The Outrageous Sophie Tucker ★★★✫✫ Director: William Gazecki Menemsha Films (Official Site) 96 Minutes Release: July 24, 2015 (limited) – Sophie Tucker was fabulous, flashy and a born entertainer. A true rags-to-riches story, she started out in Vaudeville in the early 1900s; by the early 1920s, the extraordinary Tucker was a major singing star. Known…
Burned-out police detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) gets reluctantly called in to investigate the murder of high-profile millionaire Christopher van der Veer (Max M. Brown) in Wolfen, the 1981 sociopolitical horror film directed by Michael Wadleigh. Van der Veer, his wife Pauline (Anne Marie Pohtamo), and their driver Harrison (Jeffery V. Thompson) were found sliced…
Creep ★★★★½ / ★★★★★ Director: Patrick Brice The Orchard 80 Minutes Release: June 23, 2015 on iTunes / July 14, 2015 on Netflix – On his way to a thousand-dollar-a-day gig, young filmmaker Aaron (Patrick Brice) turns his camera on himself, perhaps out of excitement for the job, or maybe a little nervousness. His destination…
Ralph Nelson’s jazzy, hard-boiled noir Once a Thief stars Alain Delon as Italian (!) immigrant Eddie Pedak with a criminal past who’s just trying to go straight, but his gangster brother Walter (Jack Palance) keeps dragging him back into the fold. Opening with the cold-blooded killing of grocery store owner Lisa Wing (an uncredited actress),…
Carey Jackson (Robert Montgomery), foreign correspondent for a huge magazine conglomo, has found himself in his employer Carlton Towne’s leather-lined office (“Must be like living in a wallet”), about to be fired. The company is closing their Vienna office because of post-war censorship, but there’s no work for him back home, either. At the last…
After years languishing in greymarket DVDs, the 1980s private detective series Spenser: For Hire finally got an official release from Warner Archive in 2014. Just a few weeks ago, Warner released Spenser: For Hire: The Complete Second Season on DVD, with the third season surely arriving soon. Featuring Robert Urich as the titular detective, Spenser:…
The Babushkas of Chernobyl ★★★★✫ Directors: Anne Bogart and Holly Morris Official Site 71 Minutes Premieres at the Los Angeles Film Festival, June 10 through 18, 2015 – With beautiful, classically framed scenery that highlights the healthy appearance of a land that is in reality riddled with invisible dangers, The Babushkas of Chernobyl takes us…
Chagall-Malevich ★★★½ / ★★★★★ Director: Aleksandr Mitta ShiM-Film (Official Site) 117 Minutes Release Date: June 12, 2015 (limited) – “An artist should have his own world,” declares Marc Chagall in writer-director Aleksandr Mitta’s vibrant and playful Chagall-Malevich. Focusing on the first years of the Russian Revolution, this fictional account follows Chagall, played by the handsome…
Desire for Beauty ★★★✫✫ Director: Miguel Gaudêncio Green Box (Official Site) 91 Minutes Available at Vimeo On Demand – Several months after shooting for Desire for Beauty (2013) wrapped, actress and host Agata Kulesza, at the head of the table during a swanky dinner party for cast and crew, says that when she was approached…
Down, But Not Out! ★★★★✫ Director: Miguel Gaudêncio Greenbox (Official Site) 71 Minutes Available at Vimeo On Demand – Shot in gritty black and white and unafraid of its own silence, the amateur boxing documentary Down, But Not Out! has a compelling neo-noir feel. Following a small local group of boxers to a two-day competition…