Blu-ray Movie Reviews

The 2014 wuxia film Brotherhood of Blades established the story of three members of an elite palace guard unit during the Ming Dynasty who must abandon their brotherhood and apprehend one of their own after he goes rogue, only to find themselves caught up in an even larger conspiracy. The Infernal Battlefield continues the story of these best-of-the-best guardsmen. It brings back much of the cast, but this is a standalone film that doesn’t require viewing the first to be understood.

2010’s Saw 3D was ostensibly the final film in the popular horror saga. And then, lo and behold, a mere seven years later, the franchise was rebooted with Jigsaw. Directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, the story finds the elaborate, gruesome Jigsaw killings mysteriously starting up all over again. As before, law enforcement is at a loss as to how the legendary serial killer Jigsaw—dead and buried!—could possibly be committing these nasty new murders. Meanwhile, as is the tradition with Jigsaw, a fresh group of victims has been ensnared in his intricate traps and forced to confess their own crimes or risk death.

In the late 1980s in the town of Derry, Maine, a young boy goes out to test a paper boat during a torrential rainstorm. Braving the elements, he places the boat in the gutter and runs alongside to watch its progress. Unfortunately, he’s too slow and watches it descend into the storm drain. He bends down to see if it’s lost forever and is surprised to see a clown staring back at him. Startled, he quickly jumps back.

Remember those A Day in the Life of… coffee table books that gave us glimpses of Hollywood and the Soviet Union and the like over a single 24-hour span? Imagine that same dynamic applied to some carefully selected, human-free locales across the globe, and you start to get the idea behind Earth: One Amazing Day. This sequel to the 2007 nature documentary Earth takes us from the pre-dawn hours well into the night, revealing visions of flora and fauna we’ve likely never seen before. (Giraffe smack-down!)

The 1982 science-fiction opus Blade Runner remains an undeniable visual spectacle that fired the imaginations of many a viewer. While neither a bona fide critical or commercial success upon debut, it visualized a Los Angeles of the future beyond anything we’d seen before and set the stage for endless fan speculation that has led to five different studio-sanctioned cuts thus far. The sequel, 2049, was released to much of that same indifference. Thirty-five years coming, it still failed to generate a response befitting a cult franchise of this magnitude.

Young Mr. Lincoln is a biography that avoids dramatizing any major achievements or historical events that make up a person’s destiny. Instead, they are alluded to by visual metaphor, audio clues, or pieces of Civil War music. At a local fair, we see Lincoln judging a pie contest, having to choose between a Georgia peach and an American apple pie, winning a logsplitting competition by dividing the body in two, and helping a tugof-war team succeed by hitching their end of the rope to a wagon; all subtly stand in for Lincoln’s moral struggles with slavery, justice and rule of law, and the coming Civil War.