Les Diaboliques is an unsettling and beautifully-paced study of betrayal mistrust and guilt. Set in a decaying boarding school it shows the grim course of a peculiar relationship between two female teachers and a sadistic headmaster. Atmospherically shot in black and white its murky tones hauntingly echo the moral ambiguity of its pricipals.
Elegant, all-star production, introducing Albert Finney as the first screen Hercule Poirot. A no-good American tycoon lies dead with twelve dagger wounds, but which of the passengers is the guilty party? Includes an Oscar® winning performance from Ingrid Bergman
Sebastian (Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Weekend) is staging an adaptation of Racine's tragedy, Andromaque while a film crew captures their rehearsals on handheld 16mm. The production's star and Sebastian's girlfriend, Claire (Bulle Ogier, Out 1), cannot take the pressure and removes herself. Life imitates art, creating a tragedy for the couple when Sebastian recasts the role with his ex. L'amour fou is a hypnotic study of tempestuous love, told with director Jacques Rivette's signature reflexivity and containing striking examinations of performance, art, theatre and life. A classic of the French New Wave and one of Rivette's most radical works, L'amour fou was unavailable for years, with the original elements tragically burned in a fire. Now meticulously restored, Radiance Films is proud to present this masterpiece from a new 4K restoration. In my opinionand I think it will be shared by manythis is one of the five or six best films of the New Wave. - François Truffaut L'amour fou is still my favourite film. - Bulle Ogier The work of a rebel, of an artist seeking to smash the codes and clichés of the normal' productions of the time. - Jean-Pierre Kalfon L'amour fou, is cinema without formal precedent. As with all great films, it feels like watching the birth of cinema, seeing the first ever film, and also the last. - André S. Labarthe A filmmaker sets up his camera and, above all, watches the actors, with no concern for characters or respect for a preestablished scenario. I'd like to draw inspiration from this. I'd like to grasp the personality of my actors and make cinéma vérité. - Bernardo Bertolucci L'amour Fou speaks to those who are madly in love with cinema. Jean De Baroncelli, Le Monde, 1969 One of Rivette's best films. Serge Daney, Libération, 1991 SPECIAL FEATURES 4K restoration from materials kept at Les Archives du Film and in Ãclair-Preservation, under the supervision of Caroline Champetier Uncompressed mono PCM audio A newly filmed feature-length documentary featuring new interviews with star Jean-Pierre Kalfon; writer/director and Rivette collaborator Pascal Bonitzer; Rivette biographer Antoine de Baecque; critic/historian Sylvie Pierre; and archival footage of Jacques Rivette (Robert Fischer, 2024, 95 mins) New interview with Caroline Champetier, renowned cinematographer and restoration supervisor (2024) The Third Eye - A video essay by film critics Cristina Ãlvarez López and Adrian Martin (2024) Newly translated English subtitles
A pair of society women dressed in all their finery stand in the middle of an abattoir, animal carcasses hanging behind them and blood splashed across the floor. Giggling and fidgeting, they drink their prescribed glass of ox blood. The startling, unreal image of high-society manners in the midst of gore and death pitches Jean Rollin's 1979 feature Fascination into a turn-of-the-century culture come unhinged. When a well-dressed rogue, fleeing from angry partners he double-crossed, takes refuge in a lavish, moat-protected mansion, servant girls Franca Mai and Brigitte Lahaie cajole, tease and seduce him into staying for their night-time soiree. "You have stumbled into Elizabeth and Eva's life, the universe of madness and death", mutters one of them as they await the cabal where he is the guest of honour. Shot on a starvation budget and populated with stiff performers, Rollin's direction is arch and at times sloppy and his story never more than an outline. It's the mix of dreamy and nightmarish imagery that gives Fascination its fascination: blonde Lahaie stalking victims with a scythe, the bourgeois blood cult swarming over a fresh victim like wild animals, alabaster faces streaked in blood. While it lacks the delirious spontaneity of his earlier vampire films Shiver of the Vampires and Requiem for a Vampire, the languid pace and austere beauty creates an often-mesmerising fantasy. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com
Brazil (Jean Claude Van Damme) is a contract killer willing to take any job if the price is right. Flint (Scott Adkins) left the assassin game when a ruthless drug dealer's brutal attack left his wife in a coma. When a contract is put out on the same cold-blooded drug dealer both Brazil and Flint want him dead - one for the money the other for revenge. With crooked Interpol agents and vicious members of the criminal underworld hot on their trail these two assassins reluctantly join forces to quickly take out their target before they themselves are terminated.
INCLUDES ALL 86 EPISODES FROM SERIES 1-8 OF THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED FRENCH POLICE DRAMA. Powerful performances, utterly believable characters and gripping plotlines have made cult viewing of this gritty, brutal, crime drama set on the mean streets of Paris. Subtitled and known as 'Engrenages' in France. No-nonsense and doggedly determined Police Captain Laure Berthaud leads her lieutenants, Gilou and Tintin, in their investigations into serious crime. But they must also battle the investigating magistrates in their department; the cool and clinical Judge François Roban, the handsome young Deputy Prosecutor, Pierre Clément and the ambitious police-hating lawyer, Joséphine Karlsson. A thriller, this is French justice in all its cynical, corrupt, backstabbing glory, where the good guys - cops, lawyers and judges - are deeply flawed and the criminals are vicious and irredeemable. As they take on corruption, murder, sex trafficking, arms dealing, serial killers and terrorists, each episode draws you into a dark and sordid world of corruption, crime and an internecine legal system. It's a belter taut, intelligent and very adult Radio Times It just gets better and better The Observer Darker and more twisted than The Wire The Guardian BAFTA-nominated French crime drama for BBC Four, starring Caroline Proust, Philippe Duclos, Fred Bianconi, Thierry Godard, Audrey Fleurot, Louis-Do Lencquesaing, Valentin Merlet, Nicolas Briancon, Bruno Debrandt, Dominique Daguier, Tewfik Jallab and Isabel Aime Gonzalez. A Series Created By Alexandra Clert.
It has not taken long for Without a Trace to emerge from the shadows of CSI and become a ratings force in its own right. Jerry Bruckheimer produced both series, and both feature the-face-is-familiar character actors with extensive and diverse resumes who have been catapulted to primetime stardom. Jack Malone, head of a crack FBI missing persons unit, is the Australian-born Anthony LaPaglia's breakout role after years of portraying enough Italian mobsters and criminals to populate a season of The Sopranos. LaPaglia was a surprise Golden Globe Award-winner for this inaugural season. Without a Trace is instantly arresting. "The clock is ticking" in each episode, as Malone and company race against time to find a missing person. "After 48 hours," Malone explains to the rookie member of the team in the series pilot, "they're gone." To solve each baffling case, Malone and fellow agents Samantha Spade (Poppy Montgomery), Vivian Johnson (Marianne Jean-Baptiste of Secrets and Lies), Danny Taylor (Enrique Murciano), and new guy Martin Fitzgerald (Eric Close), must work from the inside out. "Once we find out who she is," Malone says of one victim, "odds are we'll find out where she is." Among the inaugural season's most wrenching episodes are "Between the Cracks" and "Hang On to Me," both featuring Charles Dutton in his Emmy Award-winning performance as a father whose son has been missing for five years. The powerful season finale, "Fallout," presented in this four-disc set in a "creator's cut," concerns a man who lost his wife in the 9/11 attacks. The riveting episodes mostly stand alone, but some cases do return to haunt Malone, as witness "In Extremis," a case that ends tragically and leads to an internal investigation that threatens to subvert the close-knit unit in the episode. "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?" Sharp writing, authentic procedurals, taut direction, and effective use of music make Without a Tracea series worth finding on DVD. --Donald Liebenson
Just the name "Orient Express" conjures up images of a bygone era. Add an all-star cast (including Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset and Lauren Bacall, to name a few) and Agatha Christie's delicious plot and how can you go wrong? Particularly if you add in Albert Finney as Christie's delightfully pernickety sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Someone has knocked off nasty Richard Widmark on this train trip and, to Poirot's puzzlement, everyone seems to have a motive--just the set-up for a terrific whodunit. Though it seems like an ensemble film, director Sidney Lumet gives each of his stars their own solo and each makes the most of it. Bergman went so far as to win an Oscar for her role. But the real scene-stealer is the ever-reliable Finney as the eccentric detective who never misses a trick. --Marshall Fine
A hit in Europe but a flop in the US--where it was trimmed, rescored, and given a new ending--Luc Besson's The Big Blue has endured as a minor cult classic for its gorgeous photography (both on land and underwater) and dreamy ambiance. Jean-Marc Barr is a sweet and sensitive but passive presence as Jacques, a diver with a unique connection to the sea. He has the astounding ability to slow his heartbeat and his circulation on deep dives, "a phenomenon that's only been observed in whales and dolphins until now," remarks one scientist. Kooky New York insurance adjuster Joanna (Rosanna Arquette at her most delightfully flustered and endearingly sexy best) melts after falling into his innocent baby blues, and she follows him to Italy, where he's continuing a lifelong competition with boyhood rival Enzo (Jean Reno in a performance both comic and touching). Besson's first English-language production looks more European than Hollywood, and it suffers from a tin ear for the language. At times it feels more like an IMAX undersea documentary than a drama about free divers, but the lush and lovely images create a fairy tale dimension to Jacques's story, a veritable Little Merman. More dolphin than man, he's so torn between earthly love and aquatic paradise that even his dreams call him to the sea (in a sequence more eloquent than any speech). Besson has expanded the film by 50 minutes for his director's cut, which adds little story but slows the contemplative pace until it practically floats in time, and has restored Eric Serra's synthesizer-heavy score, a slice of 1980s pop that at times borders on disco kitsch. Most importantly, he has restored his original ending, which echoes the fairy tale he tells Joanna earlier in the film and leaves the story floating in the inky blackness of ambiguity. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com
Of all the performances to emerge from Ireland in the past decade - in rock music theatre and film - nothing has carried the energy the sensuality and the spectacle of Riverdance. See Riverdance journey from its extraordinary beginnings at the Point Theatre Dublin with original stars Michael Flatley and Jean Butler through its phenomenal success in Radio City Music Hall New York to its latest live recording in Geneva. With an international cast fea
Based on real life experiences this is the powerful story of a disparate group of women whose lives are changed forever during their capture by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1941. It is now 1942 and the women have been split into two groups to march to their new camp. Speculation is rife and despite the apparent luxury that awaits them in the new camp, unimaginable hardships are not far away and only the very strongest will survive. This four disc set contains all ten episodes from Series Two of the classic BBC series. Special Features: The Tenko Story Cast Filmographies Subtitles
In a rare on-screen appearance Kelly McGillis stars in her most provocative and daring role to date as a bisexual married woman drawn into a torrid lesbian love affair with a private investigator searching for the murderer of a young woman. Susie Porter last seen in Better Than Sex plays the private eye who willingly at first dives into a world of murder and manipulation only to be consumed by the ever-enthralling power of sex. Suspenseful hard-edged and entirely lustful 'The
American Indians were "cool" in 1970, the year A Man Called Horse made its vigorous, feverishly real, and occasionally shocking debut alongside Little Big Man and Soldier Blue. Unlike the latter two films, however, Horse is less an allegory for Vietnam-era America and more of a vision quest for historical identity. In one of his defining roles, Richard Harris plays an English aristocrat captured by Dakota Sioux in 1825. Over time, he adopts their way of life and eventually becomes tribal leader--but not before undergoing savage initiation rituals, the most famous of which involves being suspended by blades inserted beneath Harris's pectoral muscles. Horse looks clunky, quaint, and inadvertently demeaning in some respects today, but the film's Native-American milieu is at least defined on its own terms, making no concessions to familiar Western conventions. The real draw is Harris, whose performance has a soulful integrity. --Tom Keogh
Malotru , a French intelligence officer, undercover in Syria for 6 years, is called back home. He will face the difficulty to forget his undercover identity, the disappearance of a colleague in Algeria, and the training of a young girl.
Inspired by a true incident during World War II in 'The Train' Burt Lancaster plays a French Resistance fighter doggedly attempting to stop a train used by the Nazis (led by Paul Scofield as Colonel Von Waldheim) to steal precious French art treasures in the summer of 1944. Featuring spectacular action sequences expertly directed by John Frankenheimer 'The Train' is a truly thrilling war film. The Oscar-nominated screenplay by Franklin Coen and Frank Davis superbly recreates the te
To Catch a Thief is not one of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest, but it's arguably his most stylish thriller, loved as much for the elegantly erotic banter between Grace Kelly and Cary Grant as for the suspense that ensues when retired burglar Grant attempts to net the copycat diamond thief. The action, much of it shot on location, hugs the coast of the French Riviera; John Michael Hayes' screenplay crackles with doubles entendres; and Edith Head's dresses define the aloof poise of one of cinema's more enigmatic icons. If anything is missing, it's the undertow of black humour which snags the unsuspecting viewer in so many of Hitchcock's greater films. Here, the edge is supplied by the splendid Jessie Royce Landis as Kelly's vulgar, worldly mother; her special way with a fried egg is one of those cinematic moments which linger in the mind with almost pornographic disgust. History, of course, delivered its own ironic blow years later when the then Princess Grace of Monaco died in an accident on the very road where Kelly and Grant shot their exhilarating car chase. Portents aside, she remains Hitchcock's most alluring and sophisticated heroine. On the DVD: To Catch a Thief is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, which distils the distinctive qualities of the VistaVision cinematography, and with a mono Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. Interesting extras include several mini-documentaries in which Hitchcock's daughter and granddaughter, among others, reminisce about the great director, censor problems over the risqué dialogue, the talents of costume designer Edith Head, and the peculiar difficulties of shooting in VistaVision. An original theatrical trailer is another bonus. --Piers Ford
Various owners of a cursed dress pass it from person to person as it destroys their lives. A haunting film by acclaimed director Peter Strickland (Katalin Varga; Berberian Sound Studio; The Duke of Burgundy). Starring Gwendoline Christie and Marianne Jean-Baptiste.
Comedy ruled the box office in Italy from the late 1950s to the 1970s where the commedia all'italiana also found critical success. Great talent behind and in front of the camera delivered a series of brilliant films that gave an incredible spin on familiar genres with comedic overtones that often held a dark and biting critique of social mores that would provoke a challenge to a society in need of change. Feted at local awards ceremonies and European festivals as well as garnering attention from the Academy Awards this prestige would propel the films and filmmakers to international stardom but many would go unreleased in the UK for home viewing. At last, this ongoing series shines a light on this misunderstood filmmaking style with the first collection focusing on three films by master director Dino Risi, presented from new restorations and featuring a suite of contextualising extras. From a prestigious lineage in the ancient art of satirical theatre in commedia dell'arte, the Italian-style comedy distinguished itself in the late 1950s from the earlier broad comedies popularised by the likes of Toto and Vittorio De Sica with a ruthless approach to social satire focused on cynicism and the grotesque. An early example of the switch in tone can be found in Dino Risi's Il vedovo, in which Italy's preeminent comedy actor Alberto Sordi plays a philandering husband of a wealthy and successful woman who simply tolerates her husband's ineptitude. Until he sees a potential plan for her death, which would result in a great inheritance for him. One of the greatest Italian actors of all time, Vittorio Gassman (Bitter Rice) known as Il Mattatore 'The Showman' earns his name from this film and his wonderful performance as an actor with the uncanny ability to mimic regional accents, allowing him to pull off a series of scams. Ingeniously plotted by screenwriters Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari who were behind some of the greatest films in the commedia all'italiana including Il Sorpasso and Ugly, Dirty and Bad. Alternately known as Love & Larceny, Dino Risi (Anima Persa) directs this classic comedy which was nominated for the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and makes its English-subtitled Blu-ray debut. A career highlight for director Dino Risi and his star Vittorio Gasman, Il sorpasso isn't just one of the heights of commedia all'italiana but of all Italian cinema. Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Conformist) plays Roberto, a shy law student who meets Bruno (Gassman), a larger-than-life Roman playboy who convinces Roberto to join him on a road trip from Rome to the Tuscan countryside. Their travels teach them about each other and themselves, oscillating between comedy and tragedy with powerful and affecting commentary on the easy life. Long admired in Italy, the film has influenced comedic filmmakers including Alexander Payne (Sideways) and Aziz Ansari (Master of None). Radiance Films is proud to present this seminal film in the UK for the first time from a new 4K restoration. Product Features 2016 4K restoration of Il Sorpasso carried out by L'Immagine Ritrovata at the Cineteca di Bologna, presented in High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) for the first time in the UK High-Definition digital transfers of Il Mattatore and Il Vedovo, presented in world premieres on Blu-ray Original uncompressed Italian mono PCM audio Newly translated optional English subtitles Newly designed artwork based on original posters Limited Edition 80-page perfect bound booklet featuring new writing by scholars and critics including Robert Gordon on the commedia all'italiana boom, Gino Moliterno on Il vedovo; Pasquale Iannone on Age and Scarpelli and the key screenwriters of the commedia all'italiana movement, Christina Newland on Italian machismo and Il sorpasso; a newly translated interview with Dino Risi by Lorenzo Codelli; and extracts of writing by Risi Limited Edition of 3,000 copies, presented in a rigid box with full-height scanavo cases for each film and removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings IL SORPASSO [THE EASY LIFE] Appreciation of the film by Italian cinema expert Richard Dyer Archival interview with Dino Risi by critic Jean Gili (2004) Jean-Louis Trintignant on Il Sorpasso - an introduction by the actor for a French TV broadcast of the film (1983, 8 mins) L'estate di Bruno Cortona - Castiglioncello nell'anno del Sorpasso (Gloria De Antoni, 2012) - an extract from the documentary made for the 50th anniversary of Il Sorpasso featuring the cast and crew On a Trintignant Kick - An audio essay and tribute to Jean-Louis Trintignant by critic and author Tim Lucas, looking at his life and work in the 1960s (2023, 58 mins) Trailer IL MATTATORE [THE SHOWMAN] Interview with Andrea Bini, author of Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film: Comedy Italian Style Speaking with Gassman - documentary on the working relationship between Vittorio Gassman and Dino Risi, by Risi's son Marco (2005) Love & Larceny - Michel Hazanavicius on Il Mattatore, an appreciation of the film and Vittorio Gassman by the director of The Artist Trailer IL VEDOVO [THE WIDOWER] Neorealismo rosa - a visual essay by Italian cinema professor and author of Comedy Italian Style Remi Fournier Lanzoni on the softening of neo-realism which laid the groundwork for the emergence of commedia all'italiana Alberto Sordi - a visual essay by critic Kat Ellinger about the great Italian actor Trailer Extras subject to change.
Sullivan Stapleton and Jaimie Alexander star in this one-hour action thriller from Berlanti Productions (The Flash, Arrow) and writer/executive producer Martin Gero. Stapleton stars as hardened FBI agent Kurt Weller, who is drawn into a complex conspiracy when a mysterious woman, with no memories of her past, is found in Times Square her body completely covered in intricate cryptic tattoos. As Weller and his teammates at the FBI -- Edgar Reade, Tasha Zapata and the tech-savvy Patterson -- begin to investigate the veritable road map of Jane Doe's tattoos, they are drawn into a high-stakes underworld that twists and turns through a labyrinth of secrets and revelations -- with the information exposing a larger conspiracy of crime, while bringing her closer to discovering the truth about her identity.
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