Blu-ray Movie Reviews

This coming-of-age drama is notable for a lot more than the Oscar night flub seen around the world that ultimately had the film walking away with the Best Picture statuette. It’s a beautifully captured movie set in three distinct acts and, notably, one of the few dramas about the black American experience to be recognized that is not overtly concerned with slavery, the civil rights struggle, or institutionalized violence against said community, although one could make an argument about the undercurrent of those issues running through the story.

Director Ang Lee’s middling story really isn’t the reason to force your way through this film; it’s the innovative photography that’s worth your time. Lee shot the film at 120 frames per second, which is a perfect multiplier of the UHD Blu-ray’s 60 fps and Blu-ray/Blu-ray 3D’s 24 fps, so it made it easy on Sony to release the film on multiple formats and into theaters.

The brave, spirited non-princess of the title is still learning how to lead her village when a when a mysterious curse befalls their island. Despite a lifetime of warnings from her father the chief, she sets sail upon an epic journey to save her people, seeking the help of a misunderstood demigod along the way. A tale of destiny, selflessness, and family, Moana is filled with beauty, magic, and wonder and is among the very finest films to ever come from Disney.

Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) finds himself in Italy suffering a bout of amnesia. When he awakes, he’s in a strange hospital room where an attractive doctor, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), is caring for him and tries to explain how he ended up in Florence, Italy. Before you know it, an assassin attacks the hospital, and Langdon and Brooks are on the run trying to figure out who wants him dead. As the pieces fall into place, Langdon discovers he’s on the hunt for Dante-inspired clues leading the pair on a chase to save the world from a crazy billionaire (Ben Foster) who has a diabolical plan for the planet.

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.

This is the funniest classic film that doesn’t star the Marx Brothers and one of the best—certainly the most frantic—newspaper movies (outgunned only by the very different All the President’s Men). It also marks the peak in director Howard Hawks’ fling with super-fast pace and overlapping dialogue, which he’d pioneered over the previous two years, with Bringing Up Baby and Only Angels Have Wings, and which influenced many future directors, notably Robert Altman.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s best film by far, has often been called an “anti-Western,” but that’s a bit off. The plot is pure Western: A stranger comes to a frontier town, builds it up; bad guys come to kill him and take it away; he tracks them down on the street and kills them first; and oh, yes, there’s a whore with a heart of gold. The difference here is that the plot is infused with circa-1900 realism: The stranger’s a bit of a dunce; the town is a muddy mess; the bad guys are corporate poachers; our man kills them by shooting them in the back, and afterward he dies in the snow from gunshot wounds while the townsfolk put out a fire in an unused church; and, oh, the whore is also a shrewd merchant with an opium habit.