News

The uncanny Georges Franju strikes again, in an Agatha Christie-like thriller imbued with his special mood, the eerie music of Maurice Jarre and some great actors including Jean-Marie Trintignant, Pierre Brasseur, Dany Saval, Marianne Koch and Pascale Audret. If mood is the key, then Franju has found an ideal setting, a beautifully preserved castle in Brittany.

Spotlight on a Murderer

Blu-ray + DVD

Arrow Academy USA

1961 / Color / 1:37 full frame (1:66 widescreen?) / 92 min. / Street Date May 30, 2017 / Available from Arrow Video.

Starring: Pierre Brasseur, Pascale Audret, Marianne Koch, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dany Saval, Jean Babilée,

Georges Rollin, Gérard Buhr, Maryse Martin, Serge Marquand, Philippe Leroy.

Cinematography: Marcel Fredetal

Film Editor: Gilbert Natot

Original Music: Maurice Jarre

Written by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Georges Franju, Robert Thomas

Produced by Jules Borkon

Directed by Georges Franju

Until a few years ago most U.S. fans knew of Georges Franju solely through the great...

The first and most powerful Holocaust reassessment extends the horror with the assertion that, in 1955, its reality is already fading from the world memory. Alain Resnais uses the form of the art movie and his own essay-film innovations to communicate the yawning wound in the human consciousness. Night and Fog Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 197 1955 / Color & B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 32 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date July 19, 2016 / 39.95 Narrator Michel Bouquet Cinematography Ghislain Cloquet, Sacha Vierny Assistant Directors André Heinreich, Jean-Charles Lauthe, Chris Marker Film Editor Alain Resnais Original Music Hanns Eisler Written by Jean Cayrol Produced by Anatole Dauman, Samy Halfon, Philippe Lifchitz Directed by Alain Resnais

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Although I review more than my share of grim shows about the Holocaust, I don't think I have an unusually morbid curiosity; subjects like the Shoah and The Bomb are important problems difficult to fully understand.

Whether you’re trying to avoid the releases this week or augment them with even more movie, Your Alternate Box Office offers some options for movies that would play perfectly alongside of (or instead of) the stuff studios are shoving into the megaplex this weekend. This week features a cursed trust fund baby, Matt Damon in a killer fedora, a gawky video rental store employee trying to get the girl, and Hunter S. Thompson in lizard form. Blood Of Beasts (2003) Watch Instead of: Beastly The Pitch: Sure, you could watch Beauty and the Beast and jam out to Angela Lansbury as a singing tea pot. You could also check out the brilliant Jean Cocteau version of the classic tale from 1946. However, since Beastly is the modern-day retelling of the weird story of a beautiful girl falling in love with her murderous kidnapper, it’s only fitting to check out the pure ridiculousness of setting the story in...

Fango spoke to longtime New Zealand producer Dale Bradley, who tackled his first job in Australia with Malibu Shark Attack, a killer-fish film that lensed in Queensland under the title Goblin Shark Attack and premieres on the Sci Fi Channel (which co-produced the movie, and is soon to be known as Syfy) this summer. Bradley passed on a couple of production pics (see them below), and explains the flick’s odd original moniker.

The onscreen predators “are based on a species called goblin sharks [see art at bottom], which don’t look like your normal great white,” Bradley tells us. “They’re very fearsome-looking creatures. Ours are actually larger than the real thing, but modeled on them for the look that the CG company created. People do catch these things, but ours are monsters that get released from a big underground cavern during a seaquake. The resulting tsunami washes them ashore. Not only do...