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Killer Collectibles highlights five of the most exciting new horror products announced each and every week, from toys and apparel to artwork, records, and much more.

Here are the coolest horror collectibles unveiled this week!

Jaws Dunny from Kidrobot

In honor of its 50th anniversary, Jaws is joining Kidrobot’s Dunny line of art figures.

Standing 8″ tall, the limited edition collectible recreates the film’s iconic poster inside translucent, blue resin.

Estimated to ship in the third quarter of the year, it costs $149.99.

Squid Game Staircase Set from Mattel

The Squid Game staircase comes to life with a Mega building set from Mattel Creations. Shipping by June 27, it costs $130.

When constructed, the 1,735-piece build measures 10″ high, 9.85″wide, and 8″ deep. Turn the crank to make the 40 1″ worker figures move. A 2″ Front Man with desk is also included.

Terrifier 2 Shirt from Fright-Rags

Drop on by Fright-Rags for a Clown Cafe shirt from Terrifier 2.

Designed by Kyle Crawford,...

Quick Links Stephen King's "Favorite Film of All Time" Explained Sorcerer's Reception Remains A Mixed Bag Sorcerer Was Plagued by Development Hell William Friedkin Helped Change Cinema Forever Stephen King Is Right About Sorcerer

As the creator of such beloved stories as The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining, and Stand By Me, Stephen King has solidified his status as one of the greatest minds in modern literary fiction. Naturally, many of his fans are often keen to hear his recommendations for good books and movies alike. While people mostly associate the novelist with horror, one of his favorite movies is an excellent blend of thriller, adventure, and survival.

Over the years, Stephen King has let audiences in on his favorite movies, with horror typically coming out on top. However, from Billy Elliot to The Way of the Gun, the author has recommended a variety of pictures from across the spectrum of cinema.

William Friedkin had a great run in the '70s. His hard-nosed police thriller "The French Connection" dominated the 1972 Oscars, winning five Academy Awards including the big prizes for Best Picture, Director, and Actor for Gene Hackman. He followed that critical and commercial success with "The Exorcist," which courted controversy but nevertheless became a box office smash and the first horror movie to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. It also secured a second Best Director nomination for Friedkin.

He might have made it three in a row with "Sorcerer," his gripping remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 suspense thriller "The Wages of Fear," if it wasn't for bad timing. It had the misfortune to be released in 1977 a month after "Star Wars," which was smashing it at the box office and well on its way to becoming a global phenomenon. As audiences were swept away by George Lucas's brand of escapist space fantasy,...

The actor features on the poster for the 71st edition.

Javier Bardem will receive the Donostia Award of the 71st San Sebastian International Film Festival, which is taking place in Spain from September 22-30.

The Donostia is the festival’s most prestigious award, recognising the Spanish actor’s career and contributions to cinema. Bardem will be presented with the award at the opening gala, marking 30 years since his first visit to the festival.

San Sebastian has also unveiled its poster for the 71st edition, which features photographs of the actor and pays tribute to his ability to morph into different characters.

Spanish actor Javier Bardem will receive the Donostia Award, a lifetime achievement honor at this year’s San Sebastian film festival. The star of Skyfall, Dune and the new The Little Mermaid will also feature on the official poster for the 2023 San Sebastian festival.

Bardem will receive his award at the Kursaal Auditorium in San Sebastian on Sept. 22.

The Spanish festival has been a regular stopping spot for Bardem in his long career. He has attended San Sebastian more than 20 times over the past 30 years, from his festival debut with Golden Balls in 1993 through his most recent festival screening, of Fernando León de Aranoa’s The Good Boss back in 2021. In 1994, he received San Sebastian’s Silver Shell for best actor for two roles: In Imanol Uribe’s Numbered Days and Gonzalo Suárez’s El detective y la muerte.

Bardem’s international career kicked off with the San Sebastian screening...

This year’s San Sebastian Film Festival is in mourning as Spanish director Mario Camus, celebrated for his sober but caring adaptations of distinguished Spanish novels such as “La Colmena” – written by Nobel prize winner Camilo José Cela – Ignacio Aldecoa’s “Young Sánchez” and “The Holy Innocents” by Miguel Delibes, died on Saturday in Santander, northern Spain, the city where he was born. Camus was 86.

Among his career achievements, Camus took the Berlin Golden Bear for best film with “La Colmena” (1983), a Cannes Prize Ecumenical Jury prize for “The Holy Innocents” (1984). Such films proved a highpoint in Spain’s ruling socialist left’s dream, pushed when Pilar Miró took over as head of Spain’s Icaa film institute in 1982, of maintaining Spanish cinema’s social edge but priming its production levels and taking it onto a European stage.

Camus also participated in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and at the Moscow Festival...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962) is now showing April 18 - May 17, 2020 in the United Kingdom.It starts with a breakup, the dissolution of a relationship between two bourgeois Italians taking place in a stifling atmosphere of all-night contention. But by the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse, the ultimate breakdown, which likewise encompasses the cessation of yet another engagement, also strikes a more spacious, reverberating chord, portending the suspension of a fractured society and perhaps the world at large. Released in 1962, following L’avventura (1960) and La note (1961), the kindred features of what has been dubbed Antonioni’s “Trilogy of Alienation,” L’eclisse similarly hosts a congregation of emblematic individuals standing in for their class and culture, as well as embodying an entirely revelatory mode of philosophical and psychological bearing. Though seldom voiced in any explicit fashion—these are films defined by a...

"Do you feel any stirrings?" Studiocanal UK has debuted a new trailer for the upcoming UK re-release of the French drama The Nun, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966. Not to be confused with the horror movie also known as The Nun opening in theaters this summer. Jacques Rivette's third feature didn't win any awards at the time it was released, but did end up with rave reviews and is now considered a French classic. The Nun is getting 4K restoration and re-release, along with an obvious Blu-ray release as well. Set in the 18th century, the film is about a young girl who is sent to a convent against her will. When she asks to renounce her vows, she finds herself caught in a fatal trap. Anna Karina stars as Suzanne, "The Nun", and the cast includes Liselotte Pulver, Micheline Presle, Francine Bergé, Francisco Rabal, and Christiane Lénier.

Following its initial premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 52 years ago, Jacques Rivette’s breathtaking French drama The Nun – also known by its French title La religieuse – is getting a 4K restoration and a theatrical run. Overseen by Ms. Veronique Manniez-Rivette at L’Immagine Ritrovata, StudioCanal has now released a new remastered trailer for the film.

The new trailer is both riveting and tense, showcasing cinematographer Alain Levent’s striking imagery and teasing Rivette’s complex ideas. Often regarded as one of the most poignant works of French cinema, The Nun centers on Suzanne Simonin, a young woman who is forced to dedicate herself to a convent of nuns. Suzanne faces difficulty as she begins to challenge her newly instated vows – the institutional pressure weighing on her in the form of three superior mothers and their radical behavior.

The Nun–not to be confused with another film of the same...

The strangest Italian portmanteau picture of the sixties features glorious Silvana Mangano in dozens of costume changes, directed by big names (Visconti, De Sica, Pasolini) and paired with a woefully miscast Clint Eastwood. The other major attraction is a delightful music score by Piero Piccioni, with an assist from Ennio Morricone.

The Witches

Special Edition Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

1967 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 120 (?) 111 105 min. / Le streghe / Street Date January 30, 2018 / 34.95

Starring: Silvana Mangano, Clint Eastwood, Annie Girardot, Francisco Rabal, Massimo Girotti, Véronique Vendell, Elsa Albani, Clara Calamai, Marilù Tolo, Nora Ricci, Dino Mele Dino Mele, Helmut Berger, Bruno Filippini, Leslie French, Alberto Sordi, Totò, Ciancicato Miao, Ninetto Davoli, Laura Betti, Luigi Leoni, Valentino Macchi, Corinne Fontaine, Armando Bottin, Gianni Gori, Paolo Gozlino, Franco Moruzzi, Angelo Santi, Pietro Torrisi.

Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno

Film Editors: Nino Baragli, Adriana Novelli, Mario Serandrei, Giorgio Serrallonga

Original Music: Ennio Morricone, Piero Piccioni

Written by Mauro Bolognini, Fabio Carpi,...

Review by Roger Carpenter

In a day and age when video distribution companies are mostly concerned with the bottom dollar and release or re-release films they know are guaranteed to sell (anyone care to count the number of Us releases of The Evil Dead series or Night of the Living Dead?), one of my favorite things about Arrow Video USA is their apparent fearlessness in releasing films and box sets that are probably only going to appeal to a very small niche audience.

Along with Arrow Academy, Arrow Video USA’s arthouse imprint, the company has released a good portion of Walerian Borowcyzk’s films and is busily releasing the early works of Seijun Suzuki as well as other, relatively obscure, 50’s and 60’s Japanese films. While I applaud Arrow for releasing these films and enjoy them all immensely, I’m just not sure the typical movie fan has a...

William Friedkin’s 1977 thriller, in which four desperate men drive nitroglycerin through an inhospitable jungle, is a tense study in psychological breakdown

Here is a 40-years-on rerelease of William Friedkin’s treasured personal project: his 1977 movie Sorcerer. It’s a study of an existential ordeal, and a reworking of Clouzot’s classic film The Wages of Fear, though avowedly drawing directly on the 1950 source novel by Georges Arnaud. (It’s a story that incidentally still seems to fascinate film-makers: Ben Wheatley is reportedly pondering a remake of his own.)

Sorcerer is a distinctive, gritty and gloomy movie – a determined slow-burner, resisting the traditional structure of narrative and central character. It involves four guys in four desperate situations, each introduced in leisurely vignettes: New Jersey mobster Scanlon (Roy Scheider), crooked Parisian businessman Manzon (Bruno Cremer), Mexican hitman Nilo (Francisco Rabal) and Middle Eastern terrorist Kassem (played by the Moroccan actor Amidou). For individual reasons,...

Last month, coverage of the 40th anniversary of Star Wars was understandably extensive, with pop-culture publications, daily newspapers, and TV media commemorating a film that by all rights changed the landscape of Hollywood, for better or worse. Conversely, there will likely be relatively little retrospective celebration for William Friedkin’s Sorcerer or Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, two terrific films released roughly one month later in the week of June 19-25. Though they weren’t the first examples of New Hollywood directors following huge successes with more difficult works that flopped (Peter Bogdanovich’s secretly lovely At Long Last Love comes to mind), they stood in 1977 as back-to-back examples of talented filmmakers – one Oscar-winning, the other well on his way to becoming the most-acclaimed director of his generation – overreaching and failing after becoming a bit too full of themselves.

That is, of course, an oversimplification, just as the other charge popularized by the likes of Peter Biskind – i.e. George Lucas’ grand space opera and Steven Spielberg’s personal blockbusters killed Hollywood’s interest in movies for adults – is an oversimplification. In all truth, it isn’t surprising that audiences didn’t go for Sorcerer or New York, New York, two especially challenging-for-the-mainstream features that pushed their creators’ aesthetics to greater extremes than before while tracking in subject matter that was pessimistic even for the time. But while both films and their troubled productions saw directors burned by their ambition, they are also exceptional works showcasing how exhilarating it can be when all commercial sense goes out the window.

Friedkin’s Sorcerer can lay more claim to having been actively harmed by the arrival of Lucas’ megahit, arriving exactly one month later, on June 25, and competing for a thrill-seeking crowd. (One theater reportedly pulled Star Wars for Sorcerer for a week, only to replace it when Friedkin’s film failed to lure an audience.) The film, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 masterpiece The Wages of Fear, was also hurt by its confusing title — named after one of the trucks transporting dynamite through a dangerous jungle to put out an oil fire — and a budget that ballooned from an initially planned $15 million to $22 million following a difficult production.

Friedkin, hot off the Oscar-winning The French Connection and hugely successful The Exorcist, already had a reputation for his temperament and arrogance. They were in full force on Sorcerer: he clashed with cinematographer Dick Bush, who left halfway through filming, as well as producer David Salven, whom Friedkin fired after fights over the expensive location shoots. Friedkin extensively clashed with Paramount brass, sometimes reasonably (kicking executives off set after perceived interference), sometimes amusingly but questionably (the evil oil execs pictured in the film are actually Gulf & Western’s executive board, and they repaid him by not promoting the film). The jungle shoot itself was hell, with about 50 people quitting following injury or illness while Friedkin himself contracted malaria and lost 50 pounds.

But it’s only appropriate that the making of Sorcerer was so desperate, given the story it tells. Friedkin’s worldview has always been bleak and cynical, and Sorcerer may be the purest expression of that. Its heroes are a hard-bitten New Jersey hood (a spectacularly testy Roy Scheider) hiding out after shooting a mobster’s brother, a crooked French banker (Bruno Cremer) on the run following fraud accusations, a Palestinian terrorist (Amidou) behind a Jerusalem bombing, and a Mexican hitman (Francisco Rabal) who gets in on the job after murdering the fourth driver (Karl John), apparently a fugitive Nazi. The film presents their crimes as facts and without real judgment, their rottenness just another bad part of a burned-out, brutal world.

Where The French Connection and The Exorcist gave viewers visceral thrills early on and some sense of right and wrong (even if it’s fatally compromised), the early action in Sorcerer is more painful, with suicide, terrorism, and the loss of friends and partners forming the four prologues introducing the men at this film’s center. Friedkin then drops us into squalor and despair in a small South American town where the heat and rain are nearly as oppressive as the police state, the work is dangerous and pays little, and the mud seems to soak up any sense of hope. It’s little wonder that they might take up the dangerous assignment of driving through an arduous jungle landscape with unstable explosives that could set off at any moment. When you’ve been driven into no man’s land by your sins, any way out is worth it — no matter how unlikely it is that you’ll survive.

The actual drive up to the oil well doesn’t begin until about halfway through and takes on the tone of an unusually fraught funeral march for the protagonists. Friedkin’s immediate, docurealistic style helps ground the proceedings as set-pieces grow more heightened, most memorably when the drivers guide their trucks over a deteriorating bridge as the river beneath it overflows — the most expensive sequence in the film, as well as the most difficult-to-shoot of Friedkin’s career. As Popeye Doyle’s car chase in The French Connection and Regan & Chris MacNeil getting jerked around in The Exorcist evince, Friedkin always had a gift for making scenes that were already dangerous in conception even more tactile and nerve-wracking. Here, his emphasis on the mechanics of the crossing – the snapping rope and wood – as well as the fragility of the bodies attempting to cross (particularly as one rider steps outside to guide the truck and risks getting thrown off or crushed in the process) make the danger of their situation all the more palpable.

Yet there’s a more existential doom permeating the film compared with the nihilism of his earlier efforts, a more complete melding of his hard-bitten style with expressionistic touches that peppered The Exorcist. Part of that comes from Tangerine Dream’s ethereal score, which accentuates a sense that the elements are set against the drivers. But Friedkin also lends the film’s grungy look a sort of otherworldly menace, whether the camera soars through gorgeous greenery while a fire burns in the background or Scheider envisions a stream of blood soaking the dirt. Even the small moments of beauty (e.g. a butterfly hiding from the rain or a woman briefly dancing with Scheider) seem to tease the protagonists and underline their utter hopelessness. By the time we reach a grim conclusion, Friedkin has taken us through a world without mercy or decency, in which fate mocks even the most resilient of us.

Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, released just a few days earlier on June 21, was less plausibly affected by the release of Star Wars, and more likely the victim of critics and audiences being put off by its mix of glossy, Vincente Minnelli-esque musicality and aggressive, John Cassavetes-influenced verisimilitude. Scorsese, with the story of a creative and personal relationship collapsing under the weight of jealousy in a postwar environment, sought to bring to the forefront the unhappiness lurking under the surface of films such as Meet Me in St. Louis and My Dream is Yours.

It, like Sorcerer, had a difficult production, with the director battling a severe cocaine addiction while breaking up with then-wife Julia Cameron and carrying out an affair with lead actress Liza Minnelli. The film’s herky-jerky rhythms and circular intensity seem to take cues from that tension, the big-band musical numbers clashing with deliberately repetitive improvisations and screaming matches. Scorsese had mixed realism with melodrama (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and grit with florid formalism (Taxi Driver) previously, and would go on to marry his classic and New Hollywood interests more palatably in Raging Bull. But New York, New York isn’t a marriage so much as it’s a push-pull war, one that’s sometimes exhausting.

Acknowledging the unattainability of Hollywood fantasies makes it no less vital a love letter. Scorsese opens with an astonishing crane shot on V-j Day as Robert De Niro’s Jimmy gets lost in the excitement of a crowd, only to appear under an arrow that both pinpoints and isolates him. De Niro’s first interactions with Minnelli’s Francine, meanwhile, are less a meet-cute, more an ongoing, insistent harassment that eventually wears down her defenses. The entire opening sequence communicates a sense of spiritual and personal emptiness amid celebration, an early warning that not all is well in the postwar era.

De Niro continues playing Jimmy as a halfway point between his insecure, jealous bruiser in Raging Bull and his relentless, obnoxious pest in The King of Comedy, but Scorsese finds some truth in his and Francine’s romance (even as it’s rotting from the inside out) in their musical performances, with the two finding a better balance and greater chemistry as they perform “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me.” Their partnership flourishes out of a mutual recognition of talent — or, in his case, recognition of greater possible success together. Still, that balance begins to tip whenever Francine asserts herself, as in a scene where she tries to pep up the band following one of Jimmy’s criticisms, only for him to tear her down. And the film’s most gorgeous images undermine any possibility of happiness between the two, with De Niro proposing (badly: “I love you… I mean, I don’t love you. I dig you; I like you a lot”) in front of a fake forest.

Purposefully, the film’s first two hours give more emphasis to Scorsese’s more discursive side, major arguments between Jimmy and Francine getting interrupted by Jimmy’s ability to get into a minor argument with anyone he encounters. It’s in the final third that focus shifts to the director’s inner formalist and New York, New York turns into a proper musical with the remarkably bittersweet “Happy Endings” sequence. Francine’s finally given a chance to flourish as a performer, unhindered by Jimmy’s jealousy, and Scorsese jumps into an unabashedly stagey finale not unlike that of The Band Wagon or An American in Paris.

Yet the climax still reflects the inherent unhappiness in Francine’s life, telling a story of a relationship ended by success, only to double back and conclude with a wish-fulfillment coda that only makes it more painful. We’ve already seen the truth in the lives of Francine and Jimmy, and no rousing performance of “Theme from ‘New York, New York’” is going to change that. Their final encounter twists the knife further, giving one last tease of possible reconciliation before recognizing that it’s impossible, leaving Jimmy with a final, lonely shot echoing that V-j Day opening.

Audiences and critics largely rejected New York, New York and Sorcerer, with neither film making its budget back or earning the raves their makers had come to expect, but time has been kind to both. They haven’t exactly seen widespread reevaluation as their makers’ best works — Sorcerer wouldn’t be too far off for this writer, and Scorsese’s film has its passionate advocates — but they’ve developed cult followings and at least partly shaken off their previous distinctions as merely ambitious follies. Perhaps it’s appropriate that they’re not as widely cited as Taxi Driver and The Exorcist – they’re pricklier than their more popular predecessors, better suited as advanced viewing than introductory works. They may not generate thousands upon thousands of appreciations 40 years later, but they’re there, waiting for curious viewers to make a discovery.

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961) is showing June 17 - July 17 and The Exterminating Angel (1962) is showing June 18 - July 18, 2017 in the United Kingdom.ViridianaIt’s impossible to avoid describing the films of Spanish director Luis Buñuel as “surreal,” and yet to do so is woefully insufficient. This is for two reasons. In the first place, Buñuel never made one kind of film. In the second place, even his strangest films deal with social reality.Early in his career Buñuel did associate himself with the Surrealist art movement. Among his first productions were the infamous Un chien Andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930), experimental narratives co-written by Salvador Dali in which bizarre and violent psychosexual incidents connect via absurd dream logic. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Surrealists never meant “surreal” to act as a mere label for the uniquely strange.

The Supporting Actress Smackdown Of 1977 Is Just One Week Away. Get your votes in by Friday early evening. This week will be a '77 blitz at the blog to get you in the mood.

The Nominees were...

Leslie Browne, The Turning Point

Quinn Cumming, The Goodbye Girl

Melinda Dillon, Close Encounters

Vanessa Redgrave, Julia

Tuesday Weld, Looking for Mr Goodbar

Readers are our final panelist for the Smackdown so if you'd like to vote send Nathaniel an email with 1977 in the header line and your votes. Each performance you've seen should be rated on a scale of 1 to 5 hearts (1 being terrible 5 being stupendous) -- Remember to only vote for performances that you've seen! The votes are weighted to reflect numbers of voters per movies so no actress has an unfair advantage.

Click to embiggen to see the 1977 goodies

Meet The Panelists

We'll do this piecemeal so you don't feel overwhelmed.

Studiocanal

To celebrate the release of L’Eclisse, available on Est 21 September 2015 and released on Blu-ray for the first time (as well as on DVD) 28 September 2015, we are giving 3 lucky WhatCulture readers the chance to win one of three copies on Blu-ray.

Filmed in sumptuous black and white, and full of scenes of lush, strange beauty, it tells the story of Vittoria (the beautiful Monica Vitti – L’Avventura, La Notte, Red Desert – Antonioni’s partner at the time), a young woman who leaves her older lover (Francisco Rabal – Viridiana, The Holy Innocents, Goya in Bordeaux), then drifts into a relationship with a confident, ambitious young stockbroker (Alain Delon – Le Samourai, Rocco and his Brothers, Le Cercle Rouge). But this base narrative is the starting point for much, much more, including an analysis of the city as a place of estrangement and alienation and an implicit critique of colonialism.

Using the...

Stars: Hugo Stiglitz, Laura Trotter, Maria Rosaria Omaggio, Francisco Rabal, Sonia Viviani, Eduardo Fajardo, Stefania D’Amario, Mel Ferrer, Sara Franchetti, Manuel Zarzo | Written by Antonio Cesare Corti, Luis María Delgado | Directed by Umberto Lenzi

Zombies don’t run! …or something like that right? I never actually stick to that; I’m not one of the people who think that Romero wrote the rules about zombies. Nightmare City, which is being released by Arrow Video, is a batshit crazy zombie movie which may be the first instance of running zombies, all the way back in 1980, though I’m probably wrong about that…

When an airplane arrives at an airport full of bloodsucking zombies, the unstoppable force soon starts to invade the city. Dean (Hugo Stiglitz), a reporter who witnesses the original attack fights to find his wife Anna (Laura Trotter) at the hospital before the horde completely take over the city.

While the name Gabriel Figueroa may not be a familiar one to many, even those with a stronger affinity for filmmaking and the art behind it, New York’s own Film Forum is hoping to change that.

On June 5, the theater began a career spanning retrospective surrounding the work of iconic cinematographer and Mexican film industry legend Gabriel Figueroa. Taking a look at 19 of the photographer’s films, the series is running in conjunction with the new exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, entitled Under The Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa – Art And Film.

Best known as a pioneer of Mexican cinema, primarily with his work alongside director Emilio Fernandez, Figueroa’s work was as varied as they come. His work with Fernandez is without a doubt this retrospective’s highlight, particularly films like Wildflower. One of the many times Mexican cinema’s “Big Four” worked together, the film saw the...

Luis Buñuel movies on TCM tonight (photo: Catherine Deneuve in 'Belle de Jour') The city of Paris and iconoclastic writer-director Luis Buñuel are Turner Classic Movies' themes today and later this evening. TCM's focus on Luis Buñuel is particularly welcome, as he remains one of the most daring and most challenging filmmakers since the invention of film. Luis Buñuel is so remarkable, in fact, that you won't find any Hollywood hipster paying homage to him in his/her movies. Nor will you hear his name mentioned at the Academy Awards – no matter the Academy in question. And rest assured that most film critics working today have never even heard of him, let alone seen any of his movies. So, nowadays Luis Buñuel is un-hip, un-cool, and unfashionable. He's also unquestionably brilliant. These days everyone is worried about freedom of expression. The clash of civilizations. The West vs. The Other.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Spain, 1989

No matter if his protagonists are deranged or distraught, happy or sad, or if his stories are light or dark, comedic or tragic, the films of Pedro Almodóvar are usually at the very least enjoyable. Even at their most disturbing, there is something inescapably jubilant about his lavish use of color, his vibrant characters, and his unceasing passion for life and filmmaking. And when he aims to make something purely amusing, the results can be astonishing. It is for all of these reasons that Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, surprisingly the first Almodóvar film released by the Criterion Collection, is such a treat.

In this 1989 feature, made just after Almodóvar’s award-winning breakthrough Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Victoria Abril stars as junkie porn star turned respectable leading lady Marina Osorio, the object...

The Sitges Film Festival is typically a feast for horror fans, and this year's event looks to be no different as a big batch of new genre movies has been added to the lineup that's sure to make you drool.

From the Press Release:

The 47th Sitges Film Festival, to be held from 3 to 12 October, will be loaded with films that are all eagerly awaited by fantastic and, especially, horror genre film lovers. Festival Director Àngel Sala has announced the names of a good handful of new films that will be included in Sitges 2014.

These new Festival incorporations have been added to the lineup of an edition that will be opening with Jaume Balagueró’s [Rec] 4: Apocalypse, presenting its Grand Honorary Award to Roland Emmerich, and including presentations of the latest productions from important directors like Jean-Luc Godard, David Cronenberg, Kim-ki Duk, and Takashi Miike. See more details on those...

L’eclisse

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Written by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra

Italy, 1962

L’eclisse is the third film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s so-called “Trilogy of Alienation,” the preceding works having been L’avventura and La notte. (With justification, some would argue that Red Desert, his next film, truly rounds out what would then be considered a tetralogy). While the three films taken together do explore many of the same themes relating to spiritual emptiness, the disbanding of relationships, and a struggle to communicate in an increasingly modern and alienating world, L’eclisse differs from the two earlier works most notably in its increasingly experimental style and its blatant departures from conventional storytelling and formal design.

A tumultuous relationship begins L’eclisse, as we arrive in medias res, near the end of the rather unpleasantly crumbling relationship between Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) and Vittoria (Monica Vitti). Inside Riccardo’s claustrophobic home,...

After finally securing 1961’s La Notte as part of the Criterion line-up, we’re treated to a new restoration and Blu-ray transfer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, which originally graced the collection back in 2005. The final chapter of the unofficial “Incommunicability Trilogy,” it is, perhaps, the most ‘sex positive’ chapter of the erotomania that partially defines the crumbling of the troubling social orders at hand, and it certainly has a more vibrant energy than the previous films, beginning with 1960’s L’Avventura. As far as narrative goes, however, this may possibly be the most oblique of the three films, meandering through possibilities before delivering a confounding final seven minutes that are as strikingly at odds with the rest of the feature as well as confoundingly, maddeningly riveting.

A beautiful woman, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), tiredly pads back and forth in her lover’s (Fernando Rabal) apartment, a fan providing the...

Not to fall into that macho Hemingway bit, but I have to ask: Could it be that the effort it takes to do something that's difficult often results in that thing being done better than if it had been easy? William Friedkin's jungle-location triumph/boondoggle Sorcerer trumps today's event filmmaking with every mud puddle and pit stain, with rain- and sweat-streaked actors who never look like they've just swanned from the trailer to the green screen. In the last hour, plug-uglies played by Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, and Amidou drive trucks full of ready-to-blow unstable dynamite over South American mountains for story reasons that don't much matter; it's all terrified eyes boiling in stoic-faced men as mud-caked wheels skirt crumbling cliff sides, each shot like s...

Viridiana

Written by Julio Alejandro and Luis Buñuel

Directed by Luis Buñuel

Spain/Mexico, 1961

The Cannes Film Festival has long been a venue to court controversy, and filmmaker Luis Buñuel was likewise one who consistently reveled in the divisive. At the 1961 festival, Buñuel brought his latest release, Viridiana, and the results were spectacular, and spectacularly contentious. The film, which shared Palme d’Or honors with Henri Colpi’s The Long Absence, was subsequently met with charges of blasphemy from the Vatican’s newspaper, and it was promptly banned in Buñuel ‘s native Spain.

The Spanish reaction was particularly critical. Viridiana’s production in Buñuel’s place of birth was already a hot topic. Having left for America and Mexico in 1939, Spain’s surrealist native son was back home, the adamantly leftist filmmaker now working amidst Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship. What’s the worst that could happen?

Viridiana is what happened,...

Sorcerer - Warner Bros. - Blu-ray Director: William Friedkin Cast: Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, Peter Capell, Ramon Bieri. Full cast + crew I actually have never seen Sorcerer, but here's what I know: many think it's William Friedkin's greatest film, it's been overshadowed by big commercial hits of his like The Exorcist and The French Connection, and it's a remake of The Wages of Fear. I also know that Warner Bros.' new Blu-ray for the film features a complete remaster of the movie and is the closest possible version of Friedkin's original vision for this film about four men who are transporting dynamite through a South American jungle. Special Features: None beyond a beautiful, proper HD restoration...

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And here we are. The day after Easter and we’ve reached the top of the mountain. While compiling this list, it’s become evident that true religious films just aren’t made anymore (and if they are, they are widely panned). That being said, religious themes exist in more mainstream movies than ever, despite there being no deliberate attempts to dub the films “religious.” Faith, God, whatever you want to call it – it’s influenced the history of nations, of politics, of culture, and of film. And these are the most important films in that wheelhouse. There are only two American films in the top 10, and only one of them is in English.

courtesy of hilobrow.com

10. Andrei Rublev (1966)

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

A brutally expansive biopic about the Russian iconographer divided into nine chapters. Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn) is portrayed not as a silent monk, but a motivated artist working against social ruin,...

I interviewed William Friedkin back in 2012 (read part one here and part two here) and asked about the status of Sorcerer back then, knowing of the legal issues it was facing as Paramount and Universal couldn't seem to decide who owned the rights to the film. Friedkin was suing both studios in order to figure that out and hopefully get a remastered version of, what I believe is best called a "cult classic" at this point, the film released. Two years later, it finally arrives courtesy of Warner Home Video in all its tension laden madness. While Friedkin doesn't like the term, Sorcerer is a remake of French director Henri-Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fear (which itself was based on Georges Arnaud's novel), an amazing movie and one I've written about before, including my 2009 review of the Criterion Blu-ray. I can understand Friedkin's aversion to the word "remake" as...

William Friedkin: Why Sorcerer’s Spell Refuses to Die

By

Alex Simon

In the mid-1970s, there were few American filmmakers riding as high as William Friedkin. The French Connection swept the 1971 Academy Awards, nabbing Friedkin a Best Director statuette. The Exorcist, released two years later, broke box office records to become one of the top grossing films of all time. Boasting creative power and freedom that most directors could only dream about, Friedkin opted to film an updated version of French auteur Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic The Wages of Fear (1953).

The result, 1977’s Sorcerer, became one of the most notorious box office bombs of the decade. Its dark, unrelenting tale of four desperate, disparate men (Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, Amidou) who undertake a suicide mission by driving truckloads of nitroglycerine across the rugged South American jungle wasn’t what the changing tide of audience tastes were buying then,...

Part 2 of this list gets a bit more foreign. In fact, this may be the first full list that has more foreign-language films than English-language ones. Maybe English-speaking audiences aren’t as willing to watch religious films. Maybe films associated with religion come off as preachy or accusatory. Or maybe (most of) the films on this list have done it so well already that it doesn’t need to be done again.

courtesy of criterion.com

40. Marketa Lazarová (1967)

Directed by František Vláčil

The film often credited as being the best to come out of the Czech Republic, Marketa Lazarová was based on the novel by Vladislav Vančura and is an early, biting narrative about the chasm of difference between paganism and its shift into Christianity in the Middle Ages, as the daughter of a lord is kidnapped and becomes the mistress of one of her kidnappers, a robber knight. It...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: June 10, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Ennui lives!: Francisco Rabal and Monica Vitti in Antonioni's L’eclisse.

The 1962 Italian drama L’eclisse is the concluding chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s informal trilogy on contemporary malaise (following L’avventura and La notte).

L’eclisse (The Eclipse) tells the story of a young woman (L’avventura’s Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Viridiana’s Francisco Rabal) and drifts into a relationship with another (Purple Noon’s Alain Delon).

Using the architecture of Rome as a backdrop for the doomed affair, Antonioni achieves the apotheosis of his style in this return to the theme that preoccupied him the most: the difficulty of connection in an alienating modern world.

Criterion’s Blu-ray/DVD Combo edition of the movie, which is presented in Italian with English subtitles, contains the following features:

• New, restored high-definition digital film transfer, with...

I just received my review copy of Ingmar Bergman's Pesona (3/25) today so I'm a little high on Criterion love at the moment and only minutes after receiving that in the mail I received today's announcement listing the films coming to the Collection in June. I'm sure many will be excited to see Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock getting the Blu-ray upgrade. The remastered release includes a new piece on the making of the film, a new introduction by film scholar David Thomson as well as Weir's 1971 black comedy Homesdale among other additional features. The disc will hit shelves on June 17. The title I'm most looking forward to is Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse the third film in his informal trilogy that includes L'avventura and La notte. This is the only one of those three I haven't yet seen and what a cast as it tells the story of...

This Story Has Been Updated From Our Original Posting Of January 6. The Blu-ray Packaging Art Has Been Added And The Title Is Now Available For Pre-order From Amazon.

Good news for fans of William Friedkin's underrated 1977 classic Sorcerer: after years of false starts, the remastered film will now be available on Blu-ray through Warner Home Video. Check out the press release we've just received from them:

Burbank, Calif., January 6, 2014 – William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, the cult suspense thriller that has been largely overlooked since its 1977 release, has now been acquired and fully restored by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and will make its Blu-ray™ debut on April 22, 2014. The release, also available on DVD, will be packaged as a 40-page Blu-ray book filled with beautiful images from the film and excerpts from the book, “The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir.”

Sorcerer is derived from the same Georges Arnaud novel that inspired Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 French classic,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: April 22, 2014

Price: DVD $12.96, Blu-ray $27.98

Studio: Warner

William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, the 1977 cult suspense thriller will make its Blu-ray debut in a 40-page Blu-ray book filled with images from the film and excerpts from the book Friedkin’s recently published book, The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir.

Sorcerer is derived from the same Georges Arnaud novel that inspired Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 French classic, The Wages of Fear. The film, made following the successes of Friedkin’s The French Connection and The Exorcist, tells the story of four men who end up in a dismal South American town where an American oil company is seeking courageous drivers willing to haul nitroglycerin through 200 miles of treacherous terrain. The four displaced men have nothing to lose so they agree for a small payment of cash.

Roy Scheider (Jaws), Bruno Cremer (Under the Sun), Francisco Rabal (Dagon) and Amidou (Ronin) star in the movie,...

Legendary director William Friedkin has just been given a lifetime achievement award at the Venice film festival, but he is still making big, critically acclaimed movies, such as last year's Killer Joe. He looks back on his career, and the film he considers his best, 1977's Sorcerer

On a hot, sticky Tuesday in Venice, the American film director William Friedkin sauntered from his hotel to see an exhibition of paintings at the nearby Doge's Palace. There, he stood in front of Manet's L'Evasion de Rochefort, which depicts the flight of the man who challenged Napoleon III. He saw the little boat packed with indistinguishable figures and the mighty sea churning all around. It struck him that the painting summed up what he thinks of the world: that we're stuck on a boat, at the mercy of nature. Possibly it has something to say about his own career too.

Friedkin is...

Alfredo Landa, Cannes Best Actor winner dead at 80 Cannes Film Festival Best Actor winner Alfredo Landa, who was featured in more than 100 Spanish movies, died May 9 in his birthplace of Pamplona, in the Spanish province of Navarra. Landa, who underwent colon cancer treatment in 2004 and suffered a stroke in 2009, was 80. The son of a Civil Guard officer, Alfredo Landa quit his law studies to enter show business in the mid-’50s. According to the IMDb, he was an extra in Michael Anderson’s 1956 Best Picture Academy Award winner Around the World in 80 Days, though Landa’s first credited role was in Rafael J. Salvia El puente de la paz ("The Bridge of Peace") two years later. Landa kept busy throughout the ’60s, coming into his own as a star of lowbrow, post-Francisco Franco sex comedies in the mid-’70s, e.g., Mariano Ozores’ Los pecados de una chica...

By Chris Wright, MoreHorror.com

“Nightmare City” (1980)

Directed By: Umberto Lenzi

Written By: Piero Mignoli, Tony Corti, Jose Luis Delgado

Starring: Hugo Stiglitz (Dean Miller), Laura Trotter (Dr. Anna Miller), Maria Rosaria (Sheila), Francisco Rabal (Major Warren Holmes), Sonia Viviani (Cindy), Eduardo Fajardo (Dr. Kramer) Mel Ferrer (General Murchison).

I never knew mindless killing could occur with no actual plot but apparently it really can! It is fairly difficult to defend this movie unless the movie watcher really likes incoherent films. This movie was released under numerous titles as well such as “City of the Walking Dead” and its Italian label “Incubo Sulla Cittá Contaminata.” This movie is not very well known and I found out why, the hard way.

The apparent plot is a news reporter named Dean (Hugo Stiglitz) is going to interview a scientist at a European airport about a recent nuclear incident. A random plane lands...

DVD Playhouse—February 2012

By Allen Gardner

To Kill A Mockingbird 50th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s landmark novel pits a liberal-minded lawyer (Gregory Peck) against a small Southern town’s racism when defending a black man (Brock Peters) on trumped-up rape charges. One of the 1960s’ first landmark films, a truly stirring human drama that hits all the right notes and isn’t dated a bit. Robert Duvall makes his screen debut (sans dialogue) as the enigmatic Boo Radley. DVD and Blu-ray double edition. Bonuses: Two feature-length documentaries: Fearful Symmetry and A Conversation with Gregory Peck; Featurettes; Excerpts and film clips from Gregory Peck’s Oscar acceptance speech and AFI Lifetime Achievement Award; Commentary by Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 2.0 mono.

Outrage: Way Of The Yakuza (Magnolia) After a brief hiatus from his signature oeuvre of Japanese gangster flicks,...

Five-time Oscar nominee Glenn Close will receive the Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award at the 59th edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival. Why is the award called Donostia? Because that's the Basque name of the coastal town of San Sebastian, located in northern Spain's Basque Country. The first recipient of the Donostia Award was Hollywood veteran Gregory Peck (right) at the 1986 festival. Of the more than 40 actors and actresses (sometimes actor-filmmakers) who have received the award, a mere 8 have been non-Hollywood celebrities: Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Max von Sydow, Isabelle Huppert, Vittorio Gassman, Liv Ullmann, and Spaniards Francisco Rabal and (Peruvian-born) Fernando Fernán Gómez. Spaniard and Donostia winner Antonio Banderas has had a lengthy Hollywood career — even if nothing to match the prestige of his films for Pedro Almodóvar — and so have British winners like Ian McKellen, Jeremy Irons, and Michael Caine. Below is the full list of Donostia Lifetime...

The highlight of the Barbican’s Michelangelo Antonioni Directorspective have arguably been the screenings of L’avventura (1960) and La notte (1961), the first two films of what has been described by critic Philip French as the “The Antonioni Walk,” an unofficial, loose trilogy of modernist films that explore the existential crisis of rich, beautiful characters who are bored with their lives.

On the 20 February at 4.00pm the Barbican will screen the final chapter in the trilogy, L’eclisse (1964). These three films, although often termed as a trilogy, are not linked by plot but rather by the theme of the banality and pointlessness of human existence. This is typical of Antonioni, who described his films as follows:

“I never discuss the plots of my films. I never release a synopsis before I begin shooting. How could I? Until the film is edited, I have no idea myself what it will be about.

Ava Gardner, The Naked Maja Ava Gardner returns to Turner Classic Movies this evening. TCM's Star of the Month will remain on TV all the way to late afternoon Friday. The movies themselves may not be exactly great, but Gardner's presence should be more than enough to make them worth at least a look. Henry Koster's The Naked Maja (1958) has Anthony Franciosa as Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Perhaps Francisco Rabal was unavailable? (Luis Buñuel's deliciously sacrilegious Nazarin came out in 1959, so Rabal may have been busy working on that, who knows?) You may think that in order to make the two Americans — Gardner is the other one — less absurd as Spaniards, the production opted to cast equally incongruous Italians in supporting roles, among them Amedeo Nazzari, Lea Padovani, Massimo Serato, and the usually excellent Gino Cervi. But no. The Naked Maja was actually shot in Italy. Hence, the...

Oscar-winning director William Friedkin.

In July of 1997, I conducted the first of two lengthy interviews with director William Friedkin, regarded by many as the "enfant terrible" of the so-called "Easy Riders and Raging Bulls" generation of filmmakers who, for one brief, shining moment, seemed to reinvent American cinema in the late '60s thru the late '70s. Meeting Friedkin was something of a milestone for me at the time: I was still in my 20s, had been writing for Venice Magazine less than a year, and "Billy," as he likes people to call him, was the first person I interviewed who was one of my childhood heroes--a filmmaker whose one-sheets hung on my bedroom walls when I was growing up.

Below are the two interviews, conducted a decade apart from one another, and posted in reverse chronology. In both, Billy reveals a cunning intellect, a sometimes abrasive personal style,...

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Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (Eclipse) is a visually stunning film with a strange, abstract plotline. Monica Vitti stars as Vittoria, a beautiful woman who, in the opening scene of the movie, dumps her boring boyfriend Riccardo (Francisco Rabal). Vittoria's mother (Lilla Brignone) passes her time at the stock exchange, watching the numbers rise and fall as if her whole life depends on the next high or low. In contrast, Vittoria wanders the streets of the city unhindered, dreaming, floating independently and waiting for whatever fate befalls her. She begins an affair with a powerful, handsome, emotionally vacant stockbroker, Piero (Alain Delon). Their relationship is fun, flirtatious, risky, and dangerous all at once--but mostly, it is an expression of true human affection, which the other characters in L'eclisse seem to lack. However, the plot of L'eclisse is hardly Antonioni's focus.

In the spirit of Halloween '09, we're breaking out reviews (some new, some old) of some Fall Frights you may want to work into your monthly viewing.

Originally published, 08/02/2002

Horror fans have suffered in recent years, either shelling out 10 bucks to sit through another unnecessary sequel to a dying franchise (Jason X, Halloween: Resurrection), or spending half of that to watch another unnecessary sequel in a franchise that never should have been (Children Of The Corn, Witchcraft) on video. But in this time of sequels and fodder, the team behind the cult hit Re-animator--producer Brian Yuzna, writer Dennis Paoli and director Stuart Gordon--has returned with another H.P. Lovecraft tale, Dagon. While not as memorable or outrageous as the former film, Dagon still manages to deliver enough shocks and laughs to please both die-hard Lovecraft buffs and those looking beyond titles with numbers after them.

The movie starts with...

Here’s a list of some of the new DVD and Blu-ray releases this week we’re particularly interested in. Plus, some old favorites (and not so favorites) coming out this week for the first time on Blu-ray.

Movies

About Last Night… ~ Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, James Belushi (Blu-ray)

Alien Trespass ~ Eric McCormack, Dan Lauria, Robert Patrick, and Jenni Baird (DVD and Blu-ray)

Blue Thunder ~ Roy Scheider, Warren Oates, Candy Clark, and Daniel Stern (Blu-ray)

Chaos ~ Jason Statham (Blu-ray)

The Class (Entre Les Murs) ~ François Bégaudeau, Agame Malembo-Emene, and Angélica Sancio (DVD)

Cutthroat Island ~ Geena Davis, Frank Langella, Matthew Modine (Blu-ray)

Eagles Over London ~ Van Johnson, Frederick Stafford, Francisco Rabal, and Luigi Pistilli (Blu-ray)

Gigantic ~ Zooey Deschanel, Paul Dano, John Goodman, and Ed Asner (DVD)

I Love You, Man ~ Paul Rudd, Jason Segal (DVD and Blu-ray)

Katyn ~ Artur Amijewski, Maja Ostaszewska, and Andrzej Chyra (DVD)

Michael Jackson: Moonwalking – The...