Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Sort By:  Post Date TitlePublish Date
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
Chris Chiarella  |  Apr 28, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Anchored by a disquietingly reserved performance from star Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy), this Portrait is an artful character study of a very bad man. Loosely based upon documented events, Henry explores the unspeakable crimes of an unrepentant murderer, a dark soul whose bleak existence is punctuated by frequent acts of violence. And when he brings his particularly loathsome roommate into the fold, no one in Chicago is safe. The matter-of-fact dramatic style makes the instances of gore hit that much harder, and yet plot developments are sometimes revealed in clever, original ways.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Dying of the Light
Steve Guttenberg  |  Apr 14, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
I spent a big chunk of my life running movies in New York City neighborhood dumps, art houses, and palaces, so I may be a little biased, but Peter Flynn’s The Dying of the Light documentary about projectionists brought tears to my eyes. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for Flynn, since projectionists are much more at home on the other side of the lens. They all share a common bond, knowing that if they do the job well, the audience will be unaware they did anything at all. That’s the beauty of it.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Jason Bourne
Corey Gunnestad  |  Apr 14, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Matt Damon returns to the role that Universal has built a hit franchise upon and resolutely keeps churning out. Once again, Jason Bourne’s mysterious past is catching up with him faster than he can remember it. The titular protagonist is still living off the grid and making ends meet by pit fighting in some dark corner of the globe, apparently standard procedure for all retired super-soldiers living abroad.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Phantasm: Ravager
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Apr 07, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Thirty-seven years after the horror franchise Phantasm debuted, director Don Coscarelli passes the directorial reins to David Hartman for what is being billed as the final installment in the popular mind-twisting series. Although there isn’t much left here for fans of the original to really cling to, there is a sense of the series getting back to its roots. Actor Reggie Bannister returns as Reggie, and other series regulars A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, and Kathy Lester also return for a tale that brings the story right into the core of the Tall Man’s (Angus Scrimm reprising his role) home world.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Sully
Avi Greengart  |  Apr 07, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
How do you make a two-hour movie about a forced water landing in the Hudson River that lasted 208 seconds, where everyone already knows the happy outcome? You don’t. You keep it to a 90-minute running time and make two mini-movies: one about the exceptional skill and decision-making that saved lives in the air and on the ground, and one about bureaucrats second-guessing that decision-making. Weaving the stories together keeps Sully from being overly dull, but a documentary format might have been more interesting.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Girl on the Train
Chris Chiarella  |  Mar 31, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Rachel (Emily Blunt) is a lost soul who eases the lingering pain of her divorce with ample doses of alcohol, particularly on her daily rail trips to and from Manhattan. Her only diversion is an elaborate fantasy about someone she sees from her moving window, Megan (Haley Bennett), and projecting all of her longing onto this stranger. And then one day Rachel spies Megan doing something she ought not to, threatening the idyllic life the voyeur has imagined for her. She even goes so far as to attempt a confrontation with Megan, but it quickly becomes a boozy blur of violence.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Hardcore Henry
Corey Gunnestad  |  Mar 31, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Henry is part of a radical military experiment that merges cybernetic machinery with biological tissue to create the ultimate super soldier. When Henry wakes up in a high-tech laboratory missing two of his limbs, he is unable to speak. He also has no memory of who he was beforehand. A fetching lab technician attaches his new cybernetic limbs, and very shortly thereafter, the door to the lab explodes open and all hell breaks loose… and pretty much stays on the loose for the next 90 minutes.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Punch-Drunk Love
Fred Kaplan  |  Mar 24, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
I was thrilled with Punch-Drunk Love when it came out: such loopy energy, zigzag surprises, so preposterous but insouciantly so oddly appealing—a mess but a dazzling mess, like most of P.T. Anderson’s movies. A decade-and-a-half later, it’s lost a lot of its punch. I don’t know if I’ve changed, if imitations have sucked out its novelty, or what, but its shortcomings now shine too clearly. Adam Sandler plays a plumbing-parts salesman who’s out on the spectrum (a bit of Benjamin Braddock crossed with Rain Man), who’s never traveled or had a girlfriend, who’s always been tormented by seven playful sisters who don’t know the madness they’re inflicting.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Ghostbusters (2016)
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Mar 17, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Forget all the hyperbole about an all-female cast and man-hating: Is this Ghostbusters reboot any good simply based on merit? Yes and no. The movie retreads familiar ground and tries too hard to emulate its predecessor but has fantastic special effects. Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones are a group of paranormal hunters. McCarthy and Wiig play longtime pals once estranged from each other, reunited when Wiig is fired from her position at Columbia University due to McCarthy’s publishing of a book they wrote years earlier expounding on the existence of ghosts.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Our Kind of Traitor
Josef Krebs  |  Mar 10, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
This elegant, suspenseful adaptation of John le Carré’s novel, Our Kind of Traitor, makes for a marvelous companion piece to the recent excellent TV miniseries adaptation of the writer’s The Night Manager. Here, a bored and lost university poetry professor whose marriage is in crisis—one of le Carré’s endless supply of honorable and principled innocent civilians who, seeking purpose and redemption, allow themselves to become involved in international intrigue—is seduced into helping Dima, a charismatic money launderer for the Russian mafia desperate to defect to England and save his family.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Legend of Tarzan
Corey Gunnestad  |  Mar 10, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
The Legend of Tarzan nearly functions as a sequel of sorts, picking up where most other Tarzan movies leave off. It’s 1890 and the man formerly known as Tarzan, John Clayton III the Earl of Greystoke, and his beautiful wife Jane are happily married and living as aristocrats in England.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Kubo and the Two Strings
Thomas J. Norton  |  Feb 24, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
In old Japan, young Kubo lives in a mountain cave with his mother, whose mental clarity comes and goes. As an infant he lost an eye, and his father is long gone. Every day he goes to the market in a nearby town to entertain the locals with his three-string shamisen and wondrous stories, told with magic origami that fold and unfold into lifelike characters. His stories never have an ending, much to the disappointment of the townsfolk. Nevertheless, they’re ready for more the next day (Kubo apparently invented the miniseries cliff-hanger).
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Star Trek Beyond
David Vaughn  |  Feb 24, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Three years into their five-year mission, the crew of the Enterprise is in dire need of shore leave. Fortunately, they’re in a sector of space with an advanced star base, and they drop in for a visit. Shortly after their arrival, a distress call comes from a remote nebula, and their leave is cut short since the Enterprise is the only ship in the sector that can navigate through it. Once inside, they meet a deadly alien race in search of a rare artifact that just happens to be located on the Federation ship and will kill anything in their path to obtain it—even the Enterprise crew.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Independence Day: Resurgence
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Feb 17, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Two decades after Independence Day, the bug-like aliens that threatened humanity are back with their queen in Independence Day: Resurgence, bigger and badder than ever. Earth has been preparing for the return of the aliens, and humanity has come together to cooperate in unprecedented fashion, using the aliens’ own technology to build up planetary defenses. No one anticipated the aliens would return more advanced, with a mothership 3,000 miles in diameter with impenetrable force fields and a swarm of hive-like fighter jets. Central command must devise a plan with the help of recovered friendly alien technology to take out the enemy aliens’ queen.
Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Quiet Man
Chris Chiarella  |  Feb 10, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Bigger-than-life John Wayne stars as Sean Thornton, a mild-mannered American returning to his native Ireland, seeking nothing more than a peaceful life in a charming village. But his homecoming is soon complicated by the sight of a tempestuous redhead (Maureen O’Hara) and by the aggressions of a blustery local bully... who just so happens to be her brother. Sean does his best to blend into the colorful community, occasionally led into an inadvertent clash of cultures, and ultimately forced to confront a dark secret from his past, all culminating in one of the most satisfying two-fisted finales in movie history. Much of the story might seem a bit quaint or even politically incorrect to modern audiences, but The Quiet Man endures as a sweetly irresistible bit of entertainment, quite possibly inspiring an urge to visit The Emerald Isle or at least throw back a pint.
Continue Reading »

Pages

X