"A film that will never be equalled for its spectacle and dramatic power" says the stirring trailer on this otherwise sparsely featured DVD. Taking the story of the Napoleonic Wars to Bonaparte's final defeat, Waterloo is an unofficial continuation to director Sergei Bondarchuk's own 70mm super-epic War and Peace (1968). The climactic battle of Waterloo is shown in the second half of ...
Sophisticated to a point, this well-executed wolf-man tale works due to its clever setting and enormous star power. We all know Jack Nicholson can go nuts but the script makes his character aware of his changes, sometimes for the better, early on. The setting, a publishing house in the middle of a takeover, gives the characters dramatic life before the horror elements kicks in. A senior editor ...
The second and last of Anthony Mann's historical epics is a smart, handsome spectacle of the decadence, corruption, and intrigue that tore apart the greatest empire the world has seen. The sprawling story spreads itself thin over a number of characters and stories. At the centre are handsome but stiff Stephen Boyd as Livius, the loyal soldier and symbolic son of the ageing emperor Marcus ...
Peter Sellers's third go-around as the prideful but bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau, The Return of the Pink Panther is funny enough, but this 1975 Blake Edwards revival of the Sellers-Clouseau connection is a little weak in comparison to predecessors The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark (both made in 1964). Costar Christopher Plummer actually gets some of the most ...
Stylish, snappy and entirely without a coherent idea in its head, Dracula 2001 is "Presented by Wes Craven" but shows comparatively little sign of his controlling intelligence. This is very much "Dracula--the Rock Video" with some memorable dream sequences and a lot of product placement: the heroine may not be a virgin but she works at Virgin Records. Among its incidental pleasures are a ...