Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Tom Cruise is back as Jack Reacher, the ex-Army major, now aimless drifter hitchhiking around America carrying nothing with him but the clothes on his back and his cell phone. When an Army colleague that he’s never met, Major Susan Turner, is arrested on suspicion of espionage, Reacher takes it upon himself to investigate and clear her name. He of course knows she’s innocent because they’ve flirted on the phone and she’s surprisingly hot for an Army major.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s best film by far, has often been called an “anti-Western,” but that’s a bit off. The plot is pure Western: A stranger comes to a frontier town, builds it up; bad guys come to kill him and take it away; he tracks them down on the street and kills them first; and oh, yes, there’s a whore with a heart of gold. The difference here is that the plot is infused with circa-1900 realism: The stranger’s a bit of a dunce; the town is a muddy mess; the bad guys are corporate poachers; our man kills them by shooting them in the back, and afterward he dies in the snow from gunshot wounds while the townsfolk put out a fire in an unused church; and, oh, the whore is also a shrewd merchant with an opium habit.

When a gaggle of gigantic, otherworldly objects parks itself at various points around the Earth, life as we know it is paused while collective humanity figures out our next move. Our finest minds—tempered by the military—seek to determine the mysterious visitors’ even more mysterious purpose, leaving us with the complicated business of learning how to communicate with them. The best hope is brilliant language professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams), who is tasked with deciphering a bizarre form of “speech,” impossible for humans to emulate. But if she doesn’t make meaningful contact, and soon, all hell might break loose, with no guarantee of how such a conflict would end.

Jerry Maguire is the middle work in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s trio of deeply pleasurable movies, flanked by Say Anything and Almost Famous (after which…what happened, man?), and it holds up very well. Tom Cruise plays the title character, a callow sports agent, incapable of alone time or failure, who suffers a brief bout of conscience, bats out a moral manifesto, and loses his job, along with all but one of his clients, as a result. As Crowe explains on the commentary track, it was co-producer James Brooks who came up with the idea of starting the movie where most rom-coms end (selfish go-getter has his wee-hours epiphany), then following our anti-hero’s glide to the bottom before carving a new path of success that enshrines intimacy and commitment as well as ambition. It sounds corny, but Crowe and his ensemble cast (at the time all unknowns, except Cruise) pull it off.

Anchored by a disquietingly reserved performance from star Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy), this Portrait is an artful character study of a very bad man. Loosely based upon documented events, Henry explores the unspeakable crimes of an unrepentant murderer, a dark soul whose bleak existence is punctuated by frequent acts of violence. And when he brings his particularly loathsome roommate into the fold, no one in Chicago is safe. The matter-of-fact dramatic style makes the instances of gore hit that much harder, and yet plot developments are sometimes revealed in clever, original ways.

What if Superman hadn’t been a good guy? Could the government do anything about it? After the events in Batman v Superman, members of the U.S. government are nervous that aliens and metahumans could wreak havoc upon the Earth at their whim and there would be nothing the human race could do about it. With this in mind, a covert government agent named Amanda Waller hatches a plan to use incarcerated supervillains to form her “Task Force X” in order to combat evil forces in the world. To control them, she has explosive devices implanted in their necks that will detonate if they decide to not follow orders. As circumstances have it, her team is needed shortly after it’s formed to battle an ancient villain named Incubus who has invaded Midway City.