Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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.

In a not too distant future, the wealthy plunk down big bucks to enter Westworld, a Disneyland for adults populated by “hosts”—human-like A.I. androids capable of fulfilling their every desire. With a cast of A-list names such as Evan Rachel Wood, Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, and Ed Harris, this psychological, character-driven drama series goes beyond the gimmickry of its 1973 original to offer up a well-crafted exploration of what it means to be human as well as the blurred lines between good and evil and past and present. Could it be a replacement for Game of Thrones? Only time will tell.

It’s time to remind everyone what a big deal Terminator 2: Judgment Day still is. The action/adventure genre underwent a serious evolution in the ’80s, and by 1991, to be taken seriously, T2 had to be bigger and better than anything that had come before.

And it was.

Director/Producer Steven Soderbergh is an admirably free thinker, a true creative with an eye on the future of filmmaking. He’s very particular about the projects he chooses, emerging from pseudo-retirement to direct his latest, Logan Lucky. Made largely outside the Hollywood system he walked away from, it still managed to score some A-list talent on a modest budget, with James Bond and Kylo Ren likely welcoming the opportunity to play against type, as a down-on-his-luck explosives expert and a goodhearted sad-sack, respectively.

War for the Planet of the Apes concludes a trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011. It tells the story of Caesar, from a nascent, intelligent ape to the leader of a band of smart simians. Humankind here has been nearly wiped out, with the survivors fighting to retain their freedom and humanity. In a twist from the classic 1968 original, however, the humans here are the villains, and the apes, fleeing the remnants of an army led by an obsessed, Ahab-like colonel, are the heroes. We’re driven to root for the Apes, from the story’s beginning to its near-biblical conclusion.

David Leitch is known mostly as a stunt coordinator on big action films like Tron: Legacy, but for Atomic Blonde he steps behind the camera as the big man in charge to direct an adaptation of the graphic novel series The Coldest City by Antony Johnson and Sam Hart. The movie is fairly dripping in neon and ’80s nostalgia. Charlize Theron stars as sexy Cold War MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, tasked to go into East Berlin and work with embedded station chief David Percival (James McAvoy) in order to find a sensitive dossier.

In the original Cars, from 2006, hotshot racecar Lightning McQueen learned to be a gracious winner but a winner nonetheless. In Cars 2, Pixar learned that they could produce a less than sparkling sequel. Now, in Cars 3, the second Disney-Pixar property to produce a threequel (after Toy Story 3), McQueen is getting older, losing his edge, and suffering both losses and trash talk from newer, sleeker, faster racers. But he goes back into training, gets up to speed (so to speak), and is on the verge of motoring back to the top when….OK, you don’t expect spoilers, do you?