Harold Lloyd was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, but is not as well known today as his contemporaries Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, primarily because he owned his own films and refused to release them in the later years of his life whereas Chaplin and Keaton’s films have rarely been out of the public eye.
Lloyd’s last film, 1928’s Speedy, has been given a 4K digital restoration from elements preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and released by Criterion on Blu-ray and standard DVD with a slew of extras. The film itself was largely filmed on location in a New York City that is no more. Many of the locations, including the original Penn Station and Coney Island attractions no longer exist. Babe Ruth, whose popularity at the time rivaled Lloyd’s all over the world, has an extended cameo. Special features include commentary by Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming at New York’s Film Forum, and Scott McGee, director of program production at Turner Classic Movies; a new documentary about the film’s New York shoot; a new video essay featuring stills and deleted scenes; a selection of Lloyd’s home movies narrated by his granddaughter; and Lloyd’s newly restored 1919 two-reeler, Bumping into Broadway.
F.W. Murnau’s last film, 1931’s Tabu, was originally supposed to have been a co-production of Murnau’s and documentary filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty’s, but Flaherty balked at Murnau’s use of staged scenes and walked. Floyd Crosby’s breathtaking cinematography won an Oscar.
The film, which is about the flowering romance of a young man and woman as civilization comes to their native island paradise, was initially released in a shortened and censored form, but the digitally restored version released on Blu-ray and standard DVD by Kino, features Murnau’s approved version in its most complete form. Extras include the documentaries The Language of Shadows: Tabu; Tabu: Takes & Outtakes, of previously unseen sequences; Tabu: A Work in Progress featuring unused raw footage; and Hunt in the South Seas, a 1940 ethnographic short compiled from unused Tabu footage.
Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous 1934 propaganda film Triumph of the Will has been remastered from a 2K scan and released on Blu-ray and standard DVD by Synapse Films.
The film, devised by Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, was a chronicle of the 1934 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. In immediate release in Germany, it was later shown in every theatre in Germany throughout World War II. The manipulation of imagery and reality to seduce the mind to a political cause is, despite its horrific intent, a great work of art that has been studied and copied by filmmakers for both product and political commercials as well as theatrical films for decades. George Lucas, for example, studied the film before making the original Star Wars.
Extras include audio commentary by Dr. Anthony R. Santoro, specialist in National Socialist German history, and Riefenstahl’s short film Day of Freedom
The term giallo originally referred to Italian translations of American and British pulp mystery novels beginning in 1929. The term in movies came to mean any type of thriller from Vertigo to Psycho to Peeping Tom and such Italian made films as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o’ Nine Tails and Deep Red. One of the most popular was 1972’s What Have You Done to Solange? which has been given a brand new 2K resolution for an Arrow combo Blu-ray and standard DVD release.
The film is told in three parts. In the first part, star Fabio Testi, a young Italian teacher in a Catholic girls’ school in England, is attempting to seduce one of his students when she sees a murder being committed. The murder is of one of her fellow students. In the second part, Testi is arrested for the now two or three murders that have taken place and his German wife, fellow teacher Karin Baal, is determined to solve the murders. The title character does not appear until the third part. It’s mostly a straight whodunit with the only really grisly scene the one in which we learn what was done to Solange.
The new release is loaded with extras including a 2015 interview with Baal titled What Have You Done to Decency? in which the now 75-year-old actress hilariously complains about everything including the fact that the film by an Italian director (Massimo Dallamano) with a largely Italian and Spanish cast was supposed to be filmed in English but the only two cast members who spoke English were Baal and fellow German actor Joachim Fuchsberger who played the police inspector. Most of the cast either spoke in their own language or in the case of Testi, mouthed words, forcing Baal to have to wait until he stopped moving his mouth to know when to speak her lines.
It’s been over a quarter century since Ed Zwick won acclaim for directing the Civil War drama Glory and a dozen years since he directed his last critically acclaimed film, The Last Samurai. His most recent film, Pawn Sacrifice, about the difficult, legendary chess champion, Bobby Fischer is his best film since then. Tobey Maguire as Fischer, Liev Schreiber as his Russian nemesis, Michael Stuhlbarg as his lawyer, and Peter Sarsgaard as his tournament partner all deliver strong performances, but the film is a tough, if fascinating watch. It’s available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.
Tom Cruise, who filmed his first Mission: Impossible twenty years ago, is back playing Ethen Hunt for the fifth time in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, directed by Christopher McQuarrie. It’s a fast-moving, thrill-a-minute adventure that you won’t necessarily remember much about once it’s over. That can be a good thing, though, as it will seem fresh when you revisit it. Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Furgeson and Ving Rhames are along for the exhilarating ride. It’s available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.
The critics weren’t kind to Seth MacFarlane’s raunchy Ted 2 and it failed to match the original’s box-office take of $218 million, but it wasn’t exactly a flop with a tally of over $81 million. Mark Wahlberg once again plays straight man to MacFarlane’s walking, talking teddy bear now married to Jessica Barth. Wahlberg’s new love interest is lawyer Amanda Seyfried. It’s all rather silly, but undeniably funny.
This week’s new releases include Sicario and The Walk.

















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