Blu-ray Movie Reviews

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/dothing.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Spike Lee's 20-year-old masterpiece depicts the racial tensions in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, but the film has aged well. While not as polished as a day-and-date release, this catalog title features outstanding color saturation, excellent detail, clear dialog, and a great surround-sound demo scene in the third act right before all hell breaks loose. Sure, the subject matter is heavy and thought provoking, but it looks and sounds fantastic too!

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/dothing.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>It's the hottest day of the year in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. As the thermometer rises, so do tempers in the racially charged atmosphere. Local Italian pizza man Sal (Danny Aiello), proprietor of Sal's Famous, runs the restaurant with his two sons and employs Mookie (Spike Lee) as their delivery boy. When local radical Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) takes umbrage with the restaurant's lack of "brothers" on its "wall of fame," all hell breaks loose when the businessmen are pushed too far and the police must intercede.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/zhiv.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Doctor/poet Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is married to Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), an aristocratic girl with whom he raises a family. The good doctor is also in love with Lara (Julie Christie) and over a span of many years he's brought together and separated from each of the woman. While he deeply loves Tonya, his poetic side longs for Lara.

Donnie Darko is the 2001 indie cult film from Richard Kelly (Southland Tales). Set in the 1980s, the film is an amalgam of sci-fi, psycho-thriller, and horror that’s an early new-millennium answer to the John Hughes films of the 1980s. The titular character, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a disaffected high school student in suburban Middlesex living with his college-age sister (played by sister Maggie), his mother and, and younger sister. Donnie deals with psychological problems that cause him to see a 6-foot-tall rabbit named Frank that tells him the world is going to end in less than a month.

The cover art and title for filmmaker Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling is rather misleading. We could be excused for thinking that we are about to sit down to watch some sort of romantic drama, but on the contrary, the film is a psychological thriller in the vein of The Stepford Wives, if not an indirect remake of that film.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/doubt.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Set in 1964 at St. Nicholas Church in the Bronx, Fr. Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is accused by principal Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) of inappropriate conduct with 12-year-old Donald Miller (Joseph Foster), the school's first black student. Is Fr. Flynn's interest deviant or is he just looking out for the well being of a social outcast? John Patrick Shanley's Oscar-nominated scrip deals with truth, emotion, and belief, and asks if any decision is ever free from doubt.

Dr. Strangelove is one of the great American films: not just a savage anti-war satire but a jeremiad against the mechanization (and resulting dehumanization) that spawned the nuclear-war machine and might turn a burst of insanity into the death of all life on the planet. (The film’s subtitle: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”) It was an amazingly daring movie for its time: early 1964, the peak of Cold War tensions, barely a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, on the eve of escalation in Vietnam—and here’s Stanley Kubrick, joined by Terry Southern, author of Candy, The Magic Christian, and other naughty novels, portraying the top brass as mentally off, our political leaders as feckless, and the holy of military holies, the nuclear deterrent, as a Doomsday Machine. And it’s funny as hell!