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Sleuth
: essential video:Wicked, nasty, delicious fun. Laurence Olivier is a wealthy, veddy English mystery writer. He invites Michael Caine to his elaborate country house, in order to settle some rather unpleasant business between them: Caine is having an affair with Olivier's wife, and she is about to divorce the older man. Olivier, smooth as brandy, suggests that there might be a way the two men can help each other, but what appears to be an intriguing proposition escalates into a deadly cat-and-mouse game. Sleuth boasts a ...
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Vertigo (Widescreen Edition)
: essential video:Although it wasn't a box-office success when originally released in 1958, Vertigo has since taken its deserved place as Alfred Hitchcock's greatest, most spellbinding, most deeply personal achievement. In fact, it consistently ranks among the top 10 movies ever made in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound international critics poll, placing at number 4 in the most recent survey. (Universal Pictures' spectacularly gorgeous 1996 restoration and rerelease of this 1958 Paramount production was a tremendous success with the public, too.) James Stewart plays a retired ...
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Naked Kiss
:Description:Film is like a battleground, with love, hate, action, violence, death...in one word, emotion.' So proclaimed Samuel Fuller, the screen's modern master of melodrama. The Naked Kiss is quintessential Fuller, with its sultry story of a prostitute's redemption in small-town America--where not everything is as it seems. The Naked Kiss Review:Until Sam Fuller came along, movies in the 1960s were still bound by Hollywood's self-imposed and often hypocritical rules of discretion. The crimes and misdemeanors of lurid pulp fiction remained on drugstore spin-racks and newsstands, ...
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Bluebeard (1972)
: :Baron von Sepper (Richard Burton, who seems to sleepwalk through the film), a European aristocrat of vaguely Germanic heritage, marries and murders a succession of international lovelies (among them Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon, and Marilù Tolo) before his seventh bride, peppy but coy showgirl Joey Heatherton, discovers his secret in a frozen basement museum. Would you believe the Baron is just a nice guy who's a poor judge of character? A man who loves deeply but perhaps not too wisely? Or that he harbors ...
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Cat o' Nine Tails
: :Baron von Sepper (Richard Burton, who seems to sleepwalk through the film), a European aristocrat of vaguely Germanic heritage, marries and murders a succession of international lovelies (among them Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon, and Marilù Tolo) before his seventh bride, peppy but coy showgirl Joey Heatherton, discovers his secret in a frozen basement museum. Would you believe the Baron is just a nice guy who's a poor judge of character? A man who loves deeply but perhaps not too wisely? Or that he harbors ...
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Fatal Attraction (Dir)
: essential video:The date movie of the late 1980s, this had everyone arguing in the aisles. Does Michael Douglas deserve the unwanted attention he and his family are receiving at the hands of loony stalker Glenn Close? After a weekend extramarital affair with colleague Close, he returns home to wife Anne Archer, and Close becomes progressively angrier. You might even say she is boiling bunny mad. Directed by Adrian Lyne, this is not your average thriller, as it garnered six Academy Award nominations. The plot is ...
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Peeping Tom
:Description:Stark terror meets art in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Mark Lewis is the son of a famous scientist who devoted his life to studying the psychology of fear--with young Mark serving as guinea pig, and Mark has grown into a psychopathic killer obsessed with capturing his victims' fear on film. Due to its unsettling subject matter, Peeping Tom was initially reviled by British film critics. The film resurfaced in the late 1970s largely through the efforts of Martin Scorsese, and is now considered ...
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North by Northwest - Special Edition (Widescreen)
: essential video:A strong candidate for the most sheerly entertaining and enjoyable movie ever made by a Hollywood studio (with Citizen Kane, Only Angels Have Wings and Trouble in Paradise running neck and neck). Positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo (1958) and the stark horror of Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also features one of the definitive Cary Grant performances. Which is not to say that this is just ...
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The Night Stalker
: :Wise-cracking Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) is a rumpled news hound plucked from the fast-talking newspaper flicks of the 1940s and dropped into the swinging '70s. What makes the eccentric Kolchak even more unique, however, is his nose for the supernatural, a trait that leaves his editor (Simon Oakland) exasperated and the police less than amused. When he insists that a late-night Las Vegas serial killer (who leaves his victims drained of blood and sporting twin holes in the neck) is a modern-day vampire, he's practically run ...
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Eye of the Needle {Deluxe Widescreen Edition }
: essential video:Eye of the Needle is a superbly effective World War II spy thriller from the Ken Follett bestseller of the same name. Donald Sutherland is 'the Needle,' a German spy in England bearing critical information on Allied invasion plans that he must deliver personally to the Führer. He's so named because of his preferred method of assassination, the stiletto. As played by Sutherland, he's a coldly calculating psychopath, emotionlessly focused on the task at hand, whether the task is to signal a U-boat or to ...
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