Paul Malcolm

Before you get your blockbuster on this summer, take 80 minutes (and a few extra for the bonus features) to catch The Sci-Fi Boys, a straight-to-DVD documentary distributed by Universal about the generation of special effects and makeup artists that revolutionized the business in the 1970s and ’80s. Visual-effects supervisor......

Writer-director Marco Bellocchio’s debut feature, Fists in the Pocket, shocked Italian filmgoers in 1965 and heralded the arrival of a sharp, incisive voice for a new generation. Forty years later, Fists still unnerves with its relentless precision. The postwar bourgeois Italian family bears the brunt of Bellocchio’s damning critique, but......

The whole thing sounds like a joke conceived and executed by one of the cinema’s most devilish pranksters. Orson Welles began shooting Mr. Arkadin in 1954 from a script adapted from a series of Harry Lime radio plays that Welles had produced for the BBC the year before. As was......

Just in case you thought Stalinism had an upside, Hungarian director Péter Bacsó’s Stalin’s Bride (1991) arrives on DVD, via Facets, to disabuse you of the idea. Raw in form and content, Stalin’s Bride unfolds in a mud-strewn, ramshackle peasant village in a late-1930s Soviet Union where misery flows as......

Universal pays tribute to Hollywood legends Mae West, Marlene Dietrich and Carole Lombard with three separate box sets dubbed “Glamour Collections.” What’s so glamorous about jamming up to six films on two double-sided discs with barely a thought given to menus and packaging is hard to say. Less clear still......

There has been much critical hand wringing about the fate of traditional animation in the digital age, most recently in last week’s New York Times article by Charles Solomon, who decried the wonder-killing yakkety-yak nature of today’s CG-animated characters. In his alternately inspiring and depressing documentary, Dream On Silly Dreamer......

Director Steven Hanft’s Kill the Moonlight received its widest exposure in disguise, as snippets of sound in Beck’s 1994 song “Loser” and images in its accompanying music video (also directed by Hanft). The film itself revolves around a loser, one of the loserus dreamerus variety that once thundered — or......

Director Margaret Brown’s debut docu­mentary feature, Be Here to Love Me (2005), unfolds with a surety and eloquence born from devotion and tempered by honesty. Brown’s subject is country/folk/blues artist Townes Van Zandt, who achieved a legendary cult status as a songwriter’s songwriter before his death in 1999 at the......

Japanese director Seijun Suzuki has always embraced a dizzying narrative and visual turbulence. But it was the license Suzuki took in the 1960s in re-crafting traditional yakuza scripts as modernist, avant-garde jags (see Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill ) that earned him the enmity of Nikkatsu studio and a......

In Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s dazzling, hypnotic allegory of human frailty and hope, rumors of impending chaos and violence follow a bizarre carnival attraction when it arrives under cover of darkness in the central square of an impoverished, unnamed Eastern European town. Announced by fliers pasted all along the town’s......