From gentle satire to something like an anarchist paint bomb tossed into an uptight dinner party, we feature the 10 Best Classic Films on Blu-ray and DVD in 2022 – and we toss in a few more, just for kicks.
Argentine noir El Vampiro Negro is a visual mastery of Expressionist nightmare with a bravura style that makes film buffs of the high studio era swoon.
Remastered and on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber is William Dieterle’s The Turning Point, a noir film at the intersection of several crossroads in America’s early ’50s.
Alfred Werker’s fantasy-dabbling Repeat Performance and John Sturges not-your-typical western The Capture may – or may not – be actual film noir.
We never know everything that goes on that night in horror-noir ‘Among the Living’. This film is no affirmative vision of a small town in the American South.
Film noirs ‘The Beast Must Die’ and ‘The Bitter Stems’ exemplify why forgotten films must be restored and rediscoveries trumpeted to the amazement of new generations.
Flicker Alley’s set of Hollywood B-films from 1934 provide sociological snapshots of the limits of respectable cinema.
Directed by low-budget maestro Bernard Vorhaus, the restored film-noir ‘The Amazin Mr. X’ is an unpredictable little specimen of spookery-pokery.
Director Samuel Fuller scoffs at the clear-cut distinction between right and wrong in Pickup on South Street.
Today’s Kurosawa 101 explores two of the greatest films in Kurosawa’s catalog, Rashomon — the film that made Kurosawa and Japanese cinema known throughout the world — and Ikiru — perhaps the greatest film ever made about impending death.
Today’s Kurosawa 101 films include the director’s only effort at bringing a contemporary Japanese stage play to the screen (the rarely seen The Quiet Duel), a police procedural that was the finest Kurosawa film to date (Stray Dog), and a scree against tabloid journalism that resulted in one of the weakest films he would ever direct (Scandal).
Joseph H. Lewis’ My Name Is Julia Ross and So Dark the Night provide quality visuals and thoughtful analysis and will satisfy your longing for disturbing noir.
