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Wizards 35th Anniversary Edition

by Shawn Stone April 4, 2012

When Wizards was released in 1977, it turned Hollywood’s view of feature animation on its head. The film’s success proved that there was a market for more than children’s fairy tales (though Wizards was consciously ...

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Bargain Bin

by Shawn Stone April 4, 2012

I was going to call this edition of the cutout column “Bargain Burt,” as it features two 1970s vehicles for then-superstar Burt Reynolds. But that wouldn’t be fair to Reynolds’ costar in both comedies, Jill ...

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Blessed Event, Fast Workers

by Shawn Stone March 7, 2012

The talkies had been around for six years, but the movies had never seen a motor-mouthed monster quite like Lee Tracy when he exploded on the scene in 1932. That year the Georgia-born Tracy, who ...

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Isle of Lost Souls

by Shawn Stone November 16, 2011

Melodrama doesn’t get much juicier than William A. Wellman’s precode sizzler Safe in Hell. We meet the heroine, a New Orleans hooker named Gilda, as she gets an outcall and dresses for work. She meets ...

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A’s and B’s

by Shawn Stone October 6, 2011

The term “B picture” means something quite different today, but in the heyday of the studio system it meant a feature running less than 90 minutes, in a popular genre, made to fill the lower ...

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Bargain Bin

by Shawn Stone August 25, 2011

Funny Face: The Centennial Collection How many times have Paramount Home Video repackaged their Audrey Hepburn titles? Well, they haven’t released Blu-ray editions yet of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Sabrina, Roman Holiday, Paris When It Sizzles ...

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Urban Fairy Tales

by Shawn Stone July 27, 2011

Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild is an adventurous romance that’s funny and dark, energizing and violent. It begins and ends in a multicultural New York City where identities and sexuality are fluid, a rainbow of groups ...

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Crime On Demand

by Shawn Stone July 6, 2011

After a slow start, MGM’s manufactured-on-demand (MOD) disc program—which is administered, like their regular Blu-ray and DVD releases, by Twentieth Century Fox—suddenly became very active this year, with, most recently, 29 new releases in June. ...

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Political Humour

by Shawn Stone April 20, 2011

The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer is a true oddity, the kind of deep-from-the-vault item Warner Archive is wont to dredge up. This 1970 flop brought together a host of great comic actors and ...

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All Angles Covered

by Shawn Stone March 9, 2011

(Criterion) Clifford Odets’ dialogue for Sweet Smell of Success plays like it was written with, to borrow a line from another movie, “a goose quill dipped in venom.” Smell is a tale of old Broadway ...

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