Saint Maud (Blu-ray) by Ian Jane The Movie:The feature film debut of writer/director Rose Glass, 2019's Saint Maud tells the story of a young woman named Maud (Morfydd Clark) who, early in the film, starts her new job in the massive old home of Amanda Kohl (Jennifer Ehle). Once a famous dancer, Amanda now has stage 4 leukemia and Maud is to be her new live-in caregiver. Amanda has lost the use of her legs and is confined to a wheelchair.Despite the warning from the woman she replaces about Amanda's temperament, the two initially hit it off. Maud does nothing to hide her devout religious beliefs, telling Amanda that God is always with her and that sometimes she can even feel Him inside her. Amanda plays along, amused by her new companion but not about to change her ways. Fond of drink and smoke, Amanda also entertains a gentleman caller one night, and when Maud comes home and finds her stinking dr...Read the entire review »

The 7th Dawn (Blu-ray) by Stuart Galbraith IV The 7th Dawn (1964) is a surprisingly good action-adventure / political drama set in British Malaya from the end of World War II through the early 1950s. It's almost an epic; with a few more big stars it might have been distributed as a reserved-seat roadshow engagement. Though its character relationships play out in predictable ways, they're all based on real people and events, and the story's attitudes about communist terrorists and British colonialists are unusually intelligent and shaded for the time. This probably didn't go over well in America, where the war in Vietnam was just beginning to heat up. William Holden, Susannah York, Capucine, and Tetsuro Tamba star. At the end of the war guerrilla leaders Ferris (Holden), an American, Malaysian-Chinese...Read the entire review »