Pioneers is an essential gathering of early film treasures that help redefine an era of glorious creativity by women filmmakers and often surprising access to means of production.
Kino Lorber's release of Personal Problems can be seen as a major intervention in recovering "lost" videotapes, representing an important black collective creative contribution of US grassroots videomaking.
Don Siegel's crime thriller The Black Windmill starring Michael Caine, now on Blu-ray via Kino Lorber, is a meta-commentary on adults behaving badly.
Kino Lorber's release of Old Ironsides offers derring-do with cannons firing and masts breaking off and hundreds of extras swarming all over each other's ships.
William Welllman has made elegant use of shadows to convey serious issues before, and uses them in silent film You Never Know Women with a flourish.
The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre feels like an unknown episode of The Outer Limits dropped in from an alternate dimension.
These stories play with fire and do what tales of horror and the macabre are supposed to: transmute real social fears into metaphorical charades for our unsettling entertainment so we don't know which end is up.
In Graham Baker's horror/ suspense/ sci-fi film, now on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, impulses originate from within the human animal rather than from an outside force.
Whenever this movie threatens to get sexy or implies nudity, the story hastily goes back to two-fisted action.
For viewers into the techniques of mise-en-scène, Kino Lorber's 4k digital restoration of Hitchcock's first Technicolor film, Under Capricorn, is one dazzlement after another.
What amazes me about Charlie Chan-spoof Mastermind isn't that such a thing exists but that such a thing exists without my having heard of it.
Throughout his career, Fairbanks scrubbed his scripts of racist elements. The Half-Breed is a rare example when racism is foregrounded as a theme.
