Dede (Corinth Films)
It’s a familiar scenario—two best friends in love with the same woman and she’s forced into marriage with the one she doesn’t love. The setting is unusual, a remote village in the Georgian Republic where family honor trumps love. The 2018 film by Mariam Khathvani is steeped in the age-old rituals of an unpoliced communitarian society where women in are kept in second place and violent emotion are hard to keep in check.
The H Man / Battle in Outer Space (Mill Creek Entertainment)
Godzilla director Ishiro Honda was a prolific filmmaker in several genres from the 1950s through the ‘70s. A pair of his lesser known sci-fi features have been released on Blu-ray.
The H Man (1958) is the standout—a drama about “liquid creatures” spawned by U.S. hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific— set against a heroin trafficking ring. The criminals operate from a to-die-for nightclub whose sexy torch singer is backed by a dynamic combo bopping like Charlie Parker. Honda’s cinematography and use of color are top drawer and the special effects are subtle, cool—and creepy.
Battle in Outer Space (1960) is more typical with its plastic cities and tinker-toy rocket ships. Yet even here, amidst an alien assault, there are visual allusions to Hiroshima and the firebombing of Japan’s cities during World War II. Wartime Japanese imperialist rhetoric is also echoed (and condemned) in the space invader’s language: Earth will become “a colonial satellite for our glorious planet.”
Victor and Victoria (Kino Lorber)
The Julie Andrews-James Garner 1982 cross-dressing comedy was based on this German musical. Released in the dying moments of the Weimar Republic, Victor and Victoria (1933) is a sly spoof of theatrical pretensions as an aspiring actress becomes a star by pretending to be a man in drag. The gender-bending comedy maintained a light, sophisticated tone throughout—think Ernst Lubitsch—as character burst into song. The humor is still evident across barriers of time and language.
