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10-29-20 03:00 AM |
DVD Talk reviews for Wednesday, October 28th, 2020
<div style="font-weight:bold;font-size:15px">Highly Recommended</div><blockquote><table><tr><td valign="top"><a href="https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74543"><img src="http://images.dvdtalk.com/covers/ts1602091854.jpg" border="0" style="margin-right:5px;margin-bottom:5px" align="left" /></a><a href="https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74543"><strong>S.O.S. Titanic (Special Edition) (Blu-ray)</strong></a><br /><span style="font-size:11px">by Stuart Galbraith IV</span><div style="width:100%; height:1px; background: #fff"></div>Originally a 144-minute TV movie later cut by nearly 40 minutes for theatrical release abroad and, later, home video release, S.O.S. Titanic (1979) has been restored to its original length for Blu-ray while also offering the shorter cut as a supplement. I recall being unimpressed by this historical drama when it first aired but, now having seen other Titanic movies and armed with a greater awareness of that famous tragedy, I can appreciate its modest accomplishments. Director Roy Ward Baker's adaptation of Walter Lord's book A Night to Remember (1958) remains the Gold Standard of Titanic films. Produced on a large budget for Britain but modest by Hollywood standards, it's among the most accurate and remains unbearably tense, even when seen today. James Cameron's more widely disseminated Titanic (1997) is an extraordinary achievement from a production standpoint, but that film'...<a href="https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74543">Read the entire review »</a></td></tr></table></blockquote><p> </p><div style="font-weight:bold;font-size:15px">Recommended</div><blockquote><table><tr><td valign="top"><a href="https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74541"><img src="http://images.dvdtalk.com/covers/ts1602091854.jpg" border="0" style="margin-right:5px;margin-bottom:5px" align="left" /></a><a href="https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74541"><strong>Tommaso (Blu-ray)</strong></a><br /><span style="font-size:11px">by Justin Remer</span><div style="width:100%; height:1px; background: #fff"></div>The Movie: Willem Dafoe commands the screen in Abel Ferrara's new episodic film Ã* clef, Tommaso. As the title character, Dafoe beautifully embodies a man searching desperately for balance and sobriety in spite of his nagging insecurities, rage, and desires. In constructing his narrative, Ferrara counterpoints loose and presumably improvised slice-of-life vignettes with hallucinations, delusions, and fantasies that blend so seamlessly into the film's reality that keeping track of what's "real" becomes essentially unnecessary.Tommaso is a filmmaker prepping a new movie (Siberia, which Ferrara actually completed in real life this year). He spends most of his days fretting over a laptop in a cozy Rome apartment shared with his 29-year...<a href="https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74541">Read the entire review »</a></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><a href="https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74542"><img src="http://images.dvdtalk.com/covers/ts1602091854.jpg" border="0" style="margin-right:5px;margin-bottom:5px" align="left" /></a><a href="https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74542"><strong>Curse of the Undead (Blu-ray)</strong></a><br /><span style="font-size:11px">by Stuart Galbraith IV</span><div style="width:100%; height:1px; background: #fff"></div>As Tom Weaver points out in his delightful audio commentary track of Curse of the Undead (1959), Universal-International went through three distinct phases during the 1950s with regards to its sci-fi and horror films. The early ones like It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) were ambitious and original, but then genre producer William Alland noticed that Columbia's sci-fi output, making the same amount of money with their own films, cut corners padding their product scads of stock footage. U-I followed suit, in later films like the terrible The Deadly Mantis (1957). After that, Universal petered out with feeble efforts like Curse of the Undead and The Leech Woman (1960), movies made primarily to support double-bills, often with far better-made (yet no more expensive) imports, frequently from Britain's Hammer Films. Despite...<a href="https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74542">Read the entire review »</a></td></tr></table></blockquote>
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