Cinema Paradiso (Arrow Academy Blu-ray)
Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning 1988 film was sentimental enough for wide audiences but knowledgeable enough for cineastes. It’s essentially a two-hour flashback in the mind of a successful director, recalling his destitute childhood in Sicily. World War II had just ended, his father was presumed dead and the town’s dilapidated cinema was the willful child’s only diversion, his window to other worlds. Befriended by the projectionist, he learned the feel of film and drank in the theater’s repertory of Italian crime and romance pictures, American westerns and noir, Jean Renoir drama and Charlie Chaplin slapstick. Cinema Paradiso captures the largely lost, larger than life experience of filmgoing, even as it polished the past to a burnished glow of nostalgia. The new Blu-ray includes the theatrical release, the director’ cut, a making-of documentary and other special features. (David Luhrssen)
“The Ealing Studios Comedy Collection” (Film Movement DVD/Blu-ray)
London’s Ealing Studios produced some of the most funny, sophisticated comedies in cinema history. Four of them are collected in this new set. Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) show local people taking situations into their own hands when ignored by bureaucracy and heartless corporations. Later in his career, Alexander Mackendrick directed one of the great landmarks of Hollywood, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), starring Burt Lancaster as a sociopathic media star. But the Scottish director began in an entirely different key with two comedies for Ealing, Whisky Galore (1949) and The Maggie (1954).
Set on a remote Scottish island during World War II, the humor of Whisky Galore! is dry and subtle. When the narrator mentions the islanders’ “pure and simple pleasures,” a long stream of children emerges from a family dwelling. The Home Guard-trained islanders use commando tactics to hijack a shipload of “the water of life,” whisky; and they must use their wiles to conceal the hoard from the authorities. The tone is similar in The Maggie, in which a crew of clever Scots get the best of can-do Yanks and fussbudget Englishmen. (David Luhrssen)
Monster Hunter (In theaters December 30)
In 2012, writer-director Paul Anderson secured the film rights to this Japanese “Monster Hunter” video game series. He began working on a script, ultimately casting his wife, Milla Jovovich, as Lt. Artemis. She is leading a military team in Afghanistan when a sandstorm sweeps them into a world dominated by gigantic, desert-dwelling monsters. The team has no idea how to fight these adversaries until they chance upon desert-dweller Hunter (Tony Jaa), who shares his knowledge of the beasts. Eventually Artemis joins forces with another misplaced militia, led by The Admiral (Ron Perlman). Visually arresting, often confusing battle sequences abound as these fighters search for a means to get back home. Meanwhile, viewers attracted to seeing beautiful people fight awe-inspiring monsters, have reached their destination. (Lisa Miller)
The Train (Kino Lorber Blu-ray)
Director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) was at his peak when he made his World War II film, The Train (1964). Burt Lancaster stars as the flinty French railroad stationmaster, secretly a member of the Resistance, reluctantly pulled into an improvised plan to save a trainload of art treasures. The Germans are hauling away Renoirs, Van Goghs and Cezannes—the cultural patrimony of France—and Labiche (Lancaster) must figure out how to divert the train without destroying its contents. Allied air raids are another problem in a thriller that movies at the agreeable clip of a fast train. Frankenheimer filmed the picture in luscious shades of black, white and silver. (David Luhrssen)
