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Audie Murphy goes back to war and doesn’t like it. Still the best film version of Stephen Crane’s classic Civil War saga despite being metaphorically dragged from the back of a truck by MGM. Murphy reportedly offered to buy the picture back from MGM and let Huston re-edit it, but it was not to be. Lillian Ross’s devastating, essential reportage on the unmaking of this film can can be ordered here.

I Bury The Living

Blu-ray

Shout! Factory

1958 / B&W / 1:85 / / 76 min. / Street Date April 25, 2017

Starring: Richard Boone, Theodore Bikel.

Cinematography: Frederick Gately

Film Editor: Frank Sullivan

Written by Louis Garfinkle

Produced by Albert Band, Louis Garfinkle

Directed by Albert Band

I Bury the Living implicates us in a primal childhood thought-crime… what if you stepped on a crack and really did break your mother’s back? What if simply wishing someone dead made it so? Guilt, pure and simple, gives this off–kilter 50’s chiller its lasting power.

The film boasts an off–kilter leading man as well with the crater-faced Richard Boone as Robert Kraft, a small town business man railroaded into managing the family run cemetery. To make matters worse, the perennially gloomy Kraft, already skittish about his disconcerting new position, is saddled with a decrepit, unnaturally chilly workplace watched over by an unnerving bit of decoration, an...

This proto- juvenile delinquent epic launched celebrated WW2 warrior Audie Murphy on the road to Hollywood fame, fortune and more troubled times. Audie commits every crime short of shooting dogs and nuns, but those wacky liberal social workers still give him the benefit of the doubt. Director Kurt Neumann back our hero with expert acting support from Lloyd Nolan, Jane Wyatt and James Gleason.  Bad Boy DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1949 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 86 min. / Street Date January 5, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Audie Murphy, Lloyd Nolan, Jane Wyatt, James Gleason, Stanley Clements, Martha Vickers, Rhys Williams, Selena Royle, Jimmy Lydon, Dickie Moore, Tommy Cook, William F. Leicester, Stephen Chase, Walter Sande, Ray Teal, Charles Trowbridge. Cinematography Karl Struss Art Direction Theobold Holsopple Production Design Gordon Wiles Film Editor William Austin Original Music Paul Sawtell Written by Robert Hardy Andrews, Karl Kamb, Paul Short Produced by Paul Short...

or, Savant picks The Most Impressive Discs of 2015

This is the actual view from Savant Central, looking due North.

What a year! I was able to take one very nice trip back East too see Washington D.C. for the first time, or at least as much as two days' walking in the hot sun and then cool rain would allow. Back home in Los Angeles, we've had a year of extreme drought -- my lawn is looking patriotically ratty -- and we're expecting something called El Niño, that's supposed to be just shy of Old-Testament build-me-an-ark intensity. We withstood heat waves like those in Day the Earth Caught Fire, and now we'll get the storms part. This has been a wild year for DVD Savant, which is still a little unsettled. DVDtalk has been very patient and generous, and so have Stuart Galbraith & Joe Dante; so far everything...

HBO are currently courting Anna Paquin for Madame X, a miniseries she and her True Blood co-star Stephen Moyer are developing through their production company, Casm. Based on Kate Manning’s book My Notorious Life, the show is set in Victorian-era New York City and follows the life of Axie Muldoon, a wealthy New Yorker who helps her husband create a successful midwife business.

Per Deadline, the series purports to be “a love story, a family saga, and the confessions of a charismatic and passionate woman who changed the lives of countless others.” That premise, along with the true story tag, is a compelling prospect for the HBO treatment – especially in light of the superb Olive Kitteridge series.

As it stands, Paquin will star and executive produce alongside Moyer via Casm, with Jack Black producing through his Electric Dynamite banner. Your Sister’s Sister and Laggies helmer Lynn Shelton is...

A review of tonight's "The Leftovers" coming up just as soon as I get a Thug Life tattoo on my neck... "Sometimes, you have to pretend." -Kevin "The Leftovers" has offered some very brief glimpses of the world before the Sudden Departure, and alluded to the characters' histories. It's been focusing on the aftermath of what happened, and hoping that the performances and what little backstory we've been given will be enough to give us a sense of why the Garveys, Nora, Patti, Matt and the others have been acting the way they have three years later. And for the most part, I think the show's been enormously successful at that. Amy Brenneman's face tells me so much about Laurie, for instance, that I was actually relieved she didn't start talking to Patti when they were in the diner in the wake of Gladys' murder. That said, the past...

Head Case: Silver Returns With Another Slice of Low-fi Discomfort

At the end of the final credits of Soft in the Head, Nathan Silver dedicates his latest film “For the Idiot,” a nod to his inspiration for as partially being born out of a desire to adapt Dostoevsky’s famous classic, The Idiot, concerning a character released from a sanitarium, whose subsequent interactions with the outside world suggests that the cruelty and duplicity of others is more vicious than the sanitarium. In his 2012 darkly comedic Exit Elena, Silver examines an awkward and uncomfortable relationship allowed to develop because of accepted notions of polite social exchange in a situation predicated by monetary necessity for its main character. His latest also glorifies in the discomfort of mixing company of those living in the comfortable scripts of their lives with the instability of those in a slipping down desperation to find themselves without proper support or resources.

Alfonso Cuarón's space disaster movie in three acts harks back impressively to the early days of cinema

The wonder of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity – wonder being entirely the right word – is that the full spectrum of state-of-the-art digital special effects, CGI and 3D technology have been harnessed together in revolutionary ways to tell a story whose hallmarks of purity, clarity, brevity and, above all, simplicity, are the foundational virtues of the infancy of cinema. It may be the newest great movie around but in some ways – the best ways – it feels like it's among the oldest.

It's also the least real: almost everything apart from Sandra Bullock and George Clooney is digitally inserted: the tender, vulnerable Earth below, the measureless cosmic void, the zero gravity, the space-debris hurricane that strands the two astronauts outside their broken shuttle – all fake, just like King Kong.

No matter. Cuarón is not here...

A man said to the universe:

"Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the universe,

"The fact has not created in me

"A sense of obligation."

--Stephen Crane

&nbsp

That man can be found at the center of Werner Herzog's films. He is Aguirre. He is Fitzcarraldo. He is the Nosferatu. He is Timothy Treadwell, who lived among the grizzlies. He is Little Dieter Dengler, who needed to fly. She is Fini Straubinger, who lived in a land of silence and darkness since she was 12. He is Kaspar Hauser. He is Klaus Kinski. He is the man who will not leave the slopes of the Guadeloupe volcano when it is about to explode. He is those who live in the Antarctic. She is Juliana Koepcke, whose plane crashed in the rain forest and she walked out alive. He is Graham Dorrington, who flew one of the smallest airships ever built...

"John Huston Week!" concludes at Trailers from Hell with director and Tfh creator Joe Dante introducing Huston's war classic, a film "brutalized" with recuts following its original trailer debut, "ranking only with 'The Magnificent Ambersons' as a movie that was changed substantially after the preview." Audie Murphy goes back to war and doesn't like it. Still the best film version of Stephen Crane's classic Civil War saga despite being metaphorically dragged from the back of a truck by MGM. Lillian Ross's devastating, essential reportage on the unmaking of this film can be ordered here.

Novelist, playwright and essayist with a complete mastery of the scene he described

Gore Vidal, the American writer, controversialist and politician manqué, who has died aged 86, was celebrated both for his caustic wit and his mandarin's poise. His public career spanned seven decades and included 25 novels, numerous collections of essays on literature and politics, a volume of short stories, five Broadway plays, dozens of television plays and film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under the pseudonym Edgar Box. After 9/11 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he returned to centre stage with a series of blistering pamphlets and public pronouncements that led many, including his former friend Christopher Hitchens, to pounce on him. But Vidal never looked back.

Despite his output as a novelist and playwright, many critics considered Vidal's witty and acerbic essays his best work. Often published first in such journals as the New York Review...

Netflix has revolutionized the home movie experience for fans of film with its instant streaming technology. Netflix Nuggets is my way of spreading the word about independent, classic and foreign films being made available by Netflix for instant streaming. Important Note: There may be some films that do not become available on the specified dates. This is merely a report of the most accurate release dates I can find, but is not directly confirmed by Netflix themselves.

American: The Bill Hicks Story (2010)

Streaming Available: 06/29/2011

Synopsis: Since his tragic death from cancer at age 32, comedian Bill Hicks’s legend and stature have only grown, and this unique documentary tells his story, blending live footage, interviews and animation to fill in the details of a life cut short. A comic’s comic and unflagging critic of hypocrisy and cultural emptiness, Hicks was one of a kind, a Lenny Bruce for the late 20th century,...

Exactly how many comic book movie franchises could Cillian Murphy end up starring in? Maybe three, maybe none.

Recently, there have been rumblings that The Crow remake has reached the casting stage, an offer having been made to a major actor. In its coverage, MTV listed five stars whom it felt would be interesting in the lead role, with Murphy included on the short-list. Obviously, that’s nothing even remotely official, but we can’t help agreeing that he’d be great for the part, his wiry physique and sad visage eerily-reminiscent of Brandon Lee in his final role.

It’s also apparent that Murphy is open to appearing in comic book-based movies, having starred as the Scarecrow in both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Murphy, who will be appearing in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming sci-fi thriller Inception, recently said he has no idea if Dr. Stephen Crane/Scarecrow...