Paul Malcolm

Warner Bros. and All Day Entertainment give producer Val Lewton and director Edgar G. Ulmer, respectively, the royal treatment this week with box sets so extras-laden they might have made the two minimalist masters blush. Contemporaries, though never collaborators, Lewton and Ulmer both built reputations for spinning bare-bones budgets into......

An opening title in director Fernando de Fuentes’ Let’s Go With Pancho Villa (1936) heralds this Mexican classic as an homage to the “loyalty and courage Francisco Villa infused in the warriors who followed him.” If that sounds like a rousing rebel time at the movies, it is. A seminal......

African cinema was just finding its post-colonial legs when Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety burst on the scene in 1973 with his feature debut, Touki Bouki. Mambety, who died in 1998, made only a handful of films in the ensuing decades, including the masterful Hyenas (1992). But the impact and......

Amnesia, hypnosis and atomic paranoia compel the desperate actions of the characters in 20th Century Fox’s most recent film-noir DVD releases. Three lesser-known thrillers in the canon, Somewhere in the Night (1946), Whirlpool (1949) and The House on 92nd Street (1945), together offer a perfect distillation of post-WWII American anxieties......

Just as Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s most recent film, The World, made its way to local theaters, the film that first brought Jia international acclaim, Platform, arrived on DVD. Platform is Jia’s second feature and bears more than a passing similarity to another famous second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons, for......

If nun-sploitation isn’t your bag, Japanese cult director Norifumi Suzuki’s School of the Holy Beast (1974) may not have much to offer. This one’s all kinky, creepy sacrilege all the time. The film opens at a hockey match, the first event on a one-night sampling of earthly pleasures (also including......

A pair of space oddities from East Germany’s DEFA studio land on the shelves this week, and, together, they bring into focus the other space race — the one to represent the universe’s outer limits in ever more dazzling displays of special-effects technology and moviemaking craft. The Soviets may have......

The French New Wave was just breaking when director Jacques Deray (The Outside Man, La Piscine) made his feature debut (with Le Gigolo) in 1960. Deray, however, quickly charted a more commercial course for himself. While making movies that the French public actually goes to see isn’t a crime, Deray,......

Directors Dale Djerassi and Bo Boudart cover a lot of tundra in Oil on Ice, a wide-ranging look into the controversial proposal to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. On the ground in ANWR with the people who know it best — conservationists and the members of......

Kino’s Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ’30s gathers together on two discs some of the most important and influential short films in cinema history. All the hits are here: Hans Richter’s pulsing animation, Rhythmus 21 (1921); Ferdinand Léger’s cubist montage, Ballet Mécanique (1924); Germaine Dulac’s erotic fever dream,......