Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews

With Get Out, his first film as writer/director, Jordan Peele introduced us to a refined new form of horror. He was the only filmmaker who could do justice to his Oscar-bound script, finding just the right tone and wringing that last bit of mood from every line, every shot, every performance. Now, with Us, he has raised the stakes, telling a deeper story on a much grander scale.

If your crystal ball predicted that someday the writer/director of There's Something About Mary would take home an Academy Award for Best Picture, let's hope you bet big and didn't smash the thing. Peter Farrelly's Green Book is an emotional smorgasbord, one that would no doubt be appreciated by its ever-famished "hero," Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen). He's a gleefully ignorant yet strangely lovable tough guy (what my people would call a cavone), albeit one who needs to learn a thing or two about race relations. Tony gets his chance when, on a hiatus from his job as a bouncer at The Copacabana, he's hired to chauffeur piano virtuoso Dr. Don Shirley (two-time Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali)—a black man—on a concert tour of the Deep South in 1962.

An animated Spider-Man movie? In the midst of the character's latest live-action reboot? Using six different iterations of the character, all but one of which are only known to die-hard comic book fans? A direct-to-video tie-in, right? Wrong: Not only was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse a big-screen box-office success, it also snagged an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film of 2018.

Widows is a taught crime thriller directed by Oscar-winner Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), who co-wrote the script with author Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl). Based on a British television series, it follows the lives of several women brought together by their husbands' criminal pasts and features an outstanding cast led by an intense performance from Viola Davis, with support from Daniel Kaluuya, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, and others. Told in a stylish and well-paced manner, Widows holds plenty of twists and surprises for the viewer. I found the movie to be thoroughly engrossing.

With his most recent film, First Man, Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle has managed to do something remarkable: take one of the greatest achievements in all humankind and render it as cold as space itself. Astronaut Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) sacrifices much and faces incredible challenges on his way to leaving those first-ever footprints on the moon.

The indisputable success of Bohemian Rhapsody confirms what many of us have known for decades: Queen was one of the biggest rock bands in the world, and their late frontman Freddie Mercury was one of the singularly most polarizing and mesmerizing popular-music performers of the 20th century.

In part because it has now endured for 40 years, but also because it is the sort of thrilling cinematic entertainment we never seem to tire of, Superman has appeared on just about every home entertainment format, and deservedly so. The first comic book blockbuster, director Richard Donner's visually stunning epic stars Christopher Reeve as the only survivor of a brilliant but arrogant alien culture who finds his place in our world as a god-like protector.