Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Straw Dogs
Josef Krebs  |  Oct 06, 2017  | 
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From the get-go in this hugely provocative and highly challenging essay on violence, there’s a disconcerting, menacing montage of images that tilts you off balance. The setting is a small, insular, isolated, Wicker Man–ish Cornish community where Deliverance-like locals sit and wait.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Heat
Josef Krebs  |  Sep 22, 2017  | 
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Michael Mann is a thief—a damned good one. In telling this bigger-than-life tale of a career-criminal takedown crew and their nemesis, the writer-director robs from the best, especially for his brilliant set pieces. He steals heavily from crime-caper master, Jean-Pierre Melville; the overnight break-in on a precious metals storage facility has all the precision and intense silences of Le Cercle Rouge, and the wham-bam bank holdup takes the look and military precision of Un Flic. Mann’s grand, operatic airfield finale is snatched straight from the end of Bullitt, while others scenes echo The Godfather or Goodfellas, and he even jacks himself by reworking Thief.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Saturday Night Fever Director's Cut
Mike Mettler  |  Sep 15, 2017  | 
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Much as 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause and 1969’s Easy Rider defined the youth-culture zeitgeist of their respective decades, 1977’s Saturday Night Fever deftly captured the me-decade essence of the 1970s, instantly catapulting John Travolta to the A-list in the process.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Beauty and the Beast
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Sep 01, 2017  | 
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Director Bill Condon brings his experience adapting the Broadway smash Dreamgirls to this lavish, live-action reimagining of Disney’s 1991 Golden Globe–winning (Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical) animated film Beauty and the Beast. The CGI-laden visual spectacle stars the lovely Emma Watson as the titular beauty Belle who is imprisoned in a castle by an irascible prince cursed by a witch for his failure to aid her on a stormy night and forced to live life out as the Beast (Dan Stevens).
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Avi Greengart  |  Jul 28, 2017  | 
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The opening scroll of the original Star Wars states, “Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.” If you ever thought, “Hey, I’d like to see a movie version of those 17 words,” Rogue One is for you. There’s plenty of plot-driven action, minimal character development, and ample fan service. It’s certainly entertaining. Wisecracking droid K-2SO in particular is terrific. However, the movie is anchored by the serious theme of sacrifice. If you’re looking for a jaunty kiddie flick, try a different Disney movie.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Manchester by the Sea
Josef Krebs  |  Jul 28, 2017  | 
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Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea is a story of ordinary folk who are sideswiped by life. Lee is a stiff working as a janitor-handyman in Boston, his inexpressive, glum detachment occasionally interrupted by outbursts of anger or self-punishing bar fighting. After his brother, Joe, dies due to a heart condition, Lee travels back to his hometown of Manchester to break the news to Joe’s teenage son, Patrick. While awaiting the funeral—which cannot take place until the ground thaws in the spring enough to allow the grave to be dug—Lee discovers that Joe has named him as Patrick’s legal guardian.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Nocturnal Animals
Josef Krebs  |  Jul 21, 2017  | 
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In screenwriter-director Tom Ford’s (A Single Man) adaptation of Austin Wright’s multi-reality novel, we discover Susan’s emotionally drained existence, disillusioned with marriage and her career in blue-chip art curating. It’s an expensive life of high-end fashion and cutting-edge contemporary paintings, antiseptic interiors in fancy galleries and elegant homes.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Moonlight
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Jun 30, 2017  | 
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This coming-of-age drama is notable for a lot more than the Oscar night flub seen around the world that ultimately had the film walking away with the Best Picture statuette. It’s a beautifully captured movie set in three distinct acts and, notably, one of the few dramas about the black American experience to be recognized that is not overtly concerned with slavery, the civil rights struggle, or institutionalized violence against said community, although one could make an argument about the undercurrent of those issues running through the story.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsMusic Reviews
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
Josef Krebs  |  Jun 23, 2017  | 
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The heart of I’m Your Man is a celebratory concert of the recently passed Leonard Cohen’s songs performed by an oddball assortment of top talent at the Sydney Opera House. Between each number come interviews with performers telling of the inevitable life-changing moment of hearing Cohen for the first time. In addition, the poet/singer-songwriter/Jewish Zen Buddhist monk himself delivers anecdotes on personal history, his long, arduous working process, and meaning behind certain ballads illustrated and illuminated by archive poetry recitations, artwork, and photos and footage from childhood and career.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Café Society
Josef Krebs  |  Jun 16, 2017  | 
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With Café Society, Woody Allen cleverly combines 1930s Pre-Code romantic comedies like Red-Headed Woman with the glamour-and-gangster nightclubbing of Manhattan Melodrama, all delivered with Purple Rose of Cairo–type old-school Allen evocation of era. Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) leaves his Bronx Jewish family to work as an errand boy for his powerful Hollywood agent-to-the-stars uncle (Steve Carell). When Bobby falls in love with his uncle’s secretary (Kristen Stewart)—despite her having a lover—things get complicated, especially on Bobby’s discovery that her boyfriend is his boss.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
High Noon
Chris Chiarella  |  Jun 09, 2017  | 
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An undeniable dramatic masterpiece, High Noon has lost none of its considerable power to enthrall an audience with its relentless suspense born of inexorable doom. We know at once that Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is a damned good man. Yet when news breaks that a murderer he sent to hang is instead returning with his gang for revenge, he is heartlessly shunned by the townsfolk he has risked his life to protect.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Cinema Paradiso
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Jun 02, 2017  | 
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The entertainment glitterati love a work that glorifies the history and existence of themselves. Just look at the praise lavished upon such films like the neo-silent The Artist or the arguably overrated La La Land to get a sense of how much Hollywood is willing to revel in its own nostalgia. Writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 semiautobiographical paean to the films that framed his coming of age in Southern Italy revolving around the titular Cinema Paradiso movie theater is a prime example of such a work.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
His Girl Friday
Fred Kaplan  |  May 26, 2017  | 
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This is the funniest classic film that doesn’t star the Marx Brothers and one of the best—certainly the most frantic—newspaper movies (outgunned only by the very different All the President’s Men). It also marks the peak in director Howard Hawks’ fling with super-fast pace and overlapping dialogue, which he’d pioneered over the previous two years, with Bringing Up Baby and Only Angels Have Wings, and which influenced many future directors, notably Robert Altman.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Fred Kaplan  |  May 19, 2017  | 
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McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s best film by far, has often been called an “anti-Western,” but that’s a bit off. The plot is pure Western: A stranger comes to a frontier town, builds it up; bad guys come to kill him and take it away; he tracks them down on the street and kills them first; and oh, yes, there’s a whore with a heart of gold. The difference here is that the plot is infused with circa-1900 realism: The stranger’s a bit of a dunce; the town is a muddy mess; the bad guys are corporate poachers; our man kills them by shooting them in the back, and afterward he dies in the snow from gunshot wounds while the townsfolk put out a fire in an unused church; and, oh, the whore is also a shrewd merchant with an opium habit.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Jerry Maguire
Fred Kaplan  |  May 05, 2017  | 
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Jerry Maguire is the middle work in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s trio of deeply pleasurable movies, flanked by Say Anything and Almost Famous (after which…what happened, man?), and it holds up very well. Tom Cruise plays the title character, a callow sports agent, incapable of alone time or failure, who suffers a brief bout of conscience, bats out a moral manifesto, and loses his job, along with all but one of his clients, as a result. As Crowe explains on the commentary track, it was co-producer James Brooks who came up with the idea of starting the movie where most rom-coms end (selfish go-getter has his wee-hours epiphany), then following our anti-hero’s glide to the bottom before carving a new path of success that enshrines intimacy and commitment as well as ambition. It sounds corny, but Crowe and his ensemble cast (at the time all unknowns, except Cruise) pull it off.
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