Rams
This prize-winning Icelandic film is quiet as the wind that blows across its treeless landscape. Rams concerns two elderly brothers, sheep farmers who haven’t exchanged a word in years. They come to blows after a disputed “best ram” contest sparks an official investigation into a contagious sheep disease. Although billed as a deadpan comedy, the humor is seldom apparent. The film works instead as a laconic observation of life in a remote corner of the world.
Invisible Invaders
It sounds like a cheap way to shoot a sci-fi flick: Make the aliens invisible. But this 1959 C-minus thriller contains points of interest for its subversive attitude toward nuclear weapons and plea for international cooperation. Invisible Invaders is also the missing link between ’50s flying saucer movies and George Romero. The Night of the Living Dead template was set when this film’s aliens took the bodies of the dead and marched stiffly toward world conquest.
Grayeagle / Winterhawk
Westerns have grown scarce since the ’70s, but the genre’s final surge was often revisionist in character. The modestly budgeted and acted Grayeagle (1977) revisits John Ford’s classic The Searchers, but in this picture, Indian allies assist the white man searching the badlands for his lost daughter, kidnapped by a Cheyenne. There are even references to the environmental mayhem wrought by the settlers. Grayeagle is paired on Blu-ray with another western from the same period, Winterhawk.
The Ox-Bow Incident
Western movies often used their setting in a mythic American past to comment on present day concerns. Filmed in the midst of World War II, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) was a warning about the dangers of mob mentality and the perversion of democracy. Henry Fonda starred as one of the voices of reason as a lynch mob prepares to hang accused murderers Dana Andrews and Anthony Quinn. The moral of the story: Justice is everyone’s business.
