Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Oscar-nominated for best picture, direction, and screenplay, Licorice Pizza is a story of first love between a 15-year-old kid and a woman of 25 who's working at his high school. From their first conversation, Gary (Cooper Hoffman) pushes for a date, which Alana (Alana Heim), resists aggressively, but having already become a minor TV and film star and successful entrepreneur, he's soon able to charm her.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/life.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT><i>Planet Earth</i> is one of the best documentaries of the new millennium and The Discovery Channel and the BBC join forces to bring us closer to how life begins on our planet with a view from every continent and habitat. Witness 130 stories in fabulous high-definition.

Ang Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s “unfilmable” book is a hypnotic rumination on the nature of religion as a source of strength and inspiration but also exploring faith’s common tendency toward allegory as the means to an end. We meet a very spiritual college professor named Pi whose past comes alive in a series of flashbacks as he tells his story to a novelist eager to write his next book. Pi was once shipwrecked and lost at sea for 227 days, already a sufficiently fascinating tale, but to make the ordeal even more extraordinary, he had to share his predicament with a fully grown Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Their surprising relationship is masterfully dramatized in a series of indelible images, their odyssey recounted with an unending sense of wonder and a contagious love for the beauty of nature.

It’s a long-held myth that the average human being can access only about 10 percent of their brain capacity at any given time. For me, it happens to be true, and that’s on a good day, but I digress. Now imagine if you could take a pill that would give you complete and total brain function. The possibilities would be, well, limitless.

This is a drug that’s so new it doesn’t even have a street name yet. This is life on fast forward, it’s David Fincher on acid, and it’s one hell of a ride. When the effect wears off, though, it’s straight back to Stupidville, and you’re royally screwed if your supply runs out. Bradley Cooper is the washed-up writer who happens upon the drug in a chance meeting, and his life takes some very drastic turns—for better and worse.

After his brother-in-law ruins his marriage with his philandering ways, Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) is his father-in-law's (Robert DeNiro) last hope to assume the role as the family patriarch (aka, "The Godfocker"). When a beautiful pharmaceutical rep (Jessica Alba) enters the scene, Greg must repel her sexual advances in order to keep his marriage sacred and not lose the new found admiration from the family patriarch.

After being skewered by critics in its theatrical run, I had extremely low expectations for the third installment of the trials and tribulations of Greg Focker. While it doesn't measure up to the first film (or the second), there are quite a few laughs, especially when Stiller and DeNiro share the screen together. Unfortunately the screenplay doesn't flow very well and I expected to see more of the kids given the title of the film, but their time on screen is very limited.

Although he’s never seen combat, Major William Cage crosses the wrong general and finds himself on the front lines of a D-Day-like battle in France where he stands no chance of survival against an onslaught of ridiculously superior alien invaders. Within minutes of landing on the beach, he’s killed by one of those aliens, but instead of heading toward a white light, he instantly wakes up the day before the attack, and now he is destined to live that day over and over. In lieu of becoming alien fodder again, he hooks up with a heroic Special Forces warrior, and they hatch a plan to get Cage trained for battle and embark on a journey to rid the planet of the aliens for good.