Month: March 2019

In 2005, director Sydney Pollack's career was in trouble. After scoring a massive success with 1993's "The Firm," Pollack stumbled with 1995's "Sabrina" and 1999's "Random Hearts," leaving the celebrated helmer in a difficult position, requiring a return to his past triumphs to help goose box office returns. "The Interpreter" is Pollack's effort to revive screen energy that once guided his work on titles such as "Three Days of the Condor," making a thriller that's rooted in real-world ills, but still mindful of audience-pleasing suspense and his trademark attention to character. It's also the penultimate film for Pollack and one of his better pictures, delivering a tight, tense look at procedural actions and political concerns, taking what would've been a B-movie in other hands and elevating it with class and thespian encouragement, giving the chase fine performances to sell the growing panic. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1983's "Mausoleum" is a horror picture, and the genre is known for its appreciation for the strange and outrageous, with most producers looking for some way to help their endeavor stand out from the considerable competition. Co-producer/co-writer/cinematographer Robert Barich goes for extremity with the effort, and while the feature isn't incredibly violent, its blend of ghoulishness and titillation is, in many ways, charming, helping to define the decade's reliance on visual appeal to support lackluster plots. "Mausoleum" isn't a finely tuned dramatic enterprise, but it does have lots of salacious material and something of a sense of humor, with Barich stopping just short of softcore material as he works to pay tribute to the everlasting appeal of B-movies and make one himself. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Last year, Guillermo del Toro won an Academy Award for "The Shape of Water," which depicted a loving, sexual relationship between a mute woman and humanoid amphibian. This year, director Xavier Gens drinks from the same creative well, only his "Cold Skin" showcases a more mysterious love triangle between two salty men and the female humanoid amphibian they both strive to possess. Gens doesn't share del Toro's love of fantasy and textures, but he does offer intermittent intensity with his latest, which is just strange enough to pass, finding oddity often competing for scene attention with overblown dramatics. "Cold Skin" struggles to maintain pace and surprise, but Gens has the right idea more often than not, staying true to an operatic take on man vs. nature, creating something that's better with the dark and violent stuff than anything psychologically profound. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com