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Hello, everyone! I hope you have your wallets ready because we have a huge day of horror and sci-fi home media releases this week, and there are a ton of different titles fans are definitely going to want to add to their collections. Blue Underground has given the criminally undercelebrated Dead & Buried the 4K treatment for their 3-Disc Limited Edition release of the film, and if you’re a big fan of sci-fi/action movies, you’ll definitely want to pick up the latest Vestron Video release, The Wraith, which Lionsgate is putting out on Blu this Tuesday as well.

As far as recent genre fare goes, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, Jakob’s Wife, Initiation and 32 Malasana Street are all headed home on various formats, and if you happen to be a big fan of the Saw series, you can also nab brand new Blu-rays for the first eight Saw films this week,...

French composer Francis Lai, who won an Oscar for “Love Story” and penned the beguiling theme for “A Man and a Woman,” has died at the age of 86, the mayor of Nice announced on Wednesday. No cause of death was reported.

Lai’s plaintive piano melody for “Love Story,” the 1970 tearjerker that made stars of Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, was his biggest hit, earning him an Oscar and a Golden Globe. His soundtrack recording was all over radio in early 1971, reaching no. 37 as a single and no. 2 as a soundtrack album. When lyrics were added to the melody, Andy Williams sang “Where Do I Begin” to no. 7 on the charts that same year.

The score almost didn’t happen. Lai initially turned down the assignment, he told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. But French actor Alain Delon, who had seen a cut of the film, called Lai and...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. The retrospective The Many Sins of Walerian Borowczyk is showing February 12 - June 18, 2017 in the United States and in many other countries around the world.As the reverberation of horses fervently neighing and clomping their hooves begins to permeate the opening credit soundtrack of The Beast, one may recall the similarly orchestrated donkey brays that introduce Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966). Or, given its title, and the very basic concept of a young woman becoming enamored with an savage creature, one may be tempted to compare this 1975 feature to the many variations of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s classic fairy tale, La belle et la bête. One would be more than a little confounded, however, by making either inadequate association. If Walerian Borowczyk’s semi-porn-semi-art-semi-monster movie bears any resemblance to another film or story, it would be...

Writing a series focused on the depiction of gender and sexuality in films, it would be a massive oversight not to talk about the work of French director Catherine Breillat. Few other directors have as consistently explored these topics as directly or as interestingly. The next few articles will explore Breillat’s 13 feature films in detail.

One can get an idea about Breillat’s filmmaking philosophy through some of her contributions outside of directing in the 1970s. She has a small acting role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris. She contributes commentary on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sálo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is featured in the Criterion release of that film. She is a screenwriter on David Hamilton’s teenage coming-of-age/erotica film Bilitis. All three directors provoke controversy through their work and the open depiction of sexuality, whether due to the graphic nature of the sexuality,...

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that, while I do watch more foreign films than most of my peers, I have little knowledge of French cinema. There are the occasional French films that pop up on IFC or Sundance Channel, but usually the descriptions don’t inspire me to delve into them. And without this quick reference to French film in mind, I really had no clue about who Francis Lai was. So when this CD was dropped in my lap, I thought, 'Really?' I popped it into my player, and wound up finding that I enjoyed what I heard.

Francis Lai is an accordionist and composer, born on April 26, 1932 in Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France. He started out playing in jazz clubs in Marseilles, and eventually moved to Paris, honing his skills as a composer and arranger, and even worked with Edith Piaf. He has since scored over 100 films,...