Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews

It's around this time of year that a few disparate "guy" movies new to the format or re-released usually pop up on Blu-ray or Ultra HD Blu-ray. That's because, as I've said since the early DVD days, discs make fantastic gifts, and not just for Father's Day. But Sony chose a different path for 2020, opening the door of its vast and prestigious Columbia Pictures vault to debut six titles on 4K Blu-ray as the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 1.

Right out of the gate with Cronos, his first feature film, director Guillermo del Toro displayed a keen eye that would serve him well throughout his career. It’s a vampire story… kind of, as a rich old man is seeking a legendary device that can supposedly impart eternal life, but with some dark side effects. When the golden doodad comes into the possession of a humble antiques dealer, violent and unpredictable events begin to unfold. Anyone looking for a well-executed offbeat horror would do well to check out Cronos.

A lot was riding on Wade Wilson’s red-spandex-clad shoulders. Not only did he have to save his friends, his world, and reality as we know it (more on that in a moment), but he had to stick the landing of his movie trilogy and resuscitate the notoriously flagging Marvel Cinematic Universe. And with his audacious threequel, Deadpool & Wolverine, he did it.

April 20, 2010 started out like any other day for oil rig chief of maintenance Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) and superintendent Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell). As its shore leave ends, the crew boards a helicopter for the flight out into the Gulf of Mexico to begin their duty on Deepwater Horizon, an offshore rig. Standard protocol is broken when the old crew leaves and the new one arrives, raising the suspicions of Harrell that something is amiss. The project is overdue and over budget, and BP is doing whatever it can to cut costs—penny wise, pound foolish.

As students on their warm weather break wend their way through their summer reading lists, we tender to SoundandVision.com’s visitors our first-ever Summer Watching List, a menagerie of 4K discs, HD Blu-rays and DVDs selected to entertain us and perhaps even distract from the worldwide heat records that have been broken thus far.

From debut seasons of hot TV shows to complete series, from kid-friendly to adults-only animation, from magnificent restorations of genre classics to reissues of popular film franchises that are returning to the multiplex this season, you’ll find plenty of reasons to hole up in the home theater with the air conditioner blasting and your ice cubes clinking.

Tensions, rivalries, banter, squabbling, self-aggrandizement, and, above all, putdowns add to the hot air on this day in the life of Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn as the 98 percent Black (down to 70 percent in the last census) community and small mix of Hispanics, Whites, and Asians try to get along during a sweltering summer.

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.