Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Stranger Than Paradise & Night on Earth
Josef Krebs  |  Apr 26, 2019  |  0 comments
"What are we doing here?" "I don't know." Stranger Than Paradise, the delightful deadbeat breakout film by writer/director Jim Jarmusch with its whack-character studies, unactorly acting, absurdist deadpan humor, and minimalist style brilliantly captured the mood of its time. It also established him as an instant auteur of the $100,000-budget, low-production-value indie-film scene and inspired many others to do likewise.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Straw Dogs
Josef Krebs  |  Oct 06, 2017  |  2 comments
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From the get-go in this hugely provocative and highly challenging essay on violence, there’s a disconcerting, menacing montage of images that tilts you off balance. The setting is a small, insular, isolated, Wicker Man–ish Cornish community where Deliverance-like locals sit and wait.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Suicide Squad
David Vaughn  |  Apr 21, 2017  |  0 comments
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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.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Sullenly Last Summer
Chris Chiarella  |  Oct 09, 2023  |  7 comments
A funny thing happened on the way to the multiplex.

See, when studios invest hundreds of millions of dollars in their intended tentpole movies, they’re betting that sufficient tens of millions of people will be buying seats and popcorn to offset these exorbitant costs.

One of the ways they hedge these bets is to feature familiar characters in sequels, remakes, reboots and other sorts of “franchises'' with (they assume) a certain built-in audience. Of course, the movies need to be of a certain level of watchability and even rewatchability to reach that goal, and therein lies the challenge.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Sullivan’s Travels
Josef Krebs  |  Jul 16, 2015  |  0 comments
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Written and directed by silly-but-serious cynical genius Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s Travels starts out with a dark and gloomy film-within-a-film showing two figures battling on a train crossing a bridge, symbolizing labor grappling with management to their mutual destruction. But as soon as we get out of the screening room, things lighten up both visually and in mood, the movie becoming a bright, witty slapstick satire on Hollywood and a pretentious, self-important director, Sullivan (Joel McCrea). This auteur wants to make a sociologically and artistically meritorious picture with messages about grim death, war, and the suffering of the unemployed during The Great Depression but, coming from a privileged background, he knows nothing about trouble. So he decides to go looking for it by dressing as a hobo and drifting across America.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Sully
Avi Greengart  |  Apr 07, 2017  |  0 comments
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How do you make a two-hour movie about a forced water landing in the Hudson River that lasted 208 seconds, where everyone already knows the happy outcome? You don’t. You keep it to a 90-minute running time and make two mini-movies: one about the exceptional skill and decision-making that saved lives in the air and on the ground, and one about bureaucrats second-guessing that decision-making. Weaving the stories together keeps Sully from being overly dull, but a documentary format might have been more interesting.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Sunset Boulevard
David Vaughn  |  May 08, 2013  |  0 comments
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One of silent film’s biggest stars, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), enlists the talents of a down-on-his-luck Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) to help edit a screenplay she wrote in hopes of launching her big comeback. Little does Gillis know, the poor lady is off her rocker. But when you’re broke, you have to take work when you can get it. The pair watch her old movies with her trusty butler—who hides his own dirty secret—at the helm of the camera, but the more time Gillis spends with the ex-starlet, the more he becomes accustomed to the lavish lifestyle she provides him.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Super 8
David Vaughn  |  Nov 23, 2011  |  0 comments

The video quality of this Blu-ray is impressive, as long as the overused lens flare—a hallmark of director J.J. Abrams—doesn't bother you. But the audio is the real highlight here, easily matching Abrams' outstanding previous hit, Star Trek. In fact, this disc has the best audio-demo scene of any 2011 release I've heard, and it's sure to knock your socks off, as well as those of anyone you play it for. If you want to show off what your surround-sound system can do, this soundtrack is second to none.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Superhero Movie
David Vaughn  |  Jan 06, 2009  |  0 comments

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/superhero.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>In an homage to <i>Spiderman</i>, nerdy high-school student Rick Riker (Drake Bell) is bitten by a genetically altered dragonfly, giving him superhuman abilities. He soon discovers the secret of being a superhero&#151;it's all in the costume&#151;and becomes "The Dragonfly."

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Superman: The Movie, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut—HD DVD
Thomas J. Norton  |  Dec 28, 2006  |  First Published: Dec 29, 2006  |  3 comments

The 1978 story of the comic hero Superman was far from the first live action realization of that character, but it has become a classic. Christopher Reeve, in the title role, was an appealing actor. While he was never a great one, he was a good choice for the Man of Steel. It's no accident that Brandon Routh, a Reeve near look-alike, was chosen for the lead role in the new Superman Returns.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Surf's Up (Blu-ray)
 |  Sep 20, 2007  |  First Published: Sep 21, 2007  |  0 comments

Surf's Up (Blu-ray, available October 9), a new computer animated film, isn't as groundbreaking as Final Fantasy. Nor is it likely to grab the Academy Award as best animated feature in a Ratatouille year. But despite all that, and despite the fact that this is the 196th movie in the past two years to feature penguins (OK, the third, unless I somehow missed the other 193), it's still a lot of fun.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Surrogates
David Vaughn  |  Feb 05, 2010  |  0 comments
In the near future, humans live their lives through perfect robotic surrogates controlled from the safety of their homes, and murder becomes a thing of the past. But when the son of the surrogates' creator is killed, an FBI agent (Bruce Willis) must reenter the real world to unravel the mysterious death.

To witness the effect of technology on our society, all you have to do is sit in a restaurant and watch families spend more time texting on their smartphones instead of talking to each other. Surrogates takes this to the extreme as humans completely withdraw from society, but it's certainly thought-provoking. Nevertheless, the pulsating DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack is loaded with demo scenes featuring pinpoint discrete effects, multidimensional imaging, and some foundation-shaking bass.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Suspiria
Al Griffin  |  Apr 01, 2019  |  0 comments
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It was a bold move for Luca Guadagnino, director of the 2018 Academy Award-nominated, Call Me by Your Name, to undertake a remake of Suspiria, the 1977 film from Italian horror auteur Dario Argento, as his next project. Buoyed no doubt by the critical acclaim Call Me by Your Name had received, Guadagnino, an avowed Argento fan, likely felt he could do Argento's cult classic justice.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Michael Gaughn  |  May 31, 2008  |  0 comments
DreamWorks
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With serial killers all the rage (in both fiction and reali

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Swing Vote
David Vaughn  |  Jan 21, 2009  |  0 comments

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/swingvote.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner) is a regular guy with a dead-end job content with coasting his way through life until his daughter, Molly (Madeline Carroll), sets off a chain of events that results in a presidential election coming down to a single vote&#151;Bud's. All hell breaks loose when political operatives from both parties, including the incumbent president (Kelsey Grammar) and the Democrat challenger (Dennis Hopper), swarm his hometown to vie for the winning vote.

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