Daiei Gothic Vol. 2 – Directors: Tokuzō Tanaka, Fuji Yahiro, and Kimiyoshi Yasuda (Radiance)
Radiance does it again with their new box set, Daiei Gothic Vol. 2. The collection features two films from Tokuzō Tanaka – 1960’s The Demon of Mount Oe and 1969’s The Haunted Castle – and Kimiyoshi Yasuda‘s Ghost of Kasane Swamp from 1970. Together, the three Japanese horror films further secure Daei’s place in film history as an early A24-type figure; A24 continues to attract commercial attention while serving as a haven for auteurs.
Tanaka’s filmography, in particular, has been beautifully restored by Radiance, reestablishing the previously little-known director as a significant figure in Japanese cinema. That’s thanks to their excellent release of his samurai masterpiece, The Betrayal (1966), and their inclusion of his film The Snow Woman (1968) in the first volume of their Daiei Gothic series, which was one of 2024’s best releases. This second volume is even better, with The Haunted Castle worth the price of admission alone. – Matt Mahler
See also: “Three Japanese Horror Classics Haunted by Women’s Agony” by Matt Mahler.
Dark City – Director: Alex Proyas (Arrow Video)
One of the most underrated films of the 1990s gets its first 4K release thanks to Arrow Video, and it’s an incredible one. Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998) is a masterpiece of shadows, and the deep blacks look fittingly incredible in this restoration, while the increased clarity and detail of everything else do wonders without ruining the film’s style. That aesthetic is a perfect fit for a neo-noir story with sci-fi twists, a film that feels like the true successor of Blade Runner (1982).
Dark City uses the hallmarks of film noir to create a thought-provoking sci-fi film, following a man with no memory who wakes up in a hotel room with a dead woman beside him. While he evades the police, his search for the truth in a strange city that never sees sunlight leads him down a reality-bending spiral.
It’s an incredibly cool film, the director’s best, and the release celebrates it with a cavalcade of phenomenal special features. These include five different audio commentaries, a feature-length documentary on the film, two scholarly visual essays, interviews, storyboards, and more bells and whistles than referees in a cathedral. – Matt Mahler
Devil’s Bride – Director: Arūnas Žebriūnas (Deaf Crocodile)
What happens when bored angels rebel in Heaven and drop to Earth like shaken-off fleas? They cause mischief among humans, of course. In 1974, writer-director Arūnas Žebriūnas and composer Vyacheslav Ganelin were aware of decadent Western rock operas like Jesus Christ Superstar and decided to adapt the form to a classic Lithuanian folktale by Kazys Boruta. The result is colorful musical surrealism, almost totally unknown outside its country, until the Lithuanian Film Centre restored its bizarre glory.
If you truly want to know what’s happening in front of your eyes, the excellent commentary explains it, but you could just go with the flow. All the business about God and prankster demons might be interpreted as political commentary if you’re so inclined. Deaf Crocodile offers a standard edition or a Deluxe Limited Edition with slipcase and book. – Michael Barrett
The Eel – Director: Shohei Imamura (Radiance)
A gentle drama about a cautious budding romance and the exhausting, painful road to redemption, this 1997 Japanese effort earned its director, Shohei Imamura, the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Eel, for all its accolades, surprisingly didn’t catch on with the Japanese, but it warmed the hearts of critics abroad, who responded favorably to the nuanced reading of idle lives incapacitated by grief and moral judgment.
Starring Takuro Yamashita as Koji, a man imprisoned for eight years after murdering his wife, The Eel explores the ideas of salvation and deliverance through Japanese cultural ethics. Through careful structuring of the narrative, it aligns a paroled man’s romantic negotiations with a woman who comes to work in his barber shop with his odd, misunderstood relationship with his pet eel. As an assortment of peculiar characters crowd the frames and infringe on Koji’s newfound space in freedom, The Eel establishes a convincing epiphanic turn in the brewing storm that precipitates when a community is morally upended.
The often-compact framing reveals a sort of emotional claustrophobia, and the images are never quite beauteous; they capture the dreary life of rehabilitation through existential suffering and struggle. Occasionally sparked by faint touches of surrealism that subtly jolt viewers from a brick-walled realism, The Eel is a beautifully restrained drama of humans in spiritual tumult, and a fascinating look at yet another side to a culture still not wholly understood by the West.
Radiance Film’s Blu-ray release features high-definition transfers of two versions of the film: the full 134-minute director’s cut and the 117-minute theatrical version. It also includes interviews with screenwriter Daisuke Tengan, an essay-booklet featuring an interview with the director, and an analysis of the film. – Imran Khan
Finis Terrae – Director: Jean Epstein (Eureka)
Somber, enigmatic, and quietly unsettling, Jean Epstein’s Finis Terrae is one of the silent film era’s most curious efforts. Its conception, a peculiar tale of illness, friendship, and rivalry among a community of seaweed farmers, comes straight from the imagination of the same filmmaker who had earlier helmed a film adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher with the legendary Luis Buñuel.
Though the 1928 Poe adaptation is what he is now best known for, it is 1929’s Finis Terrae that reveals Epstein’s true mark as a visionary. Capturing Bannec (an islet off the coast of Brittany) in a strangely contained and shadowed world of coastal panoramas, Epstein exquisitely frames a story of four seaweed farmers whose working relationships begin to deteriorate as a result of misunderstandings.
Cordoned by the oceanic environment, one farmer is left to suffer when he is struck down by an infection that leaves him incapacitated by a raging fever. Unable to leave the islet to go for help (their collective manpower is insufficient), the four men slowly submit to their existential despair. Meanwhile, panic on the mainland brews when its inhabitants sense something wrong on Bannec.
Suffused with an atmosphere of salt, sickness, and bitter wind, Finis Terrae resides in an emotional parallax that counters cold reality with a vivid and febrile dream. Eureka’s gorgeous Blu-ray transfer holds firm and true to the film’s lustrous monochrome; sparkling white light, swathes of deep greys and oil-blacks come together like a painting on canvas. A host of supplements extols the virtues of the film, and a beautifully written essay booklet rounds out this marvelous little package. – Imran Khan
Girl With a Suitcase – Director: Valerio Zurlini (Radiance)
Stranded in a car garage by her selfish boyfriend, Piero (Gian Maria Volonté), Aida (Claudia Cardinale) endeavors to find his whereabouts and eventually tracks him down at his home. Piero, anticipating Aida’s arrival, ducks out of the household before she can confront him. Once she arrives, Aida is greeted by Piero’s younger and very impressionable brother, Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin).
Lorenzo is immediately taken with Aida, but Piero has instructed him to tell her she has the wrong address. Aida, unconvinced, nevertheless leaves Lorenzo the address of the hotel where she is staying. The next day, a smitten Lorenzo visits her at the hotel, and a curious and difficult friendship is formed.
Girl With a Suitcase is essentially a character-driven film with no discernible plot. Yet filmmaker Valerio Zurlini casts two fine, magnetic leads who draw attention to the screen through earnest, very natural performances. Carefully and often sensuously shot, Girl With a Suitcase captures a lackadaisical 1960s Italy humming with the murmurs of everyday life; the camera, a percipient and always curious minder, captures bicycle rides through picturesque backstreets, or sunny walks during midday, between scenes of Romanesque statues in cathedral hollows and lonely, grey-sky beaches. It often pans like the sequence in an Alberto Moravia novel, the lives so stilled and framed with cinematic exactitude.
Radiance’s Blu-ray release presents an excellent 4K transfer, rendering the picture in a gorgeously clear black-and-white remaster. True blacks and unspoiled whites temper beautifully all of the tonal greys that land in between. The disc also features informative interviews with the film’s screenwriter and assistant director, as well as an essay booklet. Of all the home versions of Girl With a Suitcase released thus far, this Blu-ray stands as its best representation. – Imran Khan
See also “‘Girl With a Suitcase’ Charms With Its Magnetic Performances“, by Imran Khan.
Los Golfos – Director: Carlos Saura (Radiance)
It took 65 years, but filmmaker Carlos Saura has finally bested General Francisco Franco, whose regime censored that debut picture in 1960. Now, Los Golfos is available for the first time on Blu-ray courtesy of Radiance Films, meticulously restored in 4K from the 35mm acetate negative.
Like much of Saura’s early work, his first feature is overly indebted to Luis Buñuel‘s Mexican period, but it’s nonetheless an important film. In terms of cinematic evolution, Los Golfos bridges the gap between European neorealism and cine quinqui, the “delinquent cinema” that would become so popular in Spain.
It follows several of the titular delinquents as they steal to survive, sometimes brutally beating innocents in the process. Eventually, a collective purpose forms as they band together to criminally raise the money needed for Juan (Óscar Cruz), a wannabe torero who needs cash to become a bona fide matador.
One could argue that their organizational efforts to rob the Spanish bourgeois and actually climb out of poverty (and literally kill the bull) is a reflection of socialist resistance against Francois Spain, but Los Golfos is really just a matter-of-fact realist melodrama by way of “youth in revolt” cinema.
Combined with the gorgeous restoration (and incredible sound), Los Golfos is a strong release from Radiance, even if the film itself is more a historically important prelude to an auteur’s career than a masterpiece in its own regard. – Matt Mahler
See also “‘Los Golfos’ Returns from Franco-Censored Purgatory“, by Matt Mahler.
High and Low – Director: Akira Kurosawa (Criterion)
This year, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest remade Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 thriller High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku), which in turn was based on an American novel by Ed McBain. Therefore, it’s appropriate that Criterion’s new UHD/Blu-ray combo gives us an occasion to revisit Kurosawa’s film.
When I first watched it on VHS back in the ’80s, High and Low seemed like a gripping, visually exciting, morally invigorating suspense thriller and one of Kurosawa’s greatest achievements. Revisiting it for the second time in more than 30 years gives me no reason to revise that opinion. Certain images, such as the scene of dropping suitcases through a window and the use of reflections in the final sequence, had been burned into my brain. This is cinematic greatness.
The first 50 minutes comprise a series of surprises and moral quandaries unfolding in one setting, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), with a camera just as sinuous and nervous. Toshiro Mifune plays a wheeler-dealer in the shoe business who, on the eve of an expensive corporate takeover, finds himself in a kidnapping plot. That his ruination may become his redemption is an almost incidental detail, yet crucial.
Then comes the dramatic resolution of the crime, ahnd the final hour and more of High and Low is the equally suspenseful, brilliantly realized police investigation. The widescreen black-and-white includes one startling use of color, and Masaru Sato’s music has moments of sublime beauty. Extras on the disc include excellent critical commentary and some archival interviews. – Michael Barrett
His Motorbike, Her Island – Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi (Cult Epics)
Stylized as a 1950s American biker film, His Motorbike, Her Island (1986), a Japanese romantic drama, takes its cues from France’s Cinéma du look movement of the 1980s. Throwing every aesthetic into the pot, including elements of Nouvelle Vague, American film noir, and the neon of ’80s-era MTV, filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi pulls out all the stops to fashion a painfully hip cross-cultural treatise on the lives of misunderstood youth.
With his tongue planted firmly in cheek, Obayashi tells a story of a wannabe biker who falls for an impressionable young woman who is equally fascinated by the biker culture. It is a star-crossed romance doomed from the start, as turbulent as the roads these two hapless lovers ride upon as they careen through every rough corner of their growing relationship.
As a piece of ‘80s Shibuya-kei (pre-dating the movement’s true proliferation in the ’90s), His Motorbike, Her Island frames its very Japanese traditions of family and culture through a kind of narrative designed by Eisenhower-era Hollywood. Alternating between moody black-and-white (an obvious wink to Godard) and the vibrant blush of colors of both the metropolis and Japanese countryside, Obayashi’s film delivers a dizzying swirl of action and romance that solely exists in the very microcosm of its own making. His world is at once a singular and tender ode to the many influences that span both the European and American continents, and offers an unusual and gratifying film experience.
Cult Epics’ Blu-ray release features a magnificent transfer to accommodate the supremely stylish use of color, justly bringing Obayashi’s vision to radiant life. It also features a host of supplements that delve deep into the film’s lore and the culture it was born from. – Imran Khan
House of Psychotic Women: Rarities Collection Volume 2 – Directors: Eloy de la Iglesia, Juraj Herz, Sidney Meyers, and Michael Winterbottom (Severin)
The four fabulously diverse films in this box set have one thing in common. They feature women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, if not one or two paces beyond it. As producer Kier-la Janisse explains, the woman going bonkers is a rich trope in genre cinema, and even outside it, and these films dispense observations on gender and power without making it seem like we’re eating our vegetables.
Joseph Strick’s The Savage Eye (1960) is an avant-garde indie that provides a panorama of anomie in Los Angeles through the eyes of a woman going through a divorce. Eloy de la Iglesia’s The Glass Ceiling (El techo de cristal, 1971) analyzes the middle class of General Franco’s Spain through the lens of a suspense thriller.
From 1972, Czechoslovakia, Juraj Herz’s Morgiana is a literally wiggy tale of two sisters, one of whom might be trying to kill the other. Michael Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss (1985) casts Amanda Plummer as a homeless killer wandering the petrol stations of Northern England and hooking up with another lonely soul. – Michael Barrett
See also “‘House of Psychotic Women’ Is Enough to Drive a Woman Crazy“, by Michael Barrett.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday – Director: Adam Marcus (Arrow Video)
Arrow Video may not always release the kind of essential cinema you get from distributors like Radiance, Deaf Crocodile, or the Criterion Collection, but they know how to party and go above and beyond. Two of the many silly delights they released in 2025 were Jason Goes to Hell (1993) and Jason X (2001), arguably the most bonkers films from the Friday the 13th series. In true Arrow form, they’re probably the most entertaining, too. – Matt Mahler