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Based, apparently more closely, on the same book that was adapted into the 1949 film They Live By Night, Thieves Like Us feels to me as if it falls somewhere between being Robert Altman’s faithful take on a studio era gangster film, and a somewhat gentler response to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Penn’s film arguably struck the final blow against what had been the standards in censorship in the US across the Hays Code years, ushering in the movie brats era, while Altman keeps much of the violence off screen, but otherwise makes a film that is very much of its time.

The plot is fairly loose, but follows three prison escapees—Bowie (Keith Carradine), Chicamaw (John Shuck) and T-Dub (Bert Remsen)—as they try to evade the authorities staying with relations (Louise Fletcher as T-Dub’s cousin) or criminal friends like Dee Mobley (Tom...

Hollywood finally decided to get serious about the Korean War debacle with a pro-Army, anti-politics battle epic that blames our own negotiators as much as the enemy. Director Lewis Milestone and star Gregory Peck lead a full company of favorite actors in a gritty story of ugly combat in absurd conditions: die taking territory today, give it back to the enemy later.

Pork Chop Hill

Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 196

1959 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 97 min. / Street Date December 28, 2022 / Available from [Imprint] / au 34.95

Starring: Gregory Peck, Harry Guardino, Rip Torn, George Peppard, Carl Benton Reid, James Edwards, Bob Steele, Woody Strode, George Shibata, Norman Fell, Robert Blake, Lew Gallo, Biff Elliot, Charles Aidman, Barry Atwater, Leonard Graves, Martin Landau, Ken Lynch, Chuck Hayward, Gavin MacLeod, Bert Remsen, Buzz Martin, William Wellman Jr., Titus Moede, Harry Dean Stanton, Clarence Williams III..

Cinematography: Sam Leavitt

Production Designer: Nicolai Remisoff

Art Director: Edward G. Boyle

Production Illustrator:...

Hello, everyone! I hope you all had a great holiday weekend (or regular weekend for those of you outside of the States). We’re back today with a brand new round-up of horror and sci-fi home media releases that are headed home today, and it includes quite the array of titles. One of my favorite movies of the year - Everything Everywhere All At Once from The Daniels - is being released to 4K as well as Blu-ray and DVD and if you’re looking to indulge in even more 4K entertainment, Edge of Tomorrow is also getting the 4K treatment, too.

Kino Lorber is keeping busy this week with an array of classic titles headed to Blu, including Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, Ants! (aka It Happened at Lakewood Manor) and Terror Out of the Sky (aka Revenge of the Savage Bees), and IFC is also releasing Ruth Paxton’s...

Robert Altman’s 1975 “Nashville” is considered one of the masterpieces of that golden decade of cinema and arguably the maverick filmmaker’s masterwork. The sprawling comedy-drama received stellar reviews, was nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, winning Best Original Song for Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” and won several critics’ honors.

But one group that didn’t like the movie was Nashville’s country-music crowd. Henry Gibson, who received a Golden Globe nomination for his glowing performance as egotistical country music star Haven Hamilton, told me in a 2000 L.A. Times interview on the movie, that the legendary Minnie Pearl “was outraged. I remember on opening night, someone asked her how she would rate the picture and she said, ‘I give it two closed nostrils.’”

“Nashville,” which Paramount Home Entertainment recently released on a remastered Blu-ray in a stunning 4K scan of the original elements,...

Do audiences ever ask for a History Lesson? Robert Altman gives them a smart, if diffuse, image of America as a showbiz invention, commercialized and packaged. Paul Newman is the prepackaged white hero surrounded by a jolly circus; Buffalo Bill’s trick seems to be to get his colleagues, the dispossessed minorities and especially the vanquished Native Americans to cooperate with his self-aggrandizing fantasy. One of Altman’s better scattershot ensembles sketches an amusingly hollow Buffalo Bill in Paul Newman, but the director’s style keeps emotional involvement at arm’s length… make that telephoto lens’ length.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1976 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 124, 105 min. / Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson / Street Date December 14, 2020 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Paul Newman, Joel Grey, Burt Lancaster, Kevin McCarthy, Harvey Keitel, Will Sampson, Allan F. Nicholls, Geraldine Chaplin, John Considine,...

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By Fred Blosser

To say that George Roy Hill’s “The Sting” (1973) was a hit is like calling Amazon a successful little internet business. Starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, “The Sting” placed second in ticket sales for its year of release ($159.6 million), surpassed only by “The Exorcist.” In the Academy Awards ceremonies on April 2, 1974, it earned seven Oscars, notably honors for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. The Best Picture award sparked a brief controversy as to whether the stylish but relatively lightweight film about an elaborate confidence scheme deserved the accolade. The pot was further stirred during the awards broadcast, when the screenwriter, David S. Ward, flashed a gesture on stage after picking up his statuette. It was the same signal used by real-life con artists to declare victory over unwary dupes, some observers asserted. Whatever the merits of the argument,...

Richard Donner’s first feature post- Superman is a complete switcheroo — a small-scale character piece that delivers an impressive lineup of engaging actors. John Savage leads a ‘different’ ensemble of the walking wounded, that congregates at a neighborhood bar. Are friends the best therapy? The movie has a positive sports theme, and the way its characters overcome physical limits and psychological damage feels uplifting, never phony. Diana Scarwid earned an Oscar nomination, and the unappreciated Amy Wright is a heartbreaker in a strong, uncompromised role.

Inside Moves

Blu-ray

Scorpion Releasing

1980 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 113 min. / Street Date December 10, 2019 / 19.89

Starring: John Savage, David Morse, Diana Scarwid, Amy Wright, Tony Burton, Harold Sylvester, Bill Henderson, Steve Kahan, Jack O’Leary, Bert Remsen, Harold Russell, Pepe Serna.

Cinematography: Laszlo Kovacs

Film Editor: Frank Moriss

Original Music: John Barry

Written by Valerie Curtin, Barry Levinson from a novel by Todd Walton

Produced by R.W. Goodwin, Mark M. Tanz...

Robert Altman’s first opportunity to cut loose with an entirely personal film is this scattershot comedy that satirizes the American scene, taking pokes at patriotism, greed, and silly police movies. To his favorite eccentrics from M*As*H Bud Cort and Sally Kellerman he adds the new discovery Shelley Duvall; the movie’s like a bag of absurdist jokes that spilled onto a Houston Highway.

Brewster McCloud

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1970 / Color / 2:35 enhanced widescreen / 105 min. / Street Date November 27, 2018 / available through the Warner Archive Collection / 21.99

Starring: Bud Cort, Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, William Windom, Shelley Duvall, Rene Auberjonois, Stacy Keach, John Schuck, Margaret Hamilton, Jennifer Salt, Corey Fischer, G. Wood, Bert Remsen.

Cinematography: Lamar Boren, Jordan Cronenweth

Film Editor: Lou Lombardo

Original Music: Gene Page

Written by Doran William Cannon

Produced by Lou Adler

Directed by Robert Altman

Robert Altman may be gone but he’s far from forgotten...

Barbara Dodd Remsen, an actress turned casting director who helped boost the careers of Tom Selleck, Tea Leoni, Kevin Costner, Pierce Brosnan and others, has died. She was 88.

Remsen died March 8 in Los Angeles, her daughter Kerry Remsen Cates announced.

Her late husband was Bert Remsen, a character actor who entered the casting profession after he suffered severe back and leg injuries when he was struck by a crane while on the set of the 1964-65 ABC comedy No Time for Sergeants.

Bert Remsen had an office at Raleigh Studios, where he worked as the head of Aaron...

He sings, he fixes cars, and he takes punches better than De Niro’s Raging Bull. Elvis Presley excels in one of his few ’60s pictures that shows an interest in being a ‘real movie,’ a remake of a boxing saga with entertaining characters and fine direction from noir specialist Phil Karlson. Plus Charles Bronson, Lola Albright and Joan Blackman in standout roles.

Kid Galahad

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1962 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 95 min. / Street Date August 14, 2017 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store 29.95

Starring: Elvis Presley, Gig Young, Lola Albright, Joan Blackman, Charles Bronson, Robert Emhardt, Liam Redmond, Judson Pratt, Ned Glass, George Mitchell, Roy Roberts, Michael Dante, Richard Devon, Jeff Morris, Edward Asner, Frank Gerstle, Seamon Glass, Bert Remsen.

Cinematography: Burnett Guffey

Film Editor: Stuart Gilmore

Original Music: Jeff Alexander

Written by William Fay, Francis Wallace

Produced by David Weisbart

Directed by Phil Karlson

What, a good Elvis Presley picture?...

(See previous post: Fourth of July Movies: Escapism During a Weird Year.) On the evening of the Fourth of July, besides fireworks, fire hazards, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, if you're watching TCM in the U.S. and Canada, there's the following: Peter H. Hunt's 1776 (1972), a largely forgotten film musical based on the Broadway hit with music by Sherman Edwards. William Daniels, who was recently on TCM talking about 1776 and a couple of other movies (A Thousand Clowns, Dodsworth), has one of the key roles as John Adams. Howard Da Silva, blacklisted for over a decade after being named a communist during the House Un-American Committee hearings of the early 1950s (Robert Taylor was one who mentioned him in his testimony), plays Benjamin Franklin. Ken Howard is Thomas Jefferson, a role he would reprise in John Huston's 1976 short Independence. (In the short, Pat Hingle was cast as John Adams; Eli Wallach was Benjamin Franklin.) Warner...

From the first time I saw it until this moment, two days before what might just be the most important, potentially resonant (for good and ill) American presidential election since the days of the Civil War, no other movie has expanded in my view more meaningfully, more ambiguously, with more fascination than has Robert Altman’s Nashville. We often hear of movies which “transcend” their genres, or their initial ambitions or intentions, and often built into that alleged transcendence is a condescension to said genre, or those ambitions or intentions, as if the roots were somehow corrupt or unworthy, in need of reconstruction. If the form of Nashville transcends anything, it’s the shape and scope of the multi-character drama as we’d come to know it in 1975, which was dominated at the time by disaster movies and their jam-packed casts filled with old Hollywood veterans and Oscar winners. But...

Robert Altman, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie join together for one of the great westerns, a poetic account of the founding of a town and the way big business preys on foolish little guys. Raw and cluttered, the show gives the genre a new look, with a dreamy mix of snowflakes, opium and the music of Leonard Cohen. McCabe & Mrs. Miller Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 827 1971 / Color / 2:40 widescreen / 121 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date October 11, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane, John Schuck, Bert Remsen, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy, Antony Holland, . Cinematography Vilmos Zsigmond Production Designer Leon Ericksen Film Editing and Second Unit Director Louis Lombardo Original Music Leonard Cohen Written by Robert Altman, Brian McKay from the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton Produced by Mitchell Brower, David Foster Directed by Robert Altman

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Robert Altman films run hot and cold for this reviewer.

Robert Altman's murder tale reeks of insider access and Hollywood hipster Bs; its main claim to greatness is its fifty-plus star cameos. It may no longer seem as smart as it looked in 1992, but they don't make 'em any slicker than this. The Player Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 812 1992 / Color /1:85 widescreen / 124 min. / Available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 24, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Brion James, Cynthia Stevenson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lyle Lovett. Cinematography Jean Lépine Original Music Thomas Newman Written by Michael Tolkin from his novel Produced by David Brown, Michael Tolkin, Nick Wechsler Directed by Robert Altman

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Robert Altman's filmography is undergoing what looks like a full retrospective through Criterion; even the 1975 title Nashville came out not long ago. This very successful later picture marks a revitalization of the director's career. It's sort of a Kafkaesque spin on Hail,...

Thieves Like Us

Written by Edward Anderson, Calder Willingham, Joan Tewkesbury and Robert Altman

Directed by Robert Altman

USA, 1974

Robert Altman’s foray into film in the 70s left him with a body of work densely packed with revered quality, which enshrined him as one of the great American directors. M*A*S*H, Nashville, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, and 3 Women would have been enough to designate him a worthy auteur, one who spoke a certain mystical anti-Hollywood language with beams of nostalgia resonating from current cinephiles who wonder, “How did they get away with that?”. It wasn’t by fitting in with contemporaries such as Scorsese and Hellman or emulating the previous nouvelle vague that made Altman a mainstay in cinematic history — much of that is due to his unabashed critique of genre understanding, his unique editing, and, perhaps unexpectedly, his understanding of his subjects in a...

By Lee Pfeiffer

Warner Home Video continues to earn the gratitude of movie fans by releasing special editions of films that had limited commercial appeal. The latest example is director Hal Ashby's Lookin' to Get Out, a 1982 comedy that was a notorious box-office disaster - and one that virtually ruined Ashby's career. Like fellow gadfly director Sam Peckinpah, Ashby could be a temperamental personality who prided himself on clashing with studios over issues of artistic integrity. His acclaimed hits include Coming Home, Being There and Shampoo, but -like Peckinpah- he wore out his welcome with his employers and was relegated to filming "by the numbers" movies in return for a paycheck.There has been a renaissance of interest in Ashby's career of late, so hopefully this director's cut of Lookin' to Get Out will find an appreciative audience.

The film stars Jon Voight (who co-wrote the script) as Alex Kovac,...

Blockbuster – the one-time giant in the home video rental business which went bankrupt last September – was bought at auction this past week by Dish Network for $320 million. According to Dish, it intends to combine its wireless technology with Blockbuster’s brand name recognition, studio relationships and digital rights to re-establish Blockbuster as a player in the direct-to-home market against Netflix and newer contenders like Amazon and a Warner Bros. online rental service to be offered on Facebook.

However this plays out long-term, the auction buy is the last page in a final chapter begun back in September when Blockbuster busted. To trot out the old cliché, it’s the – everybody now — end of an era.

The business Blockbuster used to be in seemed revolutionary in its day, though it seems almost quaint now; come Friday, some delegate from the family would trot to the neighborhood video store hoping to get...

DVD Playhouse—July 2009

By

Allen Gardner

Do The Right Thing: 20th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Spike Lee’s groundbreaking fable about race relations in an ethnically mixed Brooklyn neighborhood during a sweltering New York summer remains as potent, timely and prescient as it was in 1989. Lee is among the cast, which also includes John Turturro, Danny Aiello, Samuel L. Jackson, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Rosie Perez (to name a few), that provide the tableaux-like framework for this stunning work. Criminally ignored by Oscar (it wasn't even nominated for Best Picture, but did garner nods for Supporting Actor Danny Aiello and Lee’s screenplay), it endures as a timeless classic. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Commentary by Lee, Ernest Dickerson, Wynn Thomas, Joie Lee; Documentary; Deleted and extended scenes; Featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround.

Coraline (Universal) A young girl moves into an old Victorian house with her parents...