Jeff Heinrich

In Russia at the turn of the 19th century, an army officer (Anton Walbrook) becomes obsessed with card games but fears losing so much that he refuses to join in the wagers. Then he discovers that an elderly countess (Dame Edith Evans) holds the secret of how to win and to keep on winning: she's struck a deal with the devil and promised her soul in exchange for the ability to always have the best hand. But to give up her secret she must die, and the price for he who now holds it is an eternal haunting. Alexander Pushkin’s ghost story got its first iteration in talking pictures in 1949 with The Queen of Spades, a thinking man's horror film directed by Britain's Thorold Dickinson (Gaslight, Secret People). Following Kino in the U.S. and Studio Canal in the U.K., Australian distributor Via Vision Entertainment now brings the same 4K restoration of the 95-minute movie to Blu-ray, but this time on an all-region disc. New to this edition, on the Imprint label, is an audio commentary by English critic Pamela Hutchison as well as an interview with actor Michael Medwin, who played a supporting role in the film. All the other previously available extras are here, too. There's a brief introduction by Martin Scorsese, who calls "this stunning film ... one of the few true classics of supernatural cinema," an audio commentary by American film historian Nick Pinkerton, a half-hour presentation by U.K. horror expert Anna Bogutskaya, Dickinson interviewed at home for half an hour in 1979 by Canada's Elwy Yost (the late host of TV Ontario's 'Saturday Night at the Movies'), a 20-minute analysis of The Queen of Spades by Dickinson expert Philip Horne, quarter-hour audio interviews with Dickinson recorded in 1951 and 1968, a behind-the-scenes gallery of stills, and a trailer. The uncompressed audio is crisp and clear, and there are optional English subtitles. The Blu-ray release is a special run, limited to 1,500 copies.

The Shop on Sly Street, aka Code of Scotland Yard, is a crime drama from post-WWII Britain featuring the Austrian emigré Oscar Homolka. He plays a London antique dealer who has an illegal sideline: he fences smuggled diamonds, using the proceeds to pay for the music studies of his violinist daughter (Muriel Pavlow). Alas, his treacherous shop assistant (Kenneth Griffith) gets wind of the scheme, and what begins as blackmail ends in murder. The score by George Melachrino rings melodic, with airs by Schubert and Mendelssohn lending support. On its Indicator label, British distributor Powerhouse Films now release the film on all-region Blu-ray with a new audio commentary by film historians Josephine Botting and Phuong Le. Botting returns in an extra to interview Pavlow for 48 minutes, then its on to Jonathan Rigby to discuss Homolka's career for another 35. The disc is rounded out with a gallery of 67 promotional images, and the accompanying booklet features a new essay by English film historian Steve Chibnall.

Another George King picture from the 1940s, this time shot during the war, Tomorrow We Live (aka, incongruously, At Dawn We Die) stars John Clements (The Four Feathers) as a British agent sent to a coastal town in Nazi-occupied France, tasked with destroying a German submarine base. He falls in love with the daughter (Greta Gynt, simply radiant) of the local mayor (Godfrey Tearle), both of whom are secretly working for the Resistance, though the daughter is thought to be sympathetic to the Germans. In the opening credits, the filmmakers acknowledge "the official co-operation of General de Gaulle and the French National Committee"; subtle, this propaganda is not. On an all-region Blu-ray, Powerhouse add to their Indicator arsenal with a new audio commentary by film historians Jo Botting and Robert Murphy, a new 20-minute appreciation of Gynt, a long audio interview with composer Roy Douglas from 2005, and a gallery of 24 images. The booklet features a new essay by Philip Kemp.

"A treasure of Mexico’s cinematic golden age, this deliriously plotted blend of gritty crime film, heart-tugging maternal melodrama, and mambo musical is a dazzling showcase for iconic star Ninón Sevilla. She brings fierce charisma and fiery strength to her role as a rumbera – a female nightclub dancer – who gives up everything to raise an abandoned boy, whom she must protect from his ruthless gangster father. Directed at a dizzying pace by filmmaking titan Emilio Fernández, and shot in stylish chiaroscuro by renowned cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa amid smoky dance halls and atmospherically seedy underworld haunts, Victims of Sin is a ferociously entertaining female-powered noir pulsing with the intoxicating rhythms of some of Latin America’s most legendary musical stars." So goes the promotional blurb by Criterion, distributor of the new Blu-ray of the film. Extras include two new interviews – with filmmaker and archivist Viviana Garcia Besné (17 minutes) and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (16 mins.) – as well as a half-hour archival documentary on Mexico's cine de rumberas of the 1940s and '50s, featuring interviews with Sevilla, and a trailer. Subtitles are optional throughout, and the booklet includes an essay by scholar Jacqueline Avila.

In their marriage and in their lopsided professional lives, writers Sandra (Sandra Hüller) and Samuel (Samuel Theis) are going through a rough patch. She's successful, he's not, she's had an affair, he's seeing a psychiatrist, and their idyll of a mountainside home in the French Alps is about to implode: the day after they have a fierce argument, Samuel falls from his workspace two stories to his death. Coming back from a walk with his guide dog Snoop (aka Messi), the couple's preteen son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), half-blind from a car accident several years before, finds the body lying in the bloodied snow. The family tragedy soon plays out in court, with Sandra accused of murder and Daniel a key witness. Will the defence's case, led by a longtime family friend (Swann Arlaud), win the day, or will the state's pitbull prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) ultimately prove Sandra's guilt? Writer-director Justine Triet won an Oscar for the original screenplay she wrote with collaborator Arthur Harari, and was also Oscar-nominated (as best director) along with Hüller (as best actress) and the film itself (as best picture). Now on Blu-ray and DVD from U.S. distributor Criterion, the mostly English-language, two-and-a-half hour movie comes with several extras. There's a half-hour interview with Triet in which she talks with great enthusiasm of the artistic process she and her team went through on the shoot, a half-hour of alternate and extended scenes with optional commentary by Triet, audition footage of Graner and Reinhartz (8 mins.), rehearsal footage of Hüller and Graner (26 mins.), an interview with Messi's trainer Laura Martin, and a trailer. For the movie's few French-language scenes, as well as the extras, there are optional English subtitles. The slim foldout booklet has an essay by New Yorker magazine critic Alexandra Schwartz.

For a film buff in search of diversion, it can be fun sometimes to screen the also-rans of Hollywood film noir period, those "B movies" that – for want of a plausible plot, a tight script, a strong cast and a larger-than-average budget – never quite rose above mediocrity. Far from enjoying the lofty status of A-movies like The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity, or of B-movie classics like Kiss Me Deadly and Detour, these middling crime dramas of the 1940s and '50s would have stayed in the vaults indefinitely if late-night TV and home video hadn't rescued them from well-deserved obscurity. Over the last several years, in lovingly curated boxsets on its Indicator label, U.K. distributor Powerhouse has been re-releasing the good and the not-so-good of these B movies made at Columbia and Universal, two of Hollywood's top production studios of the film-noir era. Now comes volume 6 of the Columbia noirs, this time not a disparate mix but a collection called The Whistler. Adapted from the CBS radio series of the same name, seven of the eight one-hour films star journeyman actor Richard Dix (Cimarron, It Happened in Hollywood), who a year before his death at age 56 was replaced in the eighth, The Return of the Whistler, by Michael Duane. Linking each episode is the Whistler character himself, seen only in shadow, heard in the first and final moments of the picture (and sometimes midway through), whistling a haunting tune, wryly commenting on what's to take place and moralizing on the fates of the heroes and villains on screen: a contract killer, a fraud artist, a kidnapper and so on. (The voice was that of Otto Forrest, uncredited). Often, the dialogue can sound laboured, the plot "twists" are telegraphed a mile away, the sets creak from overuse, but there's something charming in just how hard everyone is working to make silk purses out of sows' ears, never really succeeding. Collected on four Indicator Blu-ray discs coded for region B, the eight films – The Whistler, The Mark of the Whistler (unlike the others, transferred here in upscaled standard definition rather than high def), The Power of the Whistler, Voice of the Whistler, Mysterious Intruder, The Secret of the Whistler, The Thirteenth Hour, and The Return of the Whistler – are augmented with a range of extras. These include newly recorded commentaries, critical appreciations, multiple stills galleries and two archival short films, "It's Your America" (1945, 36 mins.) and "It's Murder" (1944, 9 mins.). Rounding out the boxset is a 120-page book featuring a new essay by Video Watchdog blogger Tim Lucas, an extract from the autobiography of William Castle (director of four of the eight Whistler films), an archival article on the popularity of the Whistler radio show, archival interviews with Dix, and new writing on the two short films.

In 39 long takes, Hungarian director Béla Tarr (Sátántangó, The Turin Horse) and his co-director and editor Ágnes Hranitzky adapt a 1989 novel by László Krasznahorkai about a village that's turned upside down one winter by the visit of a traveling showman, whose circus act features a rotting stuffed whale and a sinister off-screen personage called the Prince. A local cobbler named Lajos (played by German actor Lars Rudolph), is enchanted by the whale, seeing the beast as proof the cosmos is glorious by design, but the rest of the assembled folk aren't so sure, and soon a mob gathers and things turn to violence. The black-and-white cinematography looks dazzling in the 4K restoration supervised by Tarr that U.S. distributor Criterion now brings to region-free Blu-ray and 4K UHD. Extras on the discs include Tarr's first feature film, the kitchen-sink drama Family Nest (1979, 106 minutes), an interview with the director by film critic Scott Foundas (21 mins.), and a trailer. The booklet has an essay by film programmer and critic Dennis Lim.

Spring of 2024 on Blu-ray

06.2024

05.2024

04.2024