BLU-RAY MOVIE REVIEWS

I have a great respect and admiration for auteur filmmakers—guys like Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino who write their own screenplays and direct them into cinematic classics. Oftentimes the temptation of appearing in their own movies proves too great for some of these filmmakers… like Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino. Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, and George Clooney have also directed themselves into great acclaim and Oscar glory, and even Alfred Hitchcock, Oliver Stone, and Martin Scorsese have managed to sneak themselves into their films here and there.

This being the third film in a row I’ve reviewed on Blu-ray in which a man’s life is destroyed by the death of a child and the loss of a wife (alongside Manchester by the Sea and Nocturnal Animals) leads me to suspect that a strong sense of loss is vibrating through our national zeitgeist despite the blessings of unsocial media. Collateral Beauty, a feel-good downer (a romtrage, if you will), is a parable filled with It’s a Wonderful Life–like whimsy concerning a grieving advertising executive, Howard (Will Smith), who, two years on from the loss of his daughter, is writing letters to Time, Death, and Love to voice his complaints and express his trauma.

Robbed of his birthright when his father is murdered by his uncle and ascends to the throne, Arthur somehow escapes. He’s found floating down the Thames by some prostitutes doing their laundry, and the young man ends up being raised in a brothel and learns how to survive on the streets of the big city until that fateful day he pulls Excalibur from the stone.

Ronin is director John Frankenheimer’s 1998 crime thriller, with a script co-written by David Mamet (under a pen name) and featuring an all-star cast headlined by Robert De Niro and Jean Reno. This gritty film borrows heavily from classic genre predecessors such as The French Connection, Le Cercle Rouge, and Bullitt. It follows a former U.S. intelligence agent (De Niro) working with a group of mercenaries trying to track down a package being pursued by both Irish and Russian interests.

Donnie Darko is the 2001 indie cult film from Richard Kelly (Southland Tales). Set in the 1980s, the film is an amalgam of sci-fi, psycho-thriller, and horror that’s an early new-millennium answer to the John Hughes films of the 1980s. The titular character, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a disaffected high school student in suburban Middlesex living with his college-age sister (played by sister Maggie), his mother and, and younger sister. Donnie deals with psychological problems that cause him to see a 6-foot-tall rabbit named Frank that tells him the world is going to end in less than a month.

Discovering life on Mars would be the crowning achievement in any scientist’s career, so when a team on the International Space Station receives a care package of samples from the red planet, they can’t wait to begin their experiments. To their surprise, they discover there was once life on Mars after all, and they unleash a creature that evolves at an accelerated pace that has its eyes on the planet below them.

I never understood why MI-6 always gave James Bond the most expensive and exotic sports cars on the planet to take with him on his missions. Q Branch must know by now there’s no way in hell that thing is coming back in one piece. That same basic logic applies to the Fast & the Furious films: Why would you ever give a Lamborghini to someone who’s going to a demolition derby?