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Marlowe (1969)

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Although he spent years playing PI Jim Rockford on TV’s The Rockford Files , actor James Garner isn’t exactly the first actor that you’d associate with the term “hardboiled.” Raymond Chandler’s famous private detective Phillip Marlowe had already been played definitively by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Slee p (1946) and briefly by Dick Powell in the POV mystery Murder, My Sweet (1944). But Garner fills the shoes quite well in this modernized script that mixes Chandler’s acid-tongued banter with blackmail, hippies and late-‘60s weirdness. The plot of Marlowe is as convoluted as Chandler devotees would expect. Marlowe is hired to track down a missing person, who turns out to be in possession of some naughty negatives that, if released, would ruin the career of a famous TV star. But each clue seems to uncover another corpse, each sporting an ice pick in the back of the neck. And Marlowe’s clients aren’t talking, which begs the question, is he protecting the wrong person? Garner’s easygo...
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Wake in Fright 4K UHD

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“World-building” has been a trendy cinematic term for the last decade. But what director Ted Kotcheff accomplishes in Wake in Fright (1971) is somehow more impressive than the fantastic geography of Middle Earth or the alien jungles of Pandora. He makes a spot right on our own planet look almost completely unrecognizable; not through the use of special effects or elaborate production design, but because every sweat-soaked square inch of Bundanyabba, a fictional backwater mining town in the Australian outback, feels like it belongs to a civilization operating by its own bizarre and unsettling rules. John Grant (Gary Bond) is a young schoolteacher posted at the edge of nowhere, anxious to return to Sydney for his holiday break. But those plans are waylaid when he winds up stranded in “The Yabba” (as locals affectionately call it) after losing his travel money on a gambling binge. John is taken in by an array of local characters who lead him on an alcohol-fueled bender, testing his m...
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Jackie Chan's Breakout Hits!

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What makes Jackie Chan so compelling isn’t how he throws a punch…but how he takes one. Bruce Lee famously refused to lose any of his onscreen battles, projecting a stoic, serious take on martial arts that always kept a straight face. Meanwhile, Jackie is beaten to a pulp in nearly every one of his films, stretching his mug into comedic poses that would make Jim Carrey proud. It’s apples to oranges, but it didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it wasn’t until the early ‘90s that Jackie’s particular brand of action-comedy broke into the American mainstream with Rumble in the Bronx making a big impression during the Sundance midnight screenings. Now Arrow Video has scooped up six of those flicks from his glory days as part of a superb collection called Jackie Chan’s Breakout Hits! Here’s where we’d normally go through the plot of each film, analyze the action sequences, praise the co-stars, fight choreographers and stuntmen. But at this stage of his career, Jackie was a brand unto hims...
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Hi, Mom!

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While collaborations with director Martin Scorsese helped establish Robert De Niro's onscreen persona, his cinematic career began several years before Mean Streets and Taxi Driver ever hit screens. In fact, his early work with director Brian De Palma reveals an actor almost fully-developed from the very beginning, working with the same level of disturbing intensity and charismatic appeal. Simply put: the camera loves him. But in films like Greetings and its sequel, Hi, Mom! , De Palma's camera takes a far more scattershot approach than his later Hitchcock-inspired genre work. Jon Rubin (De Niro), a wannabe filmmaker and full-time voyeur, returns from Vietnam and hooks up with a sleazy producer (Allen Garfield) who sees the pornography potential. However, Jon's life (and the film) takes a drastic shift into radicalization as he falls in with a left-wing theater group promoting the "Black Experience." From this point, De Palma's film becomes a POV politi...
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D.O.A. / Borderline

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It’s misleading to say that film noir is “in” when it really hasn’t disappeared from pop culture since taking post-WWII Hollywood by storm. The cynical worldview, pessimistic characters and shadowy visual aesthetic inherent in the genre haven’t aged a day. Newbies can get a good education by tuning into Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies every Saturday night where host Eddie Muller smothers you in behind-the-scenes stories and production anecdotes. Or you can take the do-it-yourself route and watch this film noir classics double feature from VCI Entertainment featuring D.O.A. (1949) and Borderline (1950). While sowing his wild oats on a trip to San Francisco, horny accountant Frank Bigelow is slipped a dose of “luminous toxin,” leaving him with only a few days to figure out who, what, where, when and why. It’s a crackerjack concept that’s been lifted for countless ticking-clock thrillers, pulling our protagonist (played by a terrific Edmond O’Brien) into a complicated conspira...
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The Himalayan

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So what’s it gonna take to put you into a new movie today? Honestly, for most physical media fans, there’s no arm twisting necessary. Even if, as in the case of The Himalayan (1976), it’s not an essential piece of cinema history, the urge to “get-em-all” is pretty hard to resist. And this Golden Harvest production adds a few wrinkles that make it just unique enough to pull the trigger. Hatching a scheme to wed his half-brother to the daughter of a wealthy Tibetan landowner, Kao Chu (Chan Sing) winds up using a body-double to finish the job then backstabbing his way up the family ladder. Meanwhile, poor Ching Lam (Angela Mao) is framed for adultery and must join forces with her childhood crush (Dorian Tan) to learn the mysterious Mi style of martial arts and get revenge. A busy man during Golden Harvest’s early years, Wong Fung wasn’t the studio’s most innovative director but he certainly knew what Angela Mao was capable of. Even though she’s second billed, the actress still domina...
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G.I. Samurai

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Time travel movies usually ask big philosophical questions. G.I. Samurai (1979) asks a much more important one: if a modern military platoon got sent back to the feudal era, how long would it take before someone fired a bazooka at a horse? The answer is: not long at all. Directed by Kosei Saito, this wonderfully violent Japanese cult film crashes a convoy of Japan Self-Defense Force soldiers into the Warring States era after a fog-covered supernatural event. Suddenly, tanks, helicopters and machine guns are sharing the battlefield with samurai swords, flaming arrows and warlords who react to modern technology with the same excitement and terror most people have trying to pair their new Bluetooth headphones. GI Samurai treats its high-concept setup with just enough seriousness to drop a few moral and philosophical nuggets on historical and modern Japanese aggression. One minute, soldiers are debating the ethics of interfering with history. The next, someone’s mowing down cavalry with ...
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