Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
It Chapter Two
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Jan 31, 2020  |  0 comments
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It Chapter Two picks up 27 years after the kids from The Losers Club in the first film have grown up and moved on with their lives. The killer clown Pennywise has returned, and a phone call from an old friend brings them all back to the town of Derry where they must face their fears and confront a past that has damaged them in more ways than they know.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
It Happened One Night
Fred Kaplan  |  Mar 04, 2015  |  1 comments
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A charmer of a film, deeper, even grittier than its Capra-corn romantic populism might suggest, It Happened One Night swept the 1934 Oscars—winning Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Screenplay, and Director—and if it hadn’t edged out The Thin Man in doing so, I’d say, Bravo, well deserved. The story is a classic class-crossing fable: A spoiled rich girl runs away from her father to join the king she wants to marry; a hardscrabble newspaperman finds her, blackmails her into letting him come along to write a story; they take to the road, by bus, foot, thumb, and jalopy, squabbling, scolding, and, of course, falling in love with each other.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Chris Chiarella  |  Jun 06, 2014  |  0 comments
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Patently rejecting the notion that brevity is the soul of wit, IaMMMMW is Hollywood’s first (and last?) “epic comedy,” clocking in at two hours and 24 minutes in its popular version. Just about every A-list comedy actor of the era is involved in this sprawling tale of some everyday folk who drop everything for an unplanned dash to find a deceased criminal’s buried loot.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
It's Complicated (Blu-ray) It's Complicated (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Apr 22, 2010  |  0 comments

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/complicated.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Jane (Meryl Streep) has spent the past 10 years raising three children, running a popular Santa Barbara bakery, and surviving a bitter divorce from Jake (Alec Baldwin), who has since remarried a much younger woman. While attending their son's college graduation in New York, Jane and Jake partake in one too many bottles of wine and end up in the sack complicating both of their lives. Was it a one night stand or has the old flame been rekindled?

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
It's Kind of a Funny Story (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Feb 09, 2011  |  0 comments
Craig (Keir Gilchrist) is a stressed-out teenager who checks himself into a mental health clinic after having fantasies of committing suicide. What he finds on the inside is an unlikely mentor in Bobby (Zach Galifianakis), a potential girlfriend in Noel (Emma Roberts), and the opportunity to discover who he truly is.

Sometimes seeing a film you have never heard of can be a blessing, and such is the case here. This is a human interest story about the stresses of being a teenager and fitting into the tidy little boxes from the perspective of your friends and parents, despite what you own wishes and dreams. Gilchrist does an outstanding job in the lead role, but it's Galifianakis who steals the show as the quirky mentor.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
J. Edgar
David Vaughn  |  Feb 24, 2012  |  0 comments

Clint Eastwood is arguably one of the best directors in Hollywood, and even though he's in the twilight of his life, he doesn't seem to be slowing down. While J. Edgar won't be considered one of his better films, I enjoyed it a lot more than most of the critics due to the fabulous acting by Leonardo DiCaprio and the historical significance of the subject. The Blu-ray boasts an above-average video encode with solid detail and intentionally understated colors, but the DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack is the true star of the show due to reference-quality imaging, dynamics, and frequency response.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Jack Reacher
Chris Chiarella  |  Nov 08, 2013  |  0 comments
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You take on some baggage when your movie stars Tom Cruise. He’s been a box office titan for decades, so you’re improving your chances of a hit. On the other hand, ever since the couch-jumping incident, he tends to bring a certain off-screen persona that rubs a lot of folks the wrong way. Plus, a leading man of his magnitude tends to be Tom first, character second.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
Corey Gunnestad  |  Jun 02, 2017  |  0 comments
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Tom Cruise is back as Jack Reacher, the ex-Army major, now aimless drifter hitchhiking around America carrying nothing with him but the clothes on his back and his cell phone. When an Army colleague that he’s never met, Major Susan Turner, is arrested on suspicion of espionage, Reacher takes it upon himself to investigate and clear her name. He of course knows she’s innocent because they’ve flirted on the phone and she’s surprisingly hot for an Army major.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
Josef Krebs  |  Sep 19, 2014  |  0 comments
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Jack Ryan’s creator, writer Tom Clancy, had the hero of his first book, The Hunt for Red October, trying to outwit the Soviets during the Cold War. Shadow Recruit presents his back story, beginning with Jack still in his college years. Yet, surprisingly, it’s the 9/11 attacks that motivate him to take his analytical skills to Afghanistan to help fight the war. Nevertheless, it works. And instead of staying behind a desk, Jack’s soon out in a helicopter with soldiers on a mission, getting shot down, badly injuring his spine, but saving two of his men. So it’s no surprise that, after heroically forcing himself to learn to walk again, he’s recruited by The Company.
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Jack the Giant Slayer
Thomas J. Norton  |  Nov 25, 2013  |  0 comments
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The old fairy tail of Jack and the Beanstalk has been a staple in movies and television, with versions including Disney’s Mickey and the Beanstalk, several Looney Tunes cartoons, a segment in the recent Puss in Boots animated feature, a recent TV episode of Once Upon a Time, and even a 1952 Abbot and Costello movie. In Jack the Giant Slayer, teen Jack trades his uncle’s horse and cart for those magic beans.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
Chris Chiarella  |  May 15, 2014  |  0 comments
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Bearing the lofty Jackass mantle, this feature film eschews the basic format of the erstwhile MTV series, which bombarded viewers with a string of standalone stunts and running jokes performed by a brave troupe with a high tolerance for pain. Instead, Bad Grandpa emulates the Borat model, crafting a basic plot and characters as a scripted backdrop for multiple outrageous set pieces that unfold before unsuspecting bystanders.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
James and the Giant Peach (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Aug 03, 2010  |  0 comments
A young boys life is turned upside down when his parents pass away and he's sent to live as a virtual slave with his two witch-like aunts. One evening he risks life and limb in order to save a spider and in the process gains possession of some magic crocodile tongues from a mysterious man. When he spills them in the garden a humongous magical peach grows on a dead tree that turns out to be his ticket to freedom.

Inspired by Roald Dahl's children's book and brought to the screen by producer Tim Burton and director Henry Selick, James and the Giant Peach was a box office bomb but has found a cult-like following on home video. I had caught portions of the movie over the years but this was my first time watching it in full and I'm not that impressed. The stop motion animation is good, but slow pacing and dreary visuals didn't impress me.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
James Bond Blu-ray Volume One & Two
David Vaughn  |  Oct 24, 2008  |  0 comments

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/bond1.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>His name is Bond, James Bond, Ian Flemming's immortal action hero who has graced the silver screen for over 45 years. Everyone has their favorite Bond&#151;is it Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, George Lazenby, or Daniel Craig, the latest actor to prefer his martinis shaken, not stirred?

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Jane Eyre
Joshua Zyber  |  Sep 28, 2011  |  0 comments
According to the painstaking research I performed before writing this review (i.e., looking at Wikipedia for all of five minutes), Charlotte Brontë’s proto-feminist novel (I cribbed that phrase right from the wiki, FYI) had been adapted at least 15 times for the silver screen and an additional 10 for television before this year’s revival. That’s to say nothing of the other numerous attempts to sequelize, prequelize, or retell the story in literary form. What is it about this book that inspires so many people to tell the story until someone finally gets it right?

The latest Jane Eyre comes from director Cary Fukunaga, an American filmmaker of Swedish and Japanese descent whose only previous feature was the Mexican gangster film Sin Nombre. In other words, he’s exactly the first person you’d think of to make a British period romance starring an Australian actress and German-Irish leading man. The mind reels.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Jason Bourne
Corey Gunnestad  |  Apr 14, 2017  |  1 comments
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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.
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