Jun17

Funny Games (1997) DVD9 and Blu-Ray Criterion Collection

by movieworld on June 17th, 2019 at 12:13
Posted In: .Other movies, Crime, Drama, Horror, Thriller

Funny Games 1997
One of Haneke's better known pictures, Funny Games, follows Georg (Ulrich Muhe) and Anna (Susanne Lohtar) and their young son son Schorschi (Stefan Clapczynski). The three have recently arrived at their house on the lake and Georg is fairly preoccupied with getting his new boat in working order, the key to the success of the family's vacation plans. While Anna is in the kitchen, a strange man wearing white gloves arrives and asks her to borrow a couple of eggs. Things become even more curious when a second man arrives and begins obsessing over Georg's golf clubs.

The two men start referring to one another as Peter and Paul, and it soon becomes obvious that there's something wrong - these guys don't intend to leave. Georg comes back from his boat-related distractions and tries to get the two men out of the home but the conflict soon becomes violent and the family find themselves being held hostage by this pair of unstable criminals bent on forcing the three of them to join in on their funny games...

Director Michael Haneke made a brutal film that stands apart from most of the horror genre. It doesn’t rely on graphic visuals as much as on psychological horror. Haneke avoids falling into exploitation movie territory by putting almost all of the violence off screen, but the audio effects used in place of gory visuals more than make up for the lack of actual on-screen bloodshed.

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Jun17

Demanty noci / Diamonds of the Night (1964) DVD9 and Blu-Ray Criterion Collection

by movieworld on June 17th, 2019 at 10:37
Posted In: .Other movies, Drama, War

Diamonds of the Night 1964
Two teenage boys (Ladislav Jansky and Antonin Kumbera) manage to escape from a train which is transporting prisoners between concentration camps. They flee for their lives with only the clothes on their backs and their official prison coats to keep them warm. They must evade their pursuers across harsh terrain whilst battling the elements and trying to find food, drink and shelter in a war-ravaged hinterland.

Diamonds of the Night is a thrilling tale of survival, dehumanisation and coming-of-age in Nazi-occupied Europe. Nemec’s uses almost no dialogue, allowing the confusion, chaos and desperation of the two young men to tell its own story. Using a mix of flashbacks, hallucinations and flights of fancy, Diamonds of the Night builds up a history around these escapees. It’s a tense, disturbing and exhilarating film which illustrates the horror as if we’re witnessing it with our own eyes.

Director: Jan Nemec
Cast: Ladislav Jansky, Antonin Kumbera, Ilse Bischofova
Country: Czechoslovakia
Genre: Drama, War

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Jun17

Blue Velvet (1986) 2 x DVD9 and Blu-Ray Criterion Collection

by movieworld on June 17th, 2019 at 09:08
Posted In: .Other movies, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Blue Velvet 1986
Written and directed by David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), Blue Velvet is a powerful and hallucinatory film that documents a young man's coming of age against a backdrop of perversion, sadomasochism, and violence. This is a film that delves into the black side of human nature in a way that few films have ever accomplished. It's a film that will stay with you—like the stuttery twitch-memories of a nightmare—long after its end credits scroll. Blue Velvet is about the moral rot underlying the American Dream.

College student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers a human ear in a field. He contacts detective John Williams (George Dickerson), hoping that he would assist him in his search for the owner of the ear, but is quickly told to keep his mouth shut.

Together with the detective's daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), Jeffrey launches his own investigation. Soon after, he meets the beautiful night club singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who often sees a drug-addicted loner (Dennis Hopper) who loves hurting people. Without realizing, Jeffrey quickly gets sucked up in a dangerous world where everyone has something to hide and life is cheap.

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Jun14

Lubitsch in Berlin: Fairy-Tales, Melodramas, and Sex Comedies – Six Films by Ernst Lubitsch (1918–1921) 3 x Blu-Ray Eureka – Masters of Cinema

by movieworld on June 14th, 2019 at 16:18
Posted In: .Other movies, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Romance

Lubitsch in Berlin
Ernst Lubitsch is a director best known for his years in Hollywood where he worked from 1923 until his death in 1947. In that time he made such classics as Trouble in Paradise (1932), Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), the original To Be or Not to Be (1942) and the original Heaven Can Wait (1943) before his untimely death. Over the years he developed what became known as the Lubitsch Touch, an indefinable style that permeated through his films. That style gave a very European sensibility to his Hollywood films and accepted an intelligence from his audience. On the surface there is little of this in his early films that he made in Berlin until he emigrated to the USA. But it is there in the cheeky and mildly saucy humour that ran through all his films. Meanwhile, many critics have stated that you can’t understand Lubitsch without looking at and including the first part of his career.

Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin is a three-disc Blu-ray collection of some of his earliest surviving silent films. The set takes its name from a feature length documentary which is also included.

Included are the elegant contemporary comedies I Wouldn't Like to Be a Man (1918) and The Oyster Princess (1919), both starring the kittenish Ossi Oswalda, as well as the Arabian Nights extravaganza Sumurun (1919) in which he himself appears with Pola Negri, and the historical epic Anne Boleyn (1920), the most expensive German film of its day, starring Emil Jannings as Henry VIII. They're accompanied by Robert Fischer's excellent two-hour documentary, Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin.

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Jun14

The Breaking Point (1950) DVD9 and Blu-Ray Criterion Collection

by movieworld on June 14th, 2019 at 13:38
Posted In: .Other movies, Crime, Drama, Thriller

The Breaking Point 1950
If you know Hemingway’s novel, it doesn’t take long before you realize that The Breaking Point is the most faithful screen adaptation, and what few key alterations Curtiz and his screenwriters made have actually created a stronger story.
The result is a tense, fast paced, atmospheric and highly watchable thriller, even a neglected little gem.

In the Curtiz version, John Garfield plays Harry Morgan, the owner of a charter boat who is having trouble making enough money to support his wife and daughters. When he accepts a charter to take a man named Hannagan and his mistress to Mexico to do some fishing, his client skips out without paying, leaving Morgan with Hannagan's girlfriend Lenora (Patricia Neal), and a docking fee he can't pay. In order to make enough money to get home, Morgan reluctantly agrees to smuggle Chinese people into the United States, but the Coast Guard finds out about it and impounds his boat. The situation becomes increasingly desperate for Morgan as a gang of crooks blackmails him and kills his first mate, forcing him into a fateful confrontation.

Director: Michael Curtiz
Cast: John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter
Country: USA
Genre: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir, Thriller

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Jun10

Personal Shopper (2016) DVD9 and Blu-Ray Criterion Collection

by movieworld on June 10th, 2019 at 19:35
Posted In: .Other movies, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Personal Shopper 2016
Olivier Assayas has delivered a fundamentally strange, disquieting picture. Personal Shopper is a unique genre-bending psychological thriller.

Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is an American who works in Paris as a personal shopper for Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten), a self-absorbed celebrity. She communicates briefly with her boyfriend (Ty Olwin), a tech expert who is working in Oman. Neither of these relationships matter much to her in comparison to the recent loss of her twin brother who died of a congenital heart condition. He promised to try and contact her from beyond the grave.

And so Maureen is waiting, and it is a hard discipline to keep. This wraithlike young woman spends her downtime communing with ghosts in a haunted house, desperately looking for a sign from her brother. But even more unnerving is her discovery that some mysterious person is stalking her via texts to her phone. He seems to know a lot about her fantasies and her obsession with forbidden activities...

Director: Olivier Assayas
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz
Country: France, Germany, Czech Republic, Belgium
Genre: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

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Jun10

Elisa, vida mia / Elisa, My Love / Elisa, My Life (1977) Blu-Ray, DVD5, DVD9

by movieworld on June 10th, 2019 at 15:43
Posted In: .Other movies, Drama

Elisa, vida mia 1977
Marking Carlos Saura's first film following the death of Franco in 1975 as Spain emerged from the shadows of fascism towards democracy, Elisa, My Love also represents Saura's creative transition from allusively political to integrally personal filmmaking, resulting in one of his most intimate, captivating, emotionally lucid, and profoundly introspective works on loneliness, aging, passion, reconciliation, and legacy.

Elisa (Geraldine Chaplin) is going to see her father Luis (Fernando Rey) for the first time in nine years, along with her sister Isabel (Isabel Mestres), brother-in-law Julian (Joaquin Hinojosa) and their children. Luis left the family many years ago, abandoning the children and their mother (also Chaplin). After a brief but pleasant visit, Isabel and her family must depart, but Elisa decides to stay on for a few more days. She is happy to be away from her husband Antonio (Norman Briski), who has been cheating with her best friend. As Elisa and Luis spend time together, Elisa discovers that he is writing his life story... or is it hers?

Director: Carlos Saura
Cast: Fernando Rey, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabel Mestres
Country: Spain
Genre: Drama

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Jun10

The 39 Steps (1935) DVD9 (Reissue) and Blu-Ray Criterion Collection

by movieworld on June 10th, 2019 at 14:34
Posted In: .Other movies, Mystery, Thriller

The 39 Steps 1935
The 39 Steps is a fascinating early film from Alfred Hitchcock, made five years before he left Britain to begin making films in America. It's a loose, free-spirited thriller, ragged around the edges, sloppily plotted, and often unevenly paced, but the director turns it into a near-masterpiece almost in spite of itself. Its subject is pure Hitchcock, an early stab at the kind of "wrong man" thrillers that would soon become his most characteristic works.

Ordinary businessman Richard Hannay (a suavely charming Robert Donat) stumbles into an international espionage plot when he brings home a mysterious foreign woman (Lucie Mannheim) after a vaudeville-style show. She's wearing a black lace veil and speaks with a sinister accent, so of course she turns out to be a mercenary spy, working for the British government to prevent some military secrets from leaving the country in the hands of an enemy spy (Godfrey Tearle). The only thing she manages to tell Hannay before she's abruptly murdered in the middle of the night is that the spy ring's leader is missing the tip of his pinky finger, and that she had planned to meet a man in a certain town in Scotland next. Hannay, quite naturally suspected of his guest's murder, flees towards Scotland with both the police and the spies on his tail.

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Jun06

Les quatre soeurs / Shoah: The Four Sisters (2018) 2 x Blu-Ray Eureka – Masters of Cinema, 2 x DVD9 Arte

by movieworld on June 6th, 2019 at 12:45
Posted In: .Other movies, Documentary, History

Shoah The Four Sisters 2018
If there was a Nobel Prize for conducting interviews, the late Claude Lanzmann would have surely been a laureate. Through recorded oral histories, he documented the Holocaust in directly personal terms. The ten-hour Shoah felt distinctly radical in 1985 and it remains the single most important cinematic exploration of the National Socialist genocide. Lanzmann continued to revisit the Holocaust in subsequent films, employing the same sensitive but persistent interview style. Essentially, this is a collection of outtakes from Shoah, but they are decidedly weighty and compelling outtakes. Four women tell how they witnessed and survived the horrific in Lanzmann's Shoah: Four Sisters.

Four Sisters consists of four short features taken from interviews he shot for “Shoah” in the 1970s, each showcasing the testimony of a different female Holocaust survivor. Their stories are as harrowing, complicated and rife with imponderables as any Lanzmann filmed. And together, collected in a form that is much less labyrinthine than “Shoah,” they represent an ideal introduction (and capstone) to Lanzmann’s project.

Director: Claude Lanzmann
Country: France
Genre: Documentary, History

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Jun06

The Prisoner (1955) Blu-Ray Arrow Academy

by movieworld on June 6th, 2019 at 11:34
Posted In: .Other movies, Drama, Thriller

The Prisoner 1955
Jack Hawkins and Alec Guinness are the dynamite duo driving this intellectually daring and morally complex thriller forward.

The story takes place in some unnamed country in Eastern Europe, with characters likewise unidentified in the credits (though some are named in the film). As the story opens, The Cardinal (Alec Guinness) is arrested for "treason against the state." Aware of his influence as a popular religious leader and war hero, and fearing martyrdom, government leaders decide instead to discredit him. They assign The Interrogator (Jack Hawkins) to get him to crack, to confess to crimes he never committed, to wear him down psychologically to the point where he'd willingly appear before the public courts and destroy his own name. This begins a battle of wits between the two men.

The overall significance of Peter Glenville’s The Prisoner, a two-hander interrogating the rights of religious freedom and political expression, falls squarely upon the perspective of the viewer. Upon its release in 1955, the film was banned in Italy for being anti-Catholic, and while it was rejected by the Venice Film Festival for being anti-communist, it was banned in Ireland for being pro-communist.

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