We've got a big week of releases this week, ranging from cult classics hitting DVD for the first time ever, to the mesmerizing Thai film that won last year's Palm d'Or, to animated comedies and horror. Check out the full slate inside! 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: July 12, 2011.

Reviewer: Vadim Rizov
Rating (out of 5): **½

Takashi Miike chooses the strangest times to assert himself. By IMDB's count, since 1991 he's directed or is wrapping up some 85 titles; if he's no longer cranking out five films a year, inconsistency is still his hallmark. Miike's best known for both Audition — Ozu meets torture porn — and a series of films that alternate between inspiration and filler with very little warning. If Miike was a band, he'd have an awesome greatest-hits disc that would make you get rid of all the albums proper.

Continue Reading 13 Assassins

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): *-½

Hobo with a Shotgun is this year's Human Centipede. The comparison, by the way, is not a compliment. Although slightly better than Tom Six's gross and stodgy film (on the basis of what we see on-screen, director/editor Jason Eisener has a good deal more film sense than Six), Hobo, written by John Davies, is one of the ugliest movies ever made. From its gaudy, hellish color palette to its near-non-stop, grizzly gore and violence, to the really ridiculous behavior of the movie's denizens -- good 'n bad guys 'n gals, included -- the movie goes almost immediately over the top. And then just goes on and on until it soon seems unending.

Continue Reading Hobo with a Shotgun

It's a small week for new releases off the heels of the Fourth of July weekend; we're just getting warmed up for a great month of DVDs ahead! 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: July 5, 2011.

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of 5): Chains **** ; Tormento **** ½ ; Nobody's Children **** ; The White Angel *** ½  ; SERIES ****

Chains (1949), the first film in Eclipse’s Raffaello Matarazzo set, begins simply enough: a stolen car breaks down and the thief, desperate to avoid apprehension, hides out at a mechanic’s garage. 388 minutes and four films later, 1955’s The White Angel closes the set with a standoff between a fearless nun and a group of ruthless female inmates who are holding an infant hostage.

These two scenes best illustrate the milieu of Director Raffaello Matarazzo, one of Italy’s most commercially successful filmmakers. Matarazzo’s films vacillate violently between the mundane and the histrionic, more than earning the set’s label: "Runaway Melodramas". Those who prefer subtlety in their storytelling have received fair warning.

Continue Reading Eclipse Series 27: Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Rating (out of 5): **** 1/2 

It would be misleading (however accurate) to tout People on Sunday as a film from the makers of Detour, Sunset Boulevard, The Killers, and High Noon. Aside from technical grace, not too much about Sunday suggests the careers Edgar G. Ulmer, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and Fred Zinnemann (respectively) would have following this early effort.

Shot over six weeks without a script (despite the credits’ claim otherwise), the film details the exploits of young people living in Weimar Republic-era Berlin. 

Continue Reading People on Sunday (Criterion)

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (ouf of 5): *** 

In American: The Bill Hicks Story, British filmmakers Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas set out to tell the tale of the influential comedian who was underappreciated in his time and then taken from us too soon. The Texas-raised Hicks was a remarkable comic who dared tell truths in this country in a time (the 1980s and into the 90s) when a lot of Americans lived in a trance and didn't want to hear them told so bluntly--or at all. The film will probably be more of a revelation to the uninitiated than to longtime fans (such as myself), but fans of the cult comic will also find much to appreciate here.

Continue Reading American: The Bill Hicks Story

There's no such thing as summer doldrum's for this season's slate of summer DVDs - inside you'll find classic films released by Criterion, two truly bizarre but not-to-be-missed slashers from the 80's (re-released by Severin Films), and yes, even MORE Nic Cage (it never ends!). 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: June 28, 2011.

We've got classic noir, Italian melodramas, docs, sci-fi, action/adventure, and so much more for this week's slate of new releases. A strong and varied bunch; check out more inside. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: June 21, 2011.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (ouf of 5): ***** 

Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled detective The Continental Op made his fiction debut in 1929, and the more famous Sam Spade followed in 1930. Raymond Chandler followed in 1939 with the debut of Philip Marlowe. Movie versions of these were made throughout the 1940s. In 1947, another hard-boiled detective hit the scene, in a book called I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane. Private eye Mike Hammer wasn't like the others; he was tougher, greedier, more lowdown, maybe not as bright... in a word, he was more primal. He struck a chord with readers and the Hammer books outsold their predecessors in huge amounts.

Continue Reading Kiss Me Deadly