Blu-ray/4K Ultra Consumer Guide, Summer 2025, Volume 2

Brainstorm (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

Back in 2009, check­ing out the stand­ard def Warner Archive release of this title, I wrote: “The pic­ture is cited by some cinephiles as the last ‘real’ film noir, and its storyline, which crosses The Killers (Siodmak’s 1946 film, that is, scrip­ted by Anthony Veiller with uncred­ited assists from Richard Brooks and John Huston, and fea­tur­ing, as a tight lipped assassin…William Conrad!) with Fuller’s Shock Corridor (minus the polit­ic­al com­ment­ary and com­plete off-the-wall-ness) cer­tainly div­vies up the noir bon­afides. It crosses these ele­ments with some­thing that was con­sidered pretty up-to-the-minute back in ’65—the devel­op­ment of com­puter tech­no­logy. Jeffrey Hunter plays a software-developing brai­n­i­ac who gets mixed up with the young, sui­cid­al wife (Ann Francis, as lovely as ever) of his ruth­less tycoon boss (Dana Andrews, very slimy). Pushed to the brink by vari­ous and sun­dry of said boss’ venge­ful mach­in­a­tions, he con­ceives the per­fect murder, as it were. He intends to kill Andrews’ char­ac­ter in broad day­light, in a room full of witnesses…and get off the hook by fak­ing insanity. 

“It’s pretty nifty stuff, and the under­rated Hunter gives one of his more intense per­form­ances. Still. There’s some­thing work­man­like, and some­thing ana­chron­ist­ic (George Duning’s brassy, TV-cop-drama-evoking score, most likely), and something…else that I can­’t put my fin­ger on, that holds the pic­ture back from clas­sic status. Like so much else proffered by the Warner Archive, this is a mar­gin­al piece…and hell, what’s wrong with that?”

To have called the movie “mar­gin­al” was, I think, a bit impre­cise and unfair. True, it wasn’t a big-budget pic­ture. It’s over­all treat­ment anti­cip­ates the made-for-TV movie — at its best, I should add. And it’s also them­at­ic­ally pres­ci­ent, pick­ing up from the sim­il­ar­it­ies to Shock Corridor but also expand­ing on them. See also Dmytryk’s Mirage same year. Both pic­tures anti­cip­ate the para­noid thrill­er, and this one sets up Pakula/Beatty’s The Parallax View rather nicely.  And this ren­der­ing is sharp as a tack. Deep blacks. Plenty of detail. You can see the blue in Hunter’s eyes even though it’s in black and white. Recommended for genre hounds and black-and-white mavens. Alternate title: My Own Private Double Indemnity. — A-

Bright Leaf (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

What an odd idea for a movie. Gary Cooper plays Brant Royle, a hard-ass tobacco farm­er who one-ups his bit­ter rival Donald Crisp by invest­ing in a cigarette-rolling machine. As someone on one of the for­ums put it, a cel­eb­ra­tion of the inven­tion of the coffin nail. Except the nar­rat­ive is extra juicy, and dir­ect­or Michael Curtiz pumps it up for all it’s worth, and gets a great assist from cine­ma­to­graph­er Karl Freund, whose light­ing here flirts wit expres­sion­ism at all the most appos­ite moments (and there are plenty). Cooper’s romantic foil Patricia Neal were still involved in a real-life at the time (1950)  so their per­verse chem­istry is pretty com­bust­ible. But Lauren Bacall, the film’s ostens­ible good girl, doesn’t hide her light under a bushel.  Check out her pos­it­ively orgas­mic expres­sion as she lights up her first cigar­ette.  As “minor” as it may be, when it wraps up you will still likely say “What a pic­ture.” — A

The Cobweb (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

One mis­sion of the Warner Archive, one infers, is to get as many Minnelli movies onto the Blu-ray format as pos­sible. This 1955 CinemaScope, Eastman Color melo­drama has been the one I’ve most eagerly anti­cip­ated. It’s what you might call a lulu. The story, from a book by Wiliam Gibson, is about a melt­down in a high-end men­tal health facil­ity known as “The Castle.”  The pre­cip­it­at­ing incid­ent has to do with a dif­fer­ence of opin­ion about new drapes in the facility’s lib­rary. No really. At the top of the crackerjack cast are Widmark, Bacall, Gloria Grahame, Charles Boyer. Little Susan Strasberg, in her film debut, is charm­ing and poignant, and Oscar Levant is Oscar Levant. In addi­tion to the inef­fable Lillian Gish (here play­ing a dis­tinctly unsym­path­et­ic char­ac­ter, for which kudos — she could have spent the entirety of her career in talk­ing pic­tures play­ing saintly old women and nobody would have com­plained), the female sup­port cast con­tains oth­er lit­er­al archi­tects of cinema Olive Carey and Fay Wray. Extras are not abund­ant but no mat­ter. This is essen­tial. — A+

Danger Diabolik 4K (Kino Lorber 4K Ultra & Blu-ray)

To give cred­it where it’s due, the recent Fantastic Four: First Steps is the closest, I think, that Kevin Feige’s film­mak­ing behemoth has come to mak­ing what I’d call a “real” comic-book movie. But it’s still not a patch on Mario Bava’s 1968 pop-art mas­ter­piece. The Blu-ray was lovely, but this upgrade — from, the pack­aging tells us, a 4K scan of the ori­gin­al cam­era neg­at­ive, hubba-hubba — does provide a genu­ine and kicky boost in both visu­als and audio. The DTS 5.1 track really does amp­li­fy the effect of Ennio Morricone’s psy­che­del­ic score, which is essen­tially a cost­ar of the movie. Even view­ers not ordin­ar­ily inclined to approve of hav­ing the ori­gin­al tampered with may enjoy this option, as it’s quite well-executed. And if they don’t, there’s the ori­gin­al track at well. Not new are any of the sup­ple­ments (the com­ment­ary with schol­ar and Bava bio­graph­er Tim Lucas and star John Phillip Law is very vin­tage, as Law passed away in in 2008). — A+

The Dark Half (Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra)

A strik­ing albeit not entirely suc­cess­ful effort from George A. Romero, col­lab­or­at­ing again with Stephen King not on a cheeky antho­logy but a full story, from a nov­el, one in which King him­self grappled with some authori­al iden­tity issues. It’s a sar­don­ic tale of writ­ing Wiliam Wilsons that can be taken as an allegory of addic­tion. It’s got some juice in the fright depart­ment, but ulti­mately reaches for poignancy, the extreme gore of the finale not­with­stand­ing.  giv­en a bor­der­line poignant treat­ment. Timothy Hutton in the dual role of nice-guy author and steel-toe-boot-wearing asshole schlock ped­dler clearly had some fun with the work, and his pom­pa­dour in ostens­ible badass mode makes him look a little like Josh Brolin. There are some good funny bits, like when Thad’s twin babies look on while Thad and Stark kick the crap out of each oth­er. Some have noted how the zom­bies’ arms com­ing through the front door in Night of the Living Dead recalled imagery from Hitchcock’s The Birds; and here Romero gets to stage a true avi­an homage to the maes­tro. Jessica Tandy would surely freak out at this picture’s end­ing. Great look­ing image, good supps includ­ing two brand new short inter­views, one with first AD Nick Mastandrea and anoth­er with cine­ma­to­graph­er Tony Pierce-Roberts. There’s also a 36 min doc made for the Shock! Factory edi­tion of the pic­ture. For Romero com­plet­ists, to be sure, but aren’t you one?  — A

Dark Victory (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

The grand­daddy of pre-World-War-II sound tear­jerkers (I know this is nar­row­ing things down a lot, but then again, Hollywood’s made a lot of tear­jerkers, many of them clas­sics), this 1939 melo­drama was the second of four pic­tures Bette Davis made with Edmund Goulding dir­ect­ing (Goulding was only the screen­writer on Old Acquaintance in 1943). It’s argu­ably the best. You know the premise: snooty soci­ety semi-reprobate learns empathy by way of a death-sentence ill­ness. It still works like a charm. This beau­ti­ful trans­fer teems with envel­op­ing detail. Twenty-two minutes in, facing away from the cam­era, Davis’s HAIR is enough to com­mand the screen, which is just a por­tion of what makes this edi­tion so valu­able. The sup­ple­ments are vin­tage: a com­ment­ary from James Ursini and Paul Clinton (who died in 2006) is com­pet­ent, inform­at­ive, puts across some con­ven­tion­al wis­dom (Bogart is mis­cast, Reagan wasn’t that bad of an act­or, etc.; the first is argu­able and the second is, well, sup­port­able, par­tic­u­larly giv­en RR’s work here). Contemporary crit­ic and future screen­writer Frank Nugent was taken with the “sur­pris­ingly self-contained and mature” George Brent here, and you will be too. But it’s Bette’s show. — A

Jade (Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra)

The thing about Basic Instinct and Showgirls, both Paul Verhoeven films from scripts by Joe Eszterhas, is that you nev­er REALLY know how ser­i­ously Verhoeven is tak­ing the mater­i­al. I con­fess to not hav­ing revis­ited Adam Nayman’s text on Showgirls in a while, and it’s not imme­di­ately access­ible to me, but I do not think he’d dis­agree strongly with my view that Verhoeven’s approach to JE’s over­heated narrative/dialogue/worldview is at least slightly iron­ic­al. Anyway. My point is, you give William Friedkin a Joe Eszterhas script and he’s going to take it at face value and for bet­ter or worse. Starring newly min­ted sex sym­bol Linda Fiorentino, the movie starts off with a bang — murder vic­tim skinned to death, yow. There’s a lot of Instinct here, what with the bombshell-babe-who-is-also-a-(possibly sociopathic)-genius plot motor and all. If Friedkin recog­nized the inter­rog­a­tion room dia­logue exchange “They told me I can’t smoke in here.”/ “They were wrong.”  as a Basic Instinct in-joke, he doesn’t show his hand. Also, a high-end pros­ti­tute selling her ser­vices for $500 a pop in ’93, which is $680 today, seems a little low. Just say­ing.  In any event, des­pite not hav­ing any lines as hil­ari­ous as “She’s evil! She’s bril­liant,” this is all great fun, David Caruso over­acts but hasn’t yet got­ten into his Saying. Every. Word. As. If. It’s. A. Full. Sentence. Schtick, the car chase is not only effect­ive but genu­inely innov­at­ive (there’s a lot of impass­able traffic), the altern­ate end­ing (the director’s cut is one of sev­er­al nifty extras) has an Exorcist shot in it, and this is one of those movies that has no real reas­on to have a heli­copter in it but has a heli­copter in it. — A+

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra)

When we last saw Zohra Lampert, it was the end of Splendor in the Grass, and she was play­ing Angelina, the girl that Warren Beatty’s Bud ended up mar­ry­ing, and it was sad, not because she was inferi­or to Nathalie Wood’s Deanie or any­thing like that, although of course she was not Deanie; no, it was sad because Lampert played the char­ac­ter with an endear­ing awk­ward­ness and a dev­ast­at­ing know­ledge that she had not been, and nev­er would be, you know. Deanie.  And of course you’d be awk­ward too, maybe more awk­ward than usu­al, if, in that pos­i­tion, you actu­ally met Deanie. It’s a rough end­ing; of course Kazan handles it beau­ti­fully, but what it really needs in the act­ress who can put across a lot of nuance and ambi­gu­ity while at the same time achiev­ing cer­tain broad ges­tures. And Lampert was the one. She would late exude a heck of a lot more con­fid­ence extolling the mul­tiple vir­tues of Goya beans in a series of zesty tele­vi­sion ads in which she delivered the copy in come-hither medi­um clos­eup if I recall cor­rectly. In any event, her work in Grass puts the “beau­ti­ful” in the immor­tal sen­ti­ment artic­u­lated by They Might Be Giants: “No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beau­ti­ful.” ANYWAY. Lampert has the lead in this remark­able 1971 low-budget hor­ror movie dir­ec­ted by John Lee Hancock, who’d go on to make Bang the Drum Slowly in 1973. These were the ‘70s movies that didn’t get much play in Peter Biskind’s work on the dec­ade, but they are not only dis­tinct­ive on their own terms but emblem­at­ic of cer­tain freedoms in ways that I think are under-celebrated. Not that I’m pitch­ing a book on the sub­ject. This movie finds a group of rel­at­ively banal quasi-bohos set­ting up in a sum­mer house under rather impov­er­ished con­di­tions — ran­sack­ing the attic for sellable goods one of them remarks, “No money, no food,” which is some­thing you usu­ally con­sider before set­ting up in a sum­mer house. Are they going to become the frig­ging Donner Party or some­thing? No. They will be diver­ted by Jessica, just out of a men­tal insti­tu­tion, see­ing an appar­i­tion — and also by a cor­por­eal squat­ter in the house. This is a very well-constructed pic­ture, one  with a real affin­ity for the L.Q. Jones/Alvy Moore Brotherhood Of Satan. A them­at­ic under­cur­rent is estab­lished when the townies deride Jessica and her gang as “hip­pies.” It’s like Charles Manson had exer­ted an influ­ence on the American hor­ror film. This is a keep­er, the 4K image is sharp but main­tain the rough integ­rity of the pic­ture; sup­ple­ments include two enga­ging com­ment­ar­ies. I got the bare-bones edi­tion so I have not read the Jason Bailey essay but I’m sure it’s good. — A+

Oil Lamps (Second Run Blu-ray) 

“What has taken us dozens, hun­dreds of years to build, our grand­sons will eclipse in a single year,” a char­ac­ter declares as 1900 is rung in. Jural Herz’s first the­at­ric­al fea­ture after the knock­out 1969 The Cremator (a short made-for-television film sep­ar­ates these two), is an inter­est­ing form­al break, depict­ing a lively col­or world that’s a dis­tinct con­trast from Cremator’s dour black and white. But the world of this 1971 film is ulti­mately dark as pitch. “With only wastrels to choose from, at least I have their king,” Iva Janžurová as Štěpa reflects upon mar­ry­ing her cous­in.  That proves an under­state­ment, as the guy is both impot­ent and syph­il­it­ic. The pro­duc­tion design trap­pings would more than pass muster in a con­ven­tion­al peri­od film, but they have a par­tic­u­lar impact giv­en the mod­ern­ity of Herz’s pess­im­ist­ic vis­ion. There’s a team com­ment­ary derived from the Projection Booth pod­cast (it doesn’t last for the whole film)— Mike White (not that one), Jonathan Owens, and Kat Ellinger. Kat Ehringer drops the phrase “fuck­ing bonkers” a little over sev­en minutes in, and while I wouldn’t use that exact phrase she’s not wrong. And their appre­hen­sion of the movie as a kind of reverse fairy tale is spot on. Rounding out the pack­age is a sol­id Peter Hames book­let essay. — A+

The Prisoner of Zenda/Knights of the Round Table (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

When Zenda was first announced, the for­ums expressed some dis­ap­point­ment that this wouldn’t be the 1937 Ronald Colman ver­sion, the most beloved of maybe 5,000 film adapt­a­tions of the late 19^th-cen­tury Anthony Hope nov­el, argu­ably a Tale of Two Cities vari­ant (one which gave Colman a second oppor­tun­ity to play a dual role after the ’35 film of the Dickens nov­el). But the 1952 ver­sion here boasts glor­i­ous Technicolor and a cast that ain’t exactly chopped liv­er: Deborah Kerr, James Mason, Louis Calhern, and Jane Greer among oth­ers.  The argu­able weak link is the guy in the title role, Stewart Granger, who him­self barely rated him­self as a film star. I recall him doing a com­ment­ary for Scaramouche back in the day in which he noted it’s the only film he can stand him­self in. He’s fine but, you know. He’s not Ronald Colman. The disc also includes, in stand­ard def, the 1927 silent ver­sion star­ring Lewis Stone, whose long career would take him to Grand Hotel and a long-standing role as Henry Aldrich’s dad. It’s dir­ec­ted by the great Rex Ingram so don’t sleep on it.

The dir­ect­or of this Zenda is the jour­ney­man Richard Thorpe, who moved into CinemaScope in 1953 for Knights of the Round Table. which looks great, although that Stonehenge is a little overtly prop-like. You know the tale — Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere. Only here Morgan Le Fay (Anne Crawford, whose second-to-last pic­ture this was) and Modred (Stanley Baker, whose great work with Losey was ahead of him) are just creeps rather than magi­cians; this is a rel­at­ively real­ist romance. Ava Gardner is lovely but the cos­tumes and dir­ec­tion tend to de-eroticize her.  Active from the mid-twenties on, Thorpe was one of those dir­ect­ors who faced every pro­ject head-on, tak­ing it for what it was. (He’d even­tu­ally make Jailhouse Rock, for example.) A dir­ect­ori­al sig­na­ture so non-distinct it worked as well for A Date With Judy as it did for peri­od semi-epics.  Inspirational dia­logue, from Zenda: “I’ve grown awfully fond of this mus­tache.”  — A

The Quatermass Experiment (Hammer 4K Ultra & Blu-ray)

“There’s no room for per­son­al feel­ings in sci­ence, Judith,” the per­petu­ally furrow-browed exper­i­menter Quatermass lec­tures the wife of a way-messed up astro­naut in this ground­break­ing 1955 sci-fi/horror mar­vel. The movie, in which the sole sur­viv­or of a rock­et exped­i­tion into space — con­ceived and super­vised by the title sci­ent­ist, who’s played with relent­lessly blunt dis­patch by Brian Donlevy, so cranky he doesn’t even ATTEMPT a British accent — starts mutat­ing in sev­er­al hor­rif­ic ways, is a bit of a slow burn even at 80 minutes. Val Guest’s dir­ec­tion taps into a prim­or­di­al fear — the kind that occurs when you’re sick but have no idea of what with. I need not detail just how influ­en­tial the idea of an ali­en host tak­ing over a human body would be in sub­sequent sci-fi film fare. This pack­age is so gar­gan­tu­an and wide-ranging that I’m still rev­el­ing in it, but I’ve taken in enough to recom­mend it unequi­voc­ally. The film is presen­ted in var­ied aspect ratios, there are abund­ant com­ment­ar­ies, there’s a poster, there’s a book­let, and the top­ics range far bey­ond the movie itself — Andrew Pixley con­trib­utes 22 pages on pro­duc­tion house Hammer’s pri­or his­tory as a pro­du­cer of music­al shorts. The whole thing is heav­en, frankly. Inspirational dia­logue: Concerned Wife: “Is he any bet­ter?” Quatermass: “He’s com­ing along fine.” Uh-huh. — A+

They Died With Their Boots On (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

The Raoul Walsh-directed 1941 account of George Custer is the second Warner Brothers account of the guy in a single year. 1940, of course, brought us Santa Fe Trail, dir­ec­ted by Curtiz, with Errol Flynn as Jeb Stuart and young Custer embod­ied by, you know it, Ronald Reagan. What a pic­ture. Who can for­get Raymond Massey’s por­tray­al of John Brown as an utter loon? In any event, this lengthy account of the sol­dier is a story of char­ac­ter growth. Flynn’s Custer begins as a rather frivol­ous strut­ting schmuck. It is pre­dicted that he’ll “make the worst record of any cadet at West Point since Ulysses S. Grant,” is very on the nose. The knotty plot blames Little Big Horn as a byproduct of cor­por­ate cor­rup­tion which Custer reveals in a posthum­ously read let­ter, which allows the final line “Your sol­dier won his last fight, after all.” The rous­ing film inspired some huff­ing from Alex Von Tunzelmann in The Guardian in 2009: “The film’s retell­ing of Custer’s early adven­tures in the civil war is riddled with so many errors that there isn’t enough space here to list them all. Dates are wrong, details of battles are fudged, events appear in the wrong order, Custer’s career path is ima­gin­at­ively fic­tion­al­ized, and Winfield Scott has his term as commander-general exten­ded by about five years so that Sydney Greenstreet gets a bet­ter role. After the war, Custer sinks into depres­sion, acquir­ing a mul­let and a drink­ing prob­lem, both of which are refresh­ingly fac­tu­al. Eventually, he is pos­ted to the Dakota fron­ti­er. It turns out to be a land of né’er-do-wells, hos­tile tribes and egre­gious his­tor­ic­al inac­cur­acy.” Heavens. Andrew Sarris, on the oth­er hand.  might well have been writ­ing about Walsh/Flynn’s Custer when he wrote this in The American Cinema: “If the her­oes of Ford are sus­tained by tra­di­tion, and the her­oes of Hawks by pro­fes­sion­al­ism, the her­oes of Walsh are sus­tained by noth­ing more than a feel­ing for adven­ture. The Fordian hero knows why he is doing some­thing even if he does­n’t know how. The Hawksian hero knows how to do what he is doing even if he does­n’t know why. The Walshian hero is less inter­ested in the why or the how than in the what. He is always plunging into the unknown, and he is nev­er too sure what he will find there.” This is a beau­ti­ful ver­sion of a film whose fac­tu­al errors make it no less time­less for cinephiles.  — A

Two Weeks With Love (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

More Louis Calhern, folks. (See above, Prisoner of Zenda.) At first I thought he was maybe play­ing John Philip Sousa (you’ll see why) but no, he’s just the dad of Jane Powell’s newly-17-year-old Patti, who hav­ing reached that age has determ­ined she can both A) romance Ricardo Montalbán and B) get a cor­set. (The film is set in the early 20^th cen­tury, don’t pan­ic.) This 1950 pic­ture was dir­ect­or Roy Rowland’s first music­al. (Other not­ables include Hit the Deck and 5000 Fingers of Dr. T , and Meet Me In Las Vegas, which I’d love to see upgraded to Blu-ray. Hit the Deck is already a great WA Blu and I did a com­ment­ary with Nick Pinkerton for the Indicator Blu of Dr. T.) He dir­ects stal­wartly but also light-heartedly. The whole enter­prise seems to be aspir­ing to a daf­fi­er vari­ant on the Meet Me In St. Louis vibe. (As a dance, an eager male beaver flashes a “Chicken Inspector” but­ton at his dance part­ner. Vincente Minnelli would nev­er, etc.) Highlights include some fire­crack­ers going off under a kid’s bed, res­ult­ing in a pecu­li­ar anim­ated mini-fireworks dis­play. And there’s the immor­tal “Aba Daba Honeymoon” from irre­press­ibly perky Debbie Reynolds, with Carleton Carpenter. The dance sequences were handled by Busby Berkeley; none of them are con­spicu­ously Berkeley-esque, but the near-climactic dance duet with Powell and Montalbán is spec­tac­u­lar. And the film itself is light­er than air. Delightful. Supplements include a long Robert Osborne inter­view with Powell from TCM back in the day and a funny Avery car­toon. — A