Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Win Puss in Boots on Blu-ray
Michael Berk  |  Mar 02, 2012  | 

As we've been saying for a while now, 7.1's coming of age - and, with increasing frequency and utility, it's coming to home theaters.

With a growing list of releases taking advantage of those extra channels, why not take a chance with us and get yourself a copy of Puss in Boots on Blu-ray.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wipe your windshield
Ken Korman  |  Apr 02, 2009  | 
Universal
Movie ••• Picture ••• Sound •••• Extras ••½
Is it possible to create high drama from the inventi
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wireless Blu-ray Player Face-off
Al Griffin  |  Nov 16, 2009  | 

No longer content to be tethered to A/V systems alone, many new Bluray Disc players augment their basic BD-Live online capability with streaming services like Netflix, Pandora, Vudu, YouTube, and CinemaNow.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wish I Was Here
Josef Krebs  |  Feb 09, 2015  | 
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In this family affair—both in subject and moviemaking— Zach Braff directs and stars while co-writing and co-producing with his brother Adam. Together they’ve created a gently comic, small, oddball drama that, like Braff’s Garden State, often feels lightweight and silly but somehow manages to deal profoundly with the biggest questions and challenges of people’s lives in a resonating and moving manner. The family is that of Aidan Bloom, an immature, 35-year-old, out-of-work L.A. actor trying to live his passionate dream while holding his family together. The crisis comes to a head when he must remove his two children from their school because Aidan’s unforgivingly judgmental, sarcastically (and funnily) scathing father Gabe (Mandy Patinkin)—who was staking the kids’ education so long as it was in a Yeshiva school—needs the money for experimental cancer treatment, forcing Aidan to half-assedly home-teach his kids.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
With a Bang or a Whimper
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jul 03, 2005  | 

<I>Avoid a Blue Tuesday by capping off your holiday weekend plans with the end of the world! Whether we will become extinct as a species from within or without is the subject of two movies on DVD, one an environmental-disaster flick of dubious distinction, the other a classic loosely based on the Victorian novel that in turn has inspired a current remake. Thomas J. Norton and Fred Manteghian report on 2004's </I>The Day After Tomorrow: All Access Collector's Edition<I> and 1953's </I>The War of the Worlds.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wolf Totem
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Apr 22, 2016  | 
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After he and his film Seven Years in Tibet (1997) were banned from China, director Jean-Jacques Annaud returns to the country for his visually stunning Wolf Totem, an adaptation of Jiang Rong’s semi-autobiographical novel.

Set during China’s Cultural Revolution of 1969, Wolf Totem is an environmentalist tale that follows Beijing student Chen Zhen (Shaofeng Feng), who is assigned to China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to teach its nomadic shepherd population. Instead, Zhen becomes attached to the land, its people, and the balance between them and their most feared enemy, the wolves.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Woman in the Dunes
Josef Krebs  |  Dec 16, 2016  | 
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Stark, disturbing, disorienting, director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) is a masterpiece of macabre metaphor. An entomologist searching for specimens of insects in a desert at the edge of a seaside misses his bus back to Tokyo and is offered to spend the night in the hut of a young widow at the bottom of a sand dune surrounding it on all sides. He discovers the next morning that the ladder has been pulled up by the local villagers trapping him with the woman for years to come.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
World's Greatest Dad (Blu-ray) World's Greatest Dad (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Dec 07, 2009  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/greatdad.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) learns that fame and fortune may not always be the key to happiness when in the wake of a freak accident his lifelong dream of being a famous writer comes to fruition, but at what cost?

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Sep 22, 2009  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/wolverine.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Hugh Jackman returns as the iconic character, revealing his tortured past from boy to man to mutant. Conflicts with his brother Victor Creed (Live Schreiber) his membership in Team X, his adamantium rebirth, and his memory loss all fuel his quest for revenge.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
X-Men Trilogy (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  May 03, 2009  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/xmen.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT><i>Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to grow from a single-cell organism into the dominating species on the planet. This process is slow, taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.</i> &#151;Prof. Charles Frances Xavier

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
X-Men: Days of Future Past–The Rogue Cut
Chris Chiarella  |  Oct 23, 2015  | 
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Remember reading that Oscar winner and True Blood star Anna Paquin was going to reprise her role as the mutant Rogue in the most recent X-Men movie, Days of Future Past? And then the movie came out and she was in exactly two shots with nary a word of dialogue, and even that moment came a scant four-and-a-half minutes before the end? Well, there was in fact more planned for her, and the new “Rogue Cut” reinstates her scenes as part of a rethought, expanded version of the movie. To be frank, it’s largely the same story you’re probably used to. Rogue’s return has minimal impact on the plot, but there are lots of other little changes along the way too, successfully enhancing the overall drama.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Y Tu Mamá También
Fred Kaplan  |  Oct 29, 2014  | 
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Is Y Tu Mamá También (rough translation: So’s your mama) a wry and trenchant story about class, friendship, sexuality, and globalization in a rapidly changing Mexico—or is it a gussied-up piece of soft porn? Both, I think, but it’s all done so affably and naturally (the sociology, the politics, and the porn) that it comes off as a work of great charm and comedy and sadness. A gorgeous young married woman and two rambunctious teenage boys—best friends, one wealthy, one poor but aspiring—take off on a road trip to Mexico’s rural beaches.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Yes Man (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Apr 09, 2009  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/yesman.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Three years after his divorce, Carl Allen (Jim Carrey) still has the blues and dreads going to work at his dead-end job as a loan officer. In order to get a new outlook on life, he attends a self-help seminar led by Terrence Bundley (Terence Stamp), who challenges people to say "yes" to everything. Miraculously, when Carl embraces this philosophy, events lead him to Allison (Zooey Deschanel), and his life takes a turn in the right direction.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
You Again (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Feb 07, 2011  | 
High school can be the best of times or the worst of times, depending on your experience. For Marnie (Kristen Bell), it was the latter. Teased throughout her years because of her acne and not being part of the "in" crowd, her memories are anything but fond. Years after graduation, she heads home to see her brother tie the knot and discovers he's marrying her nemesis (Odette Yustman) from high school.

With a cast that includes Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, and Betty White, one would assume these stars wouldn't attach their names to anything but a surefire hit. Wrong! The laughs are hard to come by, the slapstick is anything but funny, and the ending is vomit educing.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Young Frankenstein
David Vaughn  |  Oct 24, 2008  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/youngfrankenstein.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Summoned to his late grandfather's castle in Transylvania, young Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) soon discovers the scientist's step-by-step manual explaining how to bring a corpse to life. Aided by his loyal assistants, beautiful Inga (Teri Garr) and ghastly Igor (Marty Feldman)&#151;who insists his name is pronounced "eye-gore"&#151;things don't work out so well when he reanimates a body using an abnormal brain.

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