One of the earliest examples of the traditional Western fantasy film that I've been able to track down, "The Magic Sword" is a comic medieval adventure shot on studio backlots—imagine "Excalibur" with the sensibility of your average episode of "Bewitched." At times, the production values hover around 'dinner theater' levels, and the picture transfer currently streaming on Prime is sub-VHS quality. Even so, there's something about "The Magic Sword": Basil Rathbone is hamming it up as an evil sorcerer ("I…
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Highway Racer 1977
Considering how much human collateral these Poliziotteschi movies tend to trade in, it was a nice change of pace to watch one of these films where the body count is fairly low. So, the emphasis here is less on the bank robberies themselves and more on the getaway drive, with Maurizio Merli ("The Tough Ones") as a hotheaded, impulsive cop behind the wheel of a souped-up Ferrari. The structure feels similar to a martial arts film, except instead of the…
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Cat People 1942
"But I love silence. I love loneliness. And they—they are in me. Their strength, warmth. They're soft, they're soft." A Jungian fever dream of life in the urban jungle. Pop psychology, sexual repression, and marital regrets stir in the film that kicked off Val Lewton's string of RKO greats. Might be the most effective use of light, shadow, and fog in the history of its genre. The Criterion Blu-ray looks incredible.
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Crimes of the Future 2022
Less of a provocation than the Neon-branded trailers would have you believe—in fact, "Crimes of the Future" is not much of a provocation at all, and as such it took me an abnormally long time to tune into the film's frequency. I was grateful for the spare morsels of noir trappings that serve to ground the story because this is far from the genre-heavy "Scanners," hell, this makes "Videodrome" look like an action movie. What Cronenberg presents here is more…
