Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Cabin in the Woods
Shane Buettner  |  Feb 19, 2013  | 
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What a swift kick in the ass! Co-written and produced by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly on TV, The Avengers), The Cabin in the Woods is the most self-aware and gleefully gory comedy-horror flick since the Scream series devolved into a parody of a parody. As I write this, there are probably forums of fanboys aflame, identifying and exchanging the horror movie references throughout. Its plot practically defies description, but the elevator pitch would be Evil Dead meets The Truman Show.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Chico & Rita
Fred Kaplan  |  Feb 19, 2013  | 
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Chico & Rita is a wonderful movie, a valentine—poignant, sweet, but never sentimental—to Cuban jazz, bebop, and the street scenes of 1940s and ’50s Havana and New York. It’s a sophisticated animation, drawn in an evocative sketch-edged style similar to that of Waltz With Bashir. (It’s based on a graphic novel, a few pages of which are reproduced in the Blu-ray box’s booklet.)
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
School of Rock
David Vaughn  |  Feb 19, 2013  | 
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Kicked out of his band and desperate for work, Dewey Finn intercepts a call meant for his roommate and lands an extended gig as a substitute teacher at Horace Green Elementary, a $15,000-per-year private school in the Northeast. The school’s uptight principal suspects something is amiss when the new teacher is less concerned about the students and is more interested in when the school day ends, but he gets the gig anyway. Dewey’s attitude changes when he hears the kids in their music class and realizes they have some serious potential if he can take them under his wing. He forms his own “classroom band” and involves the entire class with a costume designer, backup singers, security, and even a band manager with two goals in mind—to not get caught by the principal and to win the local Battle of the Bands contest.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews3D Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Titanic
Chris Chiarella  |  Feb 13, 2013  | 
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How do you make a blockbuster film based on the all-too-familiar tale of the doomed luxury liner Titanic? Try giving it a context of modern-day exploration and discovery, weave in a resonant theme of class struggle and the folly of ambitious men, and put at its heart a romance that epitomizes the sweet stupidity of young love. And don’t forget to execute it all with an unprecedented technical genius.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Full Metal Jacket: 25th Anniversary
Corey Gunnestad  |  Feb 13, 2013  | 
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Oliver Stone practically had to sell his soul to get Platoon made at a time when no movie studio wanted to revisit the Vietnam War. After that film won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1986, however, it kicked open the floodgates, and suddenly movie theaters everywhere were inundated with Vietnam War films like Hamburger Hill, Casualties of War, and Full Metal Jacket, and all paled in comparison with Platoon. With Full Metal Jacket, legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick examines the ritualistic dehumanization of the American Marine through rigorous boot camp training and transformation into a remorseless killing machine.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Five-Year Engagement
David Vaughn  |  Feb 11, 2013  | 
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Tom and Violet had the makings of a beautiful relationship. They met at a New Year’s Eve costume party in San Francisco, and exactly one year later, Tom popped the question on a rooftop building with the lit-up Bay Bridge in the background—only in the movies. While in the process of picking a wedding date, Violet gets a chance to study for a year with a noted professor of psychology at University of Michigan. Tom puts his career on hold to allow his future bride to further her education. Her initial study was only supposed to last one year but turns into a permanent position when the professor has ulterior motives. Can their relationship survive?
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Cinderella
Thomas J. Norton  |  Feb 11, 2013  | 
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If you don’t know the Cinderella story, you must have had a deprived childhood. It goes like this: Girl’s father dies, leaving her to live with her evil stepmother and two noxious stepsisters; royal ball is held for all the eligible young women, but Cinderella is left out; cue fairy godmother, coach, dancing with the prince, midnight magic hour, quick exit, search for who fits the glass slipper, yadda, yadda, yadda; wedding bells.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Vintage Hollywood on Blu-ray: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Shane Buettner  |  Feb 06, 2013  | 
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Directed by noir great Robert Aldrich, 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a shocker in its day, from the lurid subject matter to the monumental uniting of two of the silver screen’s greatest actresses (and fiercest rivals), Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, each in her mid-fifties then. It’s a twisted tale of two once-famous, now codependent sisters: Davis’ Jane was famous in childhood as Baby Jane Hudson, while Crawford’s Blanche went on to greater stardom in Hollywood before being hit by a car, presumably driven by jealous Jane, and crippled.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews3D Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Avengers
Thomas J. Norton  |  Feb 05, 2013  | 
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When Marvel Comics’ gang of superheroes—Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, The Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye—get together after the first four of them starred in their own movies, you know something big is up. And it’s no surprise that Loki, Thor’s adopted brother, who teamed up with an army of nasty aliens, is behind it.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Sixteen Candles
Shane Buettner  |  Jan 31, 2013  | 
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Everything worth knowing about teenagers in the 1980s is found in John Hughes’ 1984 directorial debut, Sixteen Candles. This is a perfect movie, capturing it all in just two days in the life of 16-year-old Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald). Sam’s 16th birthday is the day before her older sister’s wedding, and it starts out anything but sweet. Her entire family is so consumed with the wedding details, they forget. Sam heads to the back-to-school dance saddled with her grandparents’ Asian exchange student Long Duk Dong, in love with impossibly sweet campus hunk Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), and chased by relentless freshman geek, Farmer Ted (Anthony Michael Hall). Hilarity, revelations, and romance ensue.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Dark Shadows
Corey Gunnestad  |  Jan 31, 2013  | 
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There was a time long before the Twilight era when vampires were stylishly suave, spoke with heavy European accents, resided in palatial gothic stone mansions, and didn’t get their wardrobes from Abercrombie & Fitch. Based on the popular cult soap opera from the late ’60s that ran for more than 1,200 episodes, Dark Shadows tells the story of a young 18th century aristocrat, Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) who foolishly spurns the love of a vindictive witch ironically named Angelique (Eva Green). Proving that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, Angelique places a curse on him and his entire family line. After witnessing his beloved fiancée take a suicide plunge off a seaside cliff while under a spell, Barnabas is condemned to be a vampire and then promptly sealed in a coffin and buried. And you thought your ex was a raving psychopath.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
La Grande Illusion
Fred Kaplan  |  Jan 23, 2013  | 
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Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion remains, 75 years on, one of the greatest films ever made. To some, it may seem a bit clichéd, but that’s only because so many movies since have cribbed from its plot lines. It takes place in German POW camps during the First World War and was shot on what many recognized at the time as the eve of a Second World War. One of the things it’s about is the world that vanished, for better and for worse, in the two decades between the two wars. There has been much debate over just which “great illusion” Renoir was referring to in his title. Some have assumed it’s war. But this is not a simple anti-war movie; at the end, our French heroes, who have escaped from the camp, can’t wait to get home so they can reenlist in the fighting.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Royal Tenenbaums
Shane Buettner  |  Dec 24, 2012  | 
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Writer/director Wes Anderson’s artsy comedies are so distinct, you’d never mistake a single frame of his movies for anyone else’s. 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums showcases many of his hallmarks and themes: a mixed family of blood and adopted relatives separating and then banding together to overcome collective dysfunction, oddly brilliant characters whose clothes are identity uniforms, a simultaneous embracing and lampooning of academia, a labyrinthine set that functions like a cross between a playhouse and a fort, and a nice role for the great character actor Seymour Cassel. It’s Anderson’s most polarizing film in terms of accessibility, but it’s also his funniest.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Best of the Boxes: 2012’s Best Blu-ray Collections
Chris Chiarella  |  Dec 18, 2012  | 
What better gift than a Blu-ray box set? We cherry pick the best of the best so you don't have to hunt to find that perfect gift for a family member, special friend or... yourself.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Deep Blue Sea
Shane Buettner  |  Dec 12, 2012  | 
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For those who found Revolutionary Road too upbeat comes its British postwar counterpart in the soul-crushing slog that is The Deep Blue Sea (for those hoping to read a review of Renny Harlin’s guilty pleasure of a shark movie, the title of that is simply Deep Blue Sea, so sorry to disappoint you!). Set in 1950 post-war London, The Deep Blue Sea gives us Hester (Rachel Weisz), a smart, cultured, and ardent woman at a time when none of those traits was apparently valued in British society. Hester leaves her staid marriage to a wealthy judge old enough to be her father (and who looks old enough to be her grandfather), falling in for a fiery affair with a handsome pilot nearer her age named Freddie (Tom Hiddleston, or Loki to Avengers fans out there). The drag is, Freddie’s rather a creep and has issues with both commitment and finding gainful employment.
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