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“Film is like a battleground. There’s love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion.” So said Sam Fuller of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, but he could just as easily have been speaking about Emilio Fernández’s Victims of Sin given how drastically and often ferociously the 1951 film shifts in emotional registers, from the erotic to the violent, from the tragic to the transcendent.

As one of the quintessential cabaretera films from the golden age of Mexican cinema, Victims of Sin moves at the quickening pace of the Afro-Cuban rumba dances we witness throughout. These dances, and the music supporting them, underscore the sensuality that seems to run beneath almost everything in the seedy little corner of Mexico City where the film takes place, as well as set up the female characters as objects of male lust and jealousy.

Written by Fernández and Mauricio Magdaleno, the film...

It’s a big international action epic, filmed in Mexico with a French director. Anthony Quinn is an 18th-century bandit who liberates a Mexican hamlet from marauding Yaqui Indians and a villainous Charles Bronson. Quinn is good, and all the necessary elements are present: fights, handsome scenery and a big battle… but it’s fairly tepid stuff, simplified and prettified. Leave it to Ennio Morricone’s epic music score to bind it all together. With Anjanette Comer, Sam Jaffe, Silvia Pinal and the same fifteen or so well-connected actors that cornered roles in all big Mexican films made with foreign money.

Guns for San Sebastian

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1968 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 111 min. / La bataille de San Sebastian / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date June 15, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: Anthony Quinn, Anjanette Comer, Charles Bronson, Sam Jaffe, Silvia Pinal, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Jaime Fernández, Rosa Furman, Leon Askin, Ivan Desny, Pedro Armendáriz Jr.,...

Finally out on Blu-ray in Region A, Luis Buñuel’s beautiful color adventure is a worthy jungle tale shot through with his signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.” The Spanish surrealist’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois; all of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. With the presence of movie stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, this may also be the director’s most commercial feature.

Death in the Garden

Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1956 / Color / 1:37 / 104 min. / Street Date July 23, 2019 / La mort en ce jardin / Available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Mich.le Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein,...

Finally out on Blu-ray in Region A, Luis Buñuel’s beautiful color adventure is a worthy jungle tale shot through with his signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.” The Spanish surrealist’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois; all of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. With the presence of movie stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, this may also be the director’s most commercial feature.

Death in the Garden

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1956 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 104 min. / Street Date July 23, 2019 / La mort en ce jardin / Available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Mich.le Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein,...

Luis Buñuel’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois, with a surreal spin. All of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. This beautiful color show is a worthy jungle adventure tale shot through with Buñuel’s signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.”

Death in the Garden

Region B Blu-ray + DVD

Eureka Entertainment / Masters of Cinema

1956 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 104 min. / Street Date June 19, 2017 / La mort en ce jardin / Available from Amazon UK / £ 11.65

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Michèle Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein, Marguerite Renoir

Original Music: Paul Misraki

Written by Luis Alcoriza, Luis Buñuel, Raymond Queneau, Gabriel Arout from a novel by José-André Lacour.

People who’ve seen the documentary Lost in La Mancha know about director Terry Gilliam’s ill-fated efforts to bring the story of Don Quixote to the screen. That film reported on just one of many attempts by Gilliam to bring the story of Quixote to life. Now he’s announced a seventh attempt to complete the seemingly jinxed project.

Terry Gilliam is nothing if not determined. The Monty Python alumni has been doggedly resolute in striving to get his vision of the classic Miguel de Cervantes story “the Misadventures of Don Quixote” made since the 1990s. His script, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” has been a near-obsession of his for almost 20 years. He’s had six failed attempts to realize his dream project and now he’s trying again. You have to admire his stick-to-it-iveness.

While screening his upcoming film Zero Theorem—which stars Christoph Waltz and Tilda Swinton...

Unmade Classics: Part 1 of 2:

The film industry is a place for ideas but not all those ideas will reach the big screen. Many projects are announced each year and most of them will reach the pre-production stage but many will go no further. Only about half of the films announced will ever be completed. For various reasons, many intended movies will just fade away. Some may die during the script writing stage, while other will actually begin production before the whims of fortune cause the demise of the project. Here is Part One of a list of 25 tantalizing unmade films that could have been classics.

The Adventures of Flash Gordon: In the mid-1970s, George Lucas was enjoying critical success from his American Graffiti films. Being a life-long science fiction fan, he was planning to make a big-Budget film version of Flash Gordon. He had many ideas for...

The film industry is a place for ideas but not all those ideas will reach the big screen. Many projects are announced each year and most of them will reach the pre-production stage but many will go no further. On average, only half of the films announced will ever be completed. For various reasons, many intended movies will just fade away. Some may die during the script writing stage, while other will actually begin production before the whims of fortune cause the demise of the project. Here is Part One of a list of 25 tantalizing unmade films that could have been classics.

The Adventures of Flash Gordon: In the mid-1970s, George Lucas was enjoying critical success from his American Graffiti films. Being a life-long science fiction fan, he was planning to make a big-Budget film version of Flash Gordon. He had many ideas for the film but he...

(As our editor Matt Holmes turns 25 today, he’s out of office and we are going to re-publish some old favourites.)

With the frustrating news breaking last week that Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness (based on an H.P. Lovecraft story) is ‘dead’, I began thinking about some of the other potentially great projects that audiences were tragically destined to never see. From further research it’s clear that the major directors that have worked within the industry have abandoned vast numbers of productions that would have easily been big money makers and both critical and financial successes. Indeed, filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Orson Welles have abandoned dozens of projects, even after beginning production on some of them!

Read on to discover the ten unrealised features that we’d love to have seen completed…

10. George Sluizer’S Dark Blood

George Sluizer’s...

With the frustrating news breaking last weak that Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness (based on an H.P. Lovecraft story) is ‘dead’, I began thinking about some of the other potentially great projects that audiences were tragically destined to never see. From further research it’s clear that the major directors that have worked within the industry have abandoned vast numbers of productions that would have easily been big money makers and both critical and financial successes. Indeed, filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Orson Welles have abandoned dozens of projects, even after beginning production on some of them!

Read on to discover the ten unrealised features that we’d love to have seen completed…

10. George Sluizer’S Dark Blood

George Sluizer’s Dark Blood starred River Phoenix as Boy, a widower who lives as a hermit on a nuclear testing site. In this tale of a dystopian future,...

The travails of the actor, writer and director Orson Welles are so well known that they are emblazoned on the psyche of movie makers world-wide as a cautionary tale about the penury that industry can inflict upon the conceits of uncompromised auteurism. Welles’ many, ultimately fruitless, battles with various actors, studios, producers and distributors have been retold with such frequency- particularly in their parallels with modern renegades of cinema – that they have almost become cliché; the legends surrounding his battles with money men and legal team are now the stuff of legend.

The number of projects seemingly unfinished or abandon is impressive in a way, seemingly paralleled the peaks and troughs of a manic depressive personality, though more often, the failure of much of his work to reach fruition was a combination of financial mismanagement and arbitrary personal misfortune.

Among the distinguished list of projects unfinished in ells lifetime were:...