Blu-ray Movie Reviews

How many more movies and TV shows will simulate virtual reality to tell a “thought-provoking” story about the fate of society? I gave up on Netflix’s Black Mirror because I could not bear another tale of VR gone awry, but Ready Player One brings the pedigree of Steven Spielberg, plus Ernest Cline’s bestselling novel. How could it miss?

Miguel, a feisty youngster in small town Mexico, loves music, particularly the work of his hero, the long dead guitar and singing star, Ernesto de la Cruz. But because his great-great grandfather abandoned his wife and daughter for a career in music, his family remains virulently opposed to music and forbids Miguel’s having anything to do with it.

Thomas Anderson leads a double life. During the day, he is a computer drone for a big corporation; by night, he’s Neo, hacker extraordinaire. Morpheus opens Neo’s eyes to the real world, a vast wasteland where most of humanity has been enslaved by machines that use our bodies as a power source. To reclaim the Earth, Neo must reenter the Matrix in order to overthrow the machines and discover his true destiny in life.

Is Star Wars art or entertainment? The simplest answer to that question is, “It’s both, of course.” But Episode VIII: The Last Jedi proves the question to be less simple than it first appears. Because of all its silly creatures, swashbuckling adventure sequences, million-dollar-a-minute special effects, and cheeky humor, The Last Jedi is at its heart a deeply personal, deeply thematic, deeply deconstructive, big-budget indie film that forces longtime fans to contend with questions about what Star Wars even is and why its unique blend of mythology, arthouse pastiche, and B-movie kitsch works as well as it does.

A group of kids discover an old video game console in the basement of their school with an unknown game called Jumanji. After choosing their avatars, the foursome is transported into the game’s jungle setting and assume their roles. They soon discover that not only have they taken on the look of the characters, but have inherited their strengths and weaknesses. To survive the game and get back home, all must work together to pass the obstacles placed in front of them, but the stakes are higher than they could have ever imagined.

Darkest Hour shows the other side of the 1940 events depicted in 2017’s equally superb Dunkirk. The latter showed the evacuations that enabled the British army to survive, the former depicted how Churchill, taking the office of Prime Minister almost by default, navigated around the pacifists in his cabinet who wanted to negotiate a settlement with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In doing so he cemented his status as arguably the most important national leader of the 20th century.