• June 2010
• Burn Notice: Season Three...Buy this DVD set
  Fluff, but fun fluff. Michael Weston is a spy who's been burned by the CIA, and he wants to know why. But until then, he's working as a P.I. in Miami...
  
  
• May 2010 DVDs and Videos
  
• Leverage: Season 2)..Buy the DVD
  Second season of popular show featuring Timothy Hutton as the leader of a gang of "reformed" criminals who make like latter-day Robin Hoods and rob the rich to give back to the poor.
  
  
• The Torchy Blane Complete Movie Collection.. Buy this DVD set
  Finally! Includes all nine B-flicks on five disks, featuring the original motormouth newshawk and her long-suffering meathead cop boyfriend. Glenda Farrell shines as Torchy and Basrton MacLane holds up his end, and the film's are far more fun than they have any right to be. Loosely based on Frederick Nebel's Kennedy and MacBride stories in Black Mask.
  
  
• March 2010 DVDs and Videos
• Matt Houston: The First Season)..Buy the DVD
  If you found the cheese of Magnum, P.I. to be an acquired taste, this isn't even cheese -- it's processed cheese food. It's like the producers of Matt Houston looked to The Rockford Files, and never realized that Lance White was supposed to be a joke. This ain't art; it's Kraft.
  
  
• Tenspeed and Brown Shoe)..Buy the DVD
  The fondly remembered but short-lived show from the Cannell factory finally makes it to DVD, minus the acclaimed pilot that one TV executive once called the best pilot he'd ever seen. Still, the comic friction between stick-up-his-butt accountant/wannabe P.I. Jeff Goldblum and mile-a-minute motormouth scam artist Ben Vereen stands up.
  
  
• February 2010 DVDs and Videos
• Barnaby Jones: The Complete First Season)..Buy the DVD
  Mmmmmdoggies... Folksy, soft-spoken, slow-walking, elderly Los Angeles private detective Barnaby was originally introduced on an episode of Cannon, when he came out of retirement to find his son's killer. He succeeded, and decided to come out of retirement, and resume control of the family detective agency, teaming up with his son's widow, Betty and getting his own series, which became -- believe it or not -- the longest running american P.I. show of them all.
  
  
• Cannon: Season Two, Volume 2)..Buy the DVD
  The Fat Man Returns!
  
  
• Vega$: Season One, Volume 2)..Buy the DVD
  Looks like you can't keep a good dick down! Arguably the most ubitquious and blandly affable actor on seventies and eighties TV returns in the second collection from the first season of this glitzy, star-studded meatball of a P.I. show. Plots? Hell, no -- we have showgirls!
  
  
• November 2009 DVDs and Videos
• The Rockford Files Movie Collection)..Buy the DVD
  Unlike most TV reunion shows, The Rockford Files were about more than a crass attempt to re-milk the cow. The people involved in these heart-felt updates which aired on CBS in the early nineties, were the people who had made it work the first time: the original cast, the original writers, the original producers. So it's fitting that the very first film, I Still Love LA, was dedicated to the memory of Noah Berry Jr., who passed away shortly before the show was aired. Good use of recent events in LA as we follow an unapologetically older Jim through the "missing years" as he gets married, gets unmarried, loses his father, and finally decides to pack it all in, sell the trailer, and leave LA. But nasty things keep happening, like earthquakes, the L.A. riots of '92 and the devastating brush fires in '93 and murder. Well done, as much a tribute as an update, and both long overdue. It set the bar pretty high for the subsequent films, and while they didn't all reach quite as high, for the most part they met the challenge bravely and honestly, favoring classy update and for the most part avoiding simple blatant ching-ching nostalgia. For anyone who loved the show, these are a nice chaser.

October 2009 DVDs and Videos

• Chinatown)..Buy the DVD
  It's about time Chinatown got the deluxe, two-disk DVD treatment it deserves. Completely restored and remastered, with all the attendant bells and whistles, including a brand-new making-of documentary, featuring interviews with director Roman Polanski, screenwriter Robert Towne and star Jack Nicholson (What? No Faye Dunaway?). Arguably the greatest private eye flick ever made (or is it The Maltese Falcon?), it's Polanski's masterpiece, and boasts Nicholson's greatest performance (as Jake Gittes, a slick 1930s LA gumshoe who bites off more than he can chew, and it's all about as irrelevant as today's news. It's a dark disturbing film noir that -- after all these years -- still manages to shake and haunt viewers. "Forget it"? But it's Chinatown!
  
  
• The Last Lullaby)..Buy the DVD
  Good stuff. There's a real earthy, unsettlingly, almost dangerously quiet vibe to this quietly unsettling adaptation of Max Allan Collins' The Last Quarry, starring Tom Sizemore as the hard-as-nails hitman who just wants to be left alone.. The lack of big fuss dramatics actually makes this seem even harder and tougher, and Sizemore brings an Arctic-cold ruthless pragmatism to the role, showing that Mickey Rourke's might not be the only trainwreck of a career about to make a U-turn. A classic B-film, in all the best damn good senses of the phrase.
  
  
• Mannix: The Complete Season 3)..Buy the DVD
  The return of the classic TV eye.
  
  
• Vega$: Season One: Vol. 1)..Buy the DVD
  Robert Urich alert! One of the most ubitquious and blandly affable actors on seventies and eighties TV starred in this glitzy, star-studded meatball P.I. show remains a guilty cheesy pleasure. Plots? Hell, no -- we have showgirls!

July 2009 DVDs and Videos

• Leverage: Season 1)..Buy the DVD
  Timothy Hutton (Nero Wolfe, Kidnapped) returns to television as the leader of a gang "reformed" criminals who make like latter-day Robin Hoods and rob the rich to give back to the poor.

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List respectfully compiled by film editor Chris Baldemor and site editor: Kevin Burton Smith. Special thanks to our man in the field, Bob Huggins, for the heads up.