Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Only a few moments into Across the Spider-Verse’s two-hour-and-20-minute runtime, we can begin to understand why this sequel to 2018’s Oscar-winning Into the Spider-Verse took almost five years to arrive. Dramatically bold and visually (and sonically) fearless, the movie is exhausting in the best possible sense, inviting the audience along on a mind-boggling adventure and daring us to keep up.

Time Bandits is a time traveling adventure set in an off-kilter world that is director Terry Gilliam’s signature. A frenetic story that skips through various vignettes, it follows a young boy drawn into a journey with a group of renegade dwarves who use a special map to travel to different periods in time and steal treasures. In hot pursuit of the dwarves is the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson) from whom the map was stolen.

Some sports movies are simply about baseball, boxing, hockey or whatever, while others manage to be about something else, and maybe even something more. Such is the case with The Longest Yard, which adds layer upon layer of subtext to the game of football until we can’t help but feel deeply invested in the final score.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is the latest installment in the popular action film series starring Keanu Reeves in the titular role. This story picks up with John on his way to uncovering a path to finally defeat The High Table, to whom he is beholden for his past choices. But before he can earn his freedom, he must face off against a new enemy with powerful alliances across the globe, turning old friends into foes.

From debut seasons of hot TV shows to complete series, from kid-friendly to adults-only animation, from magnificent restorations of genre classics to reissues of popular film franchises that are returning to the multiplex this season, you’ll find plenty of reasons to hole up in the home theater with the air conditioner blasting and your ice cubes clinking.

My long-suffering dad is probably still haunted by our trip to the cinema those many years ago, with me a wee lad and my sister — a naïve young fan of the musician David Bowie — eager to see what we thought would be perhaps a slightly offbeat sci-fi movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Two hours of nudity and jaw-dropping weirdness later, we were proven wrong as we were introduced to mysterious interplanetary traveler Thomas Newton (Bowie), an entrepreneurial genius who strikes it rich quick with a host of advanced technologies. He’s also quite thirsty, a clue to his secret intentions which become more difficult to bring to fruition as he is increasingly sidetracked by the new vice and excess of his wealthy American lifestyle.

As editor Mark Henninger and I discuss on the regular, physical media has become not only about entertainment but collectability, and so we have seen the arrival of new editions that look snazzy on the shelf and that we can flaunt to our friends. Quite a few of the discs I've reviewed recently for S&V have arrived in step-up steelbook cases adorned with exclusive, genuinely inspired artwork. (Take that, streaming!)