dumb action films that wasted his talents as an actor.
Rider on the Rain is a very interesting film. It starts out like a rape revenge film, then turns into a thriller, but it turns into something far more interesting. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
Somewhere in Time is a film I’ve always felt like people loved. I thought it was a revered minor classic. I watched it many years ago and was a little disappointed in it, but when I got the opportunity to review this new UHD release from Kino Lorber, I figured it was time to give it another try.
Furthermore, I was still disappointed in it. Apprently, I was wrong thinking everybody else loved it because all my Letterboxd followers feel the same as me and all the reviews I’ve read find it to be mostly average.
Christopher Reeve becomes obsessed with an old painting of Jane Seymour and finds a way to travel back in time to meet her.
Reeve and Seymour look beautiful, and the idea of the story is interesting, but I never really bought into the romance. And the film didn’t seem all that interested in the time travel aspects.
You can read all of my thoughts over at Cinema Sentries.
Like most people my age I first came to Alec Guinness through Star Wars and his memorable role as the old Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi. Later, I loved him in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Oliver Twist. For years and years I thought of him solely as a dramatic actor. It was quite surprising, then to discover him as a delightful comedic actor.
I was quite thrilled to obtain this four movie set of some of his best comedies (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, and The Ladykillers.) You can read my full review here.
Some days I truly miss the old video stores. There was something special about walking through the aisles looking at the same VHS covers you’d seen a thousand times, hoping to stumble across something special. In those days before IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, I often had no idea what a movie was like other than that cover and a description written on the back. Some of those covers made the movies seem utterly amazing. Some of them are still etched into my brain (like the cover for April Fool’s Day where a woman’s hair is braided to look like a hangman’s noose).
I don’t think I ever managed to see any of the Ninja Trilogy when I was a kid, though I do remember looking at those VHS tapes and wishing I could rent them, but I sure was thrilled when I learned they were getting the UHD treatment. Now I’ve not only seen them, but I own them, and I’ve reviewed them (something you can read right here at Cinema Sentries.)
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