The Outcasts – Director: Robert Wynne-Simmons (Deaf Crocodile)
An unheralded gem of folk-horror, The Outcasts is filmmaker Robert Wynne-Simmons’ moody paean to Irish mythology. Released in 1982, the film is said to have resurrected Ireland’s film industry, which had been dormant for 50 years. Indeed, The Outcasts has all the hallmarks of a worthy representative in its sector; full of gorgeous panoramas of the Irish countryside and steeped in its country’s folklore, The Outcasts precipitates an atmosphere so rich, it is not only felt but inhaled and absorbed.
The story of a bullied young woman who, one night, meets a shaman possessed of an uncanny power, The Outcasts works its magic primarily through suggestion. A nebulous aura of dread generates slow-winding suspense, often leading expectations into misleading corners. The film works a gentle persuasion that blurs the genre lines between fantasy, horror, and drama, and invites the viewer to experience a robust culture embodied through song, dance, and superstition.
At once earthy and sophisticated, and never edging over the borders of what it merely insinuates, The Outcasts’ power lies in its ambiguity. Its charm is further augmented by an earnest performance from Mary Ryan, altogether ethereal and unassuming as the young, persecuted Maura, accused of witchcraft, who crosses into darker realms.
Deaf Crocodile rescues this wonderful curiosity from the vaults and delivers a Blu-ray with a transfer that presents The Outcasts (originally shot on 16mm) in 1:66:1, showcasing a rustic color palette that captures the wild, verdant life of Ireland’s magnificent terrain. The disc also features a wealth of supplements, including interviews with director Wynne-Simmons and the film’s composer, as well as several Wynne-Simmons’ early short films. – Imran Khan
Performance – Directors: Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (Criterion)
James Fox plays Chas, a vicious enforcer for a London gangster who hides out in the funky bohemian mansion of a rock star played by Mick Jagger. Chas describes the milieu to a friend over the phone: “What a freak show. On the left, you know. I tell you it’s terrible. It’s a right piss-hole. Long hair, beatniks, druggers, free love, foreigners, you name it.” Sounds ideal, and the man on the other end starts smiling.
Chas finds this claustrophobic world more weird and disorienting than the mean streets of London. While changing his identities like pairs of socks, Chas spirals into an existential tease of an ending that puzzled and frustrated Warner Brothers in 1968. They just wanted something for the youth with Jagger, and they were so mystified by what co-directors Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg delivered that they put it on the shelf until 1970, then released it dismissively.
As so often, time and cineastes have the last laugh. Criterion’s 4K restoration comes with the original UK soundtrack and a battery of interviews, profiles, and comments to help us make sense of Performance‘s abundant originality, which swerves with aplomb from the vicious to the surreal. – Michael Barrett
See also “Mick Jagger and James Fox’s Disorienting Fever Dream“, by Michael Barrett.
The Pied Piper + Jiří Barta Shorts (Deaf Crocodile)
When it comes to grim fairy tales (see The Devil’s Bride), this two-disc set contains virtually the whole output of Jiří Barta, a Czechoslovakian filmmaker who combines various kinds of animation with live action.
The Pied Piper is an exquisitely gloomy stop-motion vision from 1986, as inspired by Czech novelist Viktor Dyk’s 1915 re-imagining of the fairy tale. Instead of luring children away from the ungrateful town, the children are already gone, as the mysterious piper, like an angel of death, visits his wrath on the greedy, repulsive townies. The short films are a visually dazzling smorgasbord. Deaf Crocodile offers a standard edition or a Deluxe Limited Edition with slipcase and book. – Michael Barrett
See also “Jiří Barta’s Weird and Scary Stop-Motion Animation“, by Michael Barrett.
Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray (Criterion)
“You are not dreaming,” states a title card in one of Man Ray’s four silent avant-garde films of the 1920s, yet we dream with our eyes open in the cinema, or else the cinema dreams itself. This point is underlined when a woman with open eyes painted on her eyelids opens them to reveal her true eyes.
It’s underlined again when a man’s profile peers into a hand-cranked camera while we see his upside-down eye superimposed over the lens, gazing at us. In one of the most startling of many startling and delirious moments, a woman ascends a staircase brandishing a glistening knife, a moment that foreshadows Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929).
Ray’s four shorts comprise a playful, improvised, instinctive catalogue of film’s plastic possibilities: in-camera superimpositions and multiple exposures, stop-motion, reverse, shadows, visual textures, vanishments and apparitions, distorted lenses, negatives, and even abstractions created by objects placed on unexposed film. Recurring images include women sleeping and waking, abstract sculptures, roads as seen by the front of speeding cars, and the denizens of an arty modernist mansion cavorting with stockings over their faces. The films form a coherent vision of the incoherent, dreamlike, and restless, and they look forward to countless other experimental films.
Return to Reason, named for one of the four films, combines them into a 70-minute program with a score by Jim Jarmusch on reverb-heavy guitar and Carter Logan on percussion, plus helpings of electronics. As a special avant-garde treat, you can watch an entire split-screen version of a film and performance shot at a Paris event in 2023. The restorations of the films are a thing of beauty in themselves on this Criterion disc. – Michael Barrett
Rosa La Rosa – Director: Paul Vecchiali (Radiance)
Existing in a strange universe where the musical and crime drama intersect, Rosa La Rose, Fille Publique presents a fluorescent world in which prostitutes, pimps, and would-be runaways converge in the seedy hotels and backstreets around Les Halles in Paris. Released in 1986, Rosa La Rose, Fille Publique was, by writer and director Paul Vecchiali’s admission, entirely the product of a dream. Indeed, there is a very oneiric atmosphere that permeates this story of a hopelessly hopeful young woman, Rosa (Marianne Basler), who works the streets and caters to every man’s fantasy.
Meanwhile, she dreams of a day when she can finally leave her trade and travel afar. Her pimp (Jean Sorel), an affable sort who defies many of the stereotypes of his profession, tries to accommodate Rosa’s needs as best as he can. Street politics, however, begin to impinge on Rosa’s efforts to escape; what is left, amidst the song-and-dance routines and the inspired melodramatics, is the requisite ingredient of many a French film: tragedy.
Flushed with equal amounts of grit and neon, and brimming with the kind of follies that feature heavily in a Żuławski film, Rosa La Rose, Fille Publique is one of the lesser-known entries in France’s then-trendy and brief Cinéma du look movement. It is, however, an engaging exercise in chronicling fictional lives through the refractions of a beautifully dark and disturbing dream, and filmmaker Vecchiali offers here a rare and piquant treat for your acquired tastes. Radiance Film’s Blu-ray release delivers a handsome transfer, crisp, clean, and lush with color, and featuring archival interviews with the cast and director. – Imran Khan
Splendid Outing – Director: Kim Soo-yong (Radiance)
This slow-burning thriller about a businesswoman whose life is turned upside down when she travels to a fishing village on the impetus of a strange dream presents the more meditative side of Korean horror cinema. A Jungian nightmare conceived by writer Yong-seong Kim and director Kim Soo-yong, 1978’s Splendid Outing bears an influence of Brian de Palma’s similarly themed Sisters (1972), while remaining a wholly original creation in itself.
Splendid Outing begins with a woman’s journey toward self-discovery and then is brutally sidetracked by a narrative switch that has her held prisoner on an idyllic island by a viciously abusive man claiming to be her husband. Despite the story’s multitude of rabbit holes, into which both character and viewer are unceremoniously hurled, Soo-yong maintains a remarkable command over the material, transitioning a series of dreamlike sequences in seamless fashion. The director never lets up, whether his film is an approbation of feminism or an indictment of it. His inverted fairy tale continues to challenge ideas of power within the ever-shifting constructs of gender politics.
The world of Splendid Outing is one in which the domestic household becomes a place of sheer terror, and where the world outside it is enshrouded by the visual metaphor of a wide-reaching net, reminding us that freedom and autonomy often operate within the systems of imprisonment. In 1986, Turkish filmmaker Atıf Yılmaz would retread the ground covered in Splendid Outing with Aaahh Belinda. This magical realist drama also examined marriage and feminism through a similarly absurdist lens.
Radiance Films’ Blu-ray release features an excellent remastering of the original print, restoring the colors of Korea’s coastal regions to a lush and textured sheen. The new transfer also includes an audio track that delivers a percussive, atonal mix, further unsettling and disorienting the viewer. Included in the release is a commentary track, an interview with the assistant director, and a visual essay on women in classic Korean films. – Imran Khan
Terror in the Fog: The Wallace Krimi at CCC (Eureka!)
Some of the best home media releases are the ones that redefine the traditional cinematic canon, reminding us of our blind spots and graciously filling them in. This is the case with Terror in the Fog: The Wallace Krimi at CCC, one of the most exciting box sets of 2025. Included are six West German crime films (known as “krimi”, or “kriminalfilm”), all produced by CCC Filmkunst and adapted from the works of prolific British crime writer Edgar Wallace and his son, Bryan Edgar Wallace.
Wallace is perhaps most famous in the US for writing the first draft of King Kong (1933) before dying suddenly at 56. Wallace and his son churned out so many books that dozens of them were adapted into West German films. The wonderful and highly collectible Eureka Entertainment brings together mostly lesser-known films from the younger Wallace, releasing the set as part of their always reliable Masters of Cinema series.
The films in Terror in the Fog: The Wallace Krimi at CCC should appeal to fans of Hammer horror, especially very early giallo, with their emphasis on crime stories filtered through a spooky, exaggerated aesthetic. Five of the films are 2K restorations, bringing them to Blu-ray for the first time in the US. Eureka goes above and beyond with the special features, which are an educational and stimulating treasure trove of context and analysis. – Matt Mahler
Through and Through – Director: Grzegorz Królikiewicz (Radiance)
A confounding invention of neo-gothic realism, 1973’s Through and Through dates just a few years before the start of Poland’s Cinema of Moral Anxiety. This story of a disturbed couple, a husband and wife, whose lives of poverty veer wildly out of control, offers viewers a dark, grim look at love during the years of communist Poland.
Filmmaker Grzegorz Królikiewicz delivers this bold and unsettling work as a most sensorial experience that marries the dissonance of found sounds with a brusque and often jolting editing style. In the hiccupping frames of the narrative, we explore the cagey relationship between Jan (Franciszek Trzeciak) and his wife, Maria (Anna Nieborowska), whose combined mania culminates in murder when neither can procure money or living space. A violent momentum in the moving images at once unnerves viewers and draws them into the unfolding Rabelaisian chaos.
Królikiewicz affects a sort of morose-chic here, with a camera – a fugitive from some horror film – roving around the fidgety drama with voyeuristic aggression. The steady hum of energy never breaks and barrels ahead at frightening velocity. The camera, amidst the bedlam, is always a cold and discerning eye.
Radiance Film’s Blu-ray delivers an excellent transfer that captures the stark black-and-white cinematography with razor-sharp clarity. The soundtrack, a bristling cacophony of clicking metal and discordant snatches, slices the air crisply. The package also features some choice supplements, including an interview with critic Michel Oleszczyk about the film and a number of the director’s short films. – Imran Khan
Wan Pipel – Director: Pim de la Parra (Cult Epics)
A transfixing slice-of-life that dissects the politics of Dutch-Surinamese relations, 1976’s Wan Pipel (One People) marks out a cross-cultural ground that would later be explored by the higher-profiled Mississippi Masala (1991). Wan Pipel, in fact, does the harder work of digging deeper into the cultural divide, examining Suriname’s multifarious racial quandaries, pre- and post-independence from the Netherlands.
Not just about romances between people, but also about the romance of culture, director Pim de la Parra’s film unearths the glories and turbulences of Suriname’s complex history. Wan Pipel is the story of Roy (Borger Breeveld), an Afro-Surinamese who is studying in the Netherlands when he gets a telegram informing him of his mother’s terminal illness. Roy leaves for Suriname at once, leaving his Dutch girlfriend, Karina, behind.
Following his mother’s death, Roy reacquaints himself with his home country, exploring the city’s marketplaces and social events. During his rounds, he meets an Indo-Surinamese woman named Rubia, who boldly defies her family and culture by entering into an intimate relationship with Roy. Rubia’s family shuns Roy, as he belongs to a separate racial community within the country. Complications and tensions deepen when Roy’s girlfriend Karina, a Dutch white woman, arrives from the Netherlands to bring him back.
A bustling intersection of culture and language, Wan Pipel is alive with music of the tongue and the colors of cloth and skin. As societies merge amid the furors of cultural clashes, Wan Pipel delves deeper to reveal prejudices rooted in Suriname’s colonial history. De la Parra’s film never subtracts the human element from the story, which seeks to inform and enlighten; the heart of community throbs incessantly, and it is felt keenly in the spiritual hush that borders all cultural dissent.
Cult Epics’ Blu-ray release is a true gem, a rediscovery of a once-rare film, and it receives a 2K transfer that restores the richness of color that shows off Suriname’s bucolic beauty. Also included is an audio commentary, an introduction by the filmmaker, a making-of featurette, and a short film. – Imran Khan
Weeds – Director: John D. Hancock (MVD Marquee)
An odd prison drama intercut with musical sequences, Weeds remains one of the leading roles of the star Nick Nolte’s lesser-known films. Released in 1987 and featuring a blinding cast of actors who go all-out in their passions and purposes, filmmaker John Hancock establishes Weeds as a cinematic dissertation on the emotional and creative enterprises of the marginalized.
The story of an incarcerated man whose literary and dramatic passions are ignited by the copious reading he does while in jail, Weeds presents Nolte as Lee, an underdog powering through the dirt of shame to deliver the magnum opus of his years in prison. Unexpectedly pardoned from his life sentence when his in-jail productions reach the attention of the public beyond prison walls, Lee takes his show, along with his now-released jailmates, out on the road. Trouble arises when it is discovered that Lee plagiarized portions of his play. Meanwhile, the politics of the penal system is never far behind, and they catch up to the would-be dramatic troupe with unremitting traction.
Weeds features musical numbers written by a pre-fame Melissa Etheridge that capture the plight of the powerless and persecuted with ceremonious heartbreak. Backdropped against a grainy naturalism, these numbers lift their players above the grounds of their trodden earth into something altogether absurd, fantastical, and almost celestial.
MVD Marquee Collection’s Blu-ray release features a new 2K HD scan of the film, as well as an interview with the director and his Oscar-nominated short film, Sticky My Fingers…Fleet My Feet. – Imran Khan
Wicked Games: Three Films by Robert Hossein (Radiance)
While many often reduce the whole of French cinema between 1959 and 1968 down to the machinations of the Nouvelle Vague, it’s a mistake to overlook the many filmmakers who weren’t hip to that movement, including Robert Hossein. The actor-turned-director is the subject of a wonderful new box set from Radiance, Wicked Games: Three Films by Robert Hossein, which includes The Wicked Go to Hell (1955), Nude in a White Car (1958), and A Taste of Violence (1961).
Like many of his contemporaries outside that trend-setting scene, Robert Hossein’s work has been hard to find. Besides some poor-quality uploads on Russian websites, it seems like the only film of his to make it to Blu-ray has been Arrow Video’s release of Cemetery Without Crosses (1968). Suffice to say, it’s safe to assume that even most card-carrying cinephiles haven’t heard of Hossein these days. As such, it’s certainly a satisfying surprise to see these three films get such a beautiful release.
The three films in Wicked Games all exhibit fascinating gender-based power struggles. They also share strong existentialist tendencies, with toes dipped in absurdist waters. Harold Pinter could have easily written them if the playwright had gone through a Francophile period of berets, ménages à trois, and even more ennui (and that’s a compliment).
The Radiance reissues look fantastic, especially the outdoor photography. The windy beachside drama of The Wicked Go to Hell and the lonely mountainous expanses of A Taste of Violence are stunning to behold. One can also see Hossein’s directorial development across the six years of these three films, with the filmmaker embracing bolder choices and more cerebral aesthetics by the time the ‘60s rolled around.
See also “Three Robert Hossein Films Evoke Harold Pinter“, by Matt Mahler.