Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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The Angry Birds Movie
Thomas J. Norton  |  Dec 23, 2016  |  0 comments
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I’d heard of Angry Birds but completely missed their first flight of fame in an immensely popular game for smartphones. Subsequently, they went bird-flu viral with follow-up games, an animated TV series, and more. A movie launch was inevitable. It features hotheaded Red and other (non-flighted!) feathered citizens of Bird Island. Sentenced to take an anger management course, Red meets a few similarly explosive (sometimes literally!) souls.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Hardcore Henry
Corey Gunnestad  |  Dec 16, 2016  |  0 comments
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Henry is part of a radical military experiment that merges cybernetic machinery with biological tissue to create the ultimate super soldier. When Henry wakes up in a high-tech laboratory missing two of his limbs, he is unable to speak. He also has no memory of who he was beforehand. A fetching lab technician named Estelle attaches his new cybernetic limbs to his body, and very shortly thereafter, the door to the lab explodes open and all hell breaks loose… and pretty much stays on the loose for the next 90 minutes.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Woman in the Dunes
Josef Krebs  |  Dec 16, 2016  |  1 comments
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Stark, disturbing, disorienting, director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) is a masterpiece of macabre metaphor. An entomologist searching for specimens of insects in a desert at the edge of a seaside misses his bus back to Tokyo and is offered to spend the night in the hut of a young widow at the bottom of a sand dune surrounding it on all sides. He discovers the next morning that the ladder has been pulled up by the local villagers trapping him with the woman for years to come.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
2016 Blu-ray (plus 4K!) Holiday Gift Guide
Chris Chiarella  |  Dec 09, 2016  |  0 comments
It’s time once again to separate the digital wheat from the chaff to find movies, TV shows, and music that make great gifts. Venerable Blu-ray is joined by upstart 4K Ultra HD this year, and even a bit of vinyl for good measure. Whichever holiday you call your own, make it a little brighter with one or more of these.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Jungle Book
Chris Chiarella  |  Dec 02, 2016  |  0 comments
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So I guess revisiting in live action the catalog of Disney animated classics is officially a thing now. And that’s fine, if they can all manage to be as good as director Jon Favreau’s astutely conceived, beautifully realized take on The Jungle Book. The story here is different enough from the popular 1967 version to make the tale of man-cub Mowgli (endearing newcomer Neel Sethi) fresh and worth watching all over again. He’s been raised by wolves and lives happily among the animals until a ferocious tiger sets his sights on the boy, sending brave Mowgli on a dangerous journey back to the world of man. Yes, there are a couple of familiar songs along the way, but plenty of surprises as well, in addition to some rough beast-on-beast combat that might frighten the little ones.
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3D Blu-ray Movie ReviewsBlu-ray Movie Reviews
Humpback Whales
David Vaughn  |  Dec 02, 2016  |  0 comments
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By the mid-1960s, it was estimated that 90 percent of the humpback whales were gone from the Earth when a moratorium was put in place throughout most of the world. Fortunately, the population started to grow again, and there’s now an estimated 80,000 throughout the world. I’m old enough to remember the “Save the Whales” campaign in the mid-1970s as well as George and Gracie from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in 1986 where it took the songs of the humpbacks to save Earth from sure destruction by an alien vessel.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Star Trek: The Great Rewatching Marathon
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Nov 22, 2016  |  10 comments
I had an idea. In hindsight, a really bad idea. I thought it would be cool to rewatch all 13 Star Trek movies, in order, and rank them...
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Mermaid
Chris Chiarella  |  Nov 18, 2016  |  0 comments
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In cinema, would-be cautionary tales of our current environmental crisis tend to be heavy-handed, and they frequently fall flat as a result. Maybe the secret to an effective global wakeup call is to tuck it neatly into a slapstick romantic comedy about modern-day merpeople.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Keanu
Corey Gunnestad  |  Nov 11, 2016  |  0 comments
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The successful sketch comedy duo of Key and Peele has made the transition from their Comedy Central series to motion pictures with their comic adventure Keanu. The Shakespearian plot unfolds thusly: Rell (Peele) is depressed and hasn’t left his couch or his bong in days because his girlfriend has just dumped him. His straight-laced cousin Clarence (Key) sympathizes but is of little consolation. A timely miracle shows up on Rell’s doorstep in the form of a lost kitten that meows plaintively and is adorable beyond all reason.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Eye in the Sky
Josef Krebs  |  Nov 04, 2016  |  0 comments
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A godlike eye in the sky that can send down hellfire; fake-fly-on-the-wall drones capable of entering anyone’s home to observe their most intimate moments; militia and religious police who, in the name of God, watch, search, and regulate every aspect of a person’s existence or end it with guns and explosive. In a place with no privacy, your life is not your own.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Point Break
Corey Gunnestad  |  Nov 04, 2016  |  0 comments
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Following up the release of the standard HD Blu-ray by only two months, Warner Bros. has reissued Point Break in the 4K Ultra HD format. Not to be confused with the original 1991 Point Break starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, this new version stars two relatively unknown actors, Edgar Ramirez and Luke Bracey, in the central roles; and while it generally follows the same basic plot of the original, it also departs substantially from the pre-established formula.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Oct 21, 2016  |  0 comments
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In Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (military code for, umm, WTF), Tina Fey plays real-life reporter Kim Baker who, tired of her stagnant career, accepts a three-month assignment embedded with the U.S. Marines covering the war in Afghanistan, much to the dismay of her boyfriend. As three months turns into four years, Baker meets a collection of colorful war correspondents, marines, and corrupt government officials, including a Scottish playboy (Martin Freeman) who becomes her love interest and a gorgeous rival reporter (Margot Robbie). But as she endures the almost surreal dangers and day-to-day activities of Afghanistan, she begins to realize that the place is having a negative effect on her perception of reality.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Chris Chiarella  |  Oct 21, 2016  |  0 comments
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Dawn of Justice brings together the entire trinity of DC Universe heroes, arguably the most enduring characters of 20th-century popular culture. So where’s the thrill? The awe? The “wow,” dammit? Let’s focus on the expanded three-hour Ultimate Edition featured in this set, also available separately on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, along with director Zack Snyder’s other two DC forays, Man of Steel and Watchmen.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Allegiant
David Vaughn  |  Oct 14, 2016  |  0 comments
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With Erudite’s leader overthrown, Four’s mother is now in control of Chicago, and instead of getting on with their lives, it’s payback time for those who oppressed the people under the previous leadership. Tris wants no part of this, and she and Four lead a team of rebels on a daring escape beyond the wall where they face an even larger threat. Tris is then befriended by the mysterious leader, but Four’s spidey sense tells him to be on guard—and for good reason.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Dr. Strangelove
Fred Kaplan  |  Oct 14, 2016  |  2 comments
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Dr. Strangelove is one of the great American films: not just a savage anti-war satire but a jeremiad against the mechanization (and resulting dehumanization) that spawned the nuclear-war machine and might turn a burst of insanity into the death of all life on the planet. (The film’s subtitle: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”) It was an amazingly daring movie for its time: early 1964, the peak of Cold War tensions, barely a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, on the eve of escalation in Vietnam—and here’s Stanley Kubrick, joined by Terry Southern, author of Candy, The Magic Christian, and other naughty novels, portraying the top brass as mentally off, our political leaders as feckless, and the holy of military holies, the nuclear deterrent, as a Doomsday Machine. And it’s funny as hell!
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