Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews

It’s 1973, and a U.S. survey and mapping expedition, supported by an Army helicopter unit recently released from the wind-down of the Vietnam War, heads toward the previously unexplored Skull Island.

If they’d brushed up on their old movies, they wouldn’t have been gobsmacked, and soon simply smacked, when they spot and engage with a really big ape. Big enough to squish all previous versions of the character under his big toe. Big enough to easily challenge the helicopters and crews. I mean really, really big.

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?

The long-running Japanese franchise Power Rangers is rebooted in this 2017 film from director Dean Israelite and writer John Gatins. The somewhat camp story follows a group of teen misfits who uncover a collection of ancient artifacts and a buried alien ship; endowed with superpowers, the teens must muster their new powers and learn to work together to save the world. Power Rangers is hardly high art, and it never has been. The American version of the series was culled from stock Japanese footage edited together with new English-speaking scenes.

In 2002, Sony Entertainment kicked off the Resident Evil film series based on the popular zombie apocalypse video game of the same name. Fifteen years and five sequels later, the beleaguered franchise comes to a close… sort of. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is technically the last installment in the long-running series, but plans are already afoot to reboot the entire franchise and start over again from square one. The expression “beating a dead horse” springs to mind, but I digress.

When we last saw John Wick, he’d come out of retirement to take out the Russian mobsters who were responsible for stealing his prized muscle car and killing his puppy. In this well-made sequel, we are greeted by an angry Wick who’s still on the hunt for his Mustang Mach 1, which he finds in a local chop shop. Needless to say, Wick dispenses some brutal street justice on the thugs—and he does recover his car.

Chief among Lego Batman’s extraordinary feats is its ability to remain true to the dark essence of its enduring hero while weaving a family-friendly and wildly funny animated adventure. The backgrounds are littered with inside jokes and subtle bits of Batmania culled from the past eight decades.

In a city of human-like animals (think Zootopia), Buster Moon, an ambitious koala theater owner, has fallen on hard times. He hasn’t had a hit in ages, when he suddenly has an inspiration: We’ll pack ’em in with a singing contest! When his loopy lizard assistant mislabels the announcement flyers to offer a $100,000 prize, hundreds of hopefuls show up for the auditions.