Brandon A. DuHamel

Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Resident Evil: Vendetta
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Nov 10, 2017  |  3 comments
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Resident Evil: Vendetta picks up the mantle yet again for the Capcom strain of this popular video-game franchise. Sticking to the animé-oriented roots and offering some visceral action without the frenzied camera panning and ADD editing of the live-action The Final Chapter, the film brings together favorites from the franchise. Game characters Leon S. Kennedy (voiced my Matthew Mercer), Chris Redfield (Kevin Dorman), and Rebecca Chambers (Erin Cahill) battle wanted bioterrorist Glenn Arias (John DeMita), who plans to release a deadly virus in New York City as revenge for the government killing his wife.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Ronin
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Oct 27, 2017  |  2 comments
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Ronin is director John Frankenheimer’s 1998 crime thriller, with a script co-written by David Mamet (under a pen name) and featuring an all-star cast headlined by Robert De Niro and Jean Reno. This gritty film borrows heavily from classic genre predecessors such as The French Connection, Le Cercle Rouge, and Bullitt. It follows a former U.S. intelligence agent (De Niro) working with a group of mercenaries trying to track down a package being pursued by both Irish and Russian interests.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Donnie Darko
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Oct 20, 2017  |  0 comments
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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.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Power Rangers
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Sep 29, 2017  |  0 comments
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The long-running Japanese franchise Power Rangers is rebooted in this 2017 film from director Dean Israelite and writer John Gatins. The somewhat camp story follows a group of teen misfits who uncover a collection of ancient artifacts and a buried alien ship; endowed with superpowers, the teens must muster their new powers and learn to work together to save the world. Power Rangers is hardly high art, and it never has been. The American version of the series was culled from stock Japanese footage edited together with new English-speaking scenes.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Beauty and the Beast
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Sep 01, 2017  |  0 comments
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Director Bill Condon brings his experience adapting the Broadway smash Dreamgirls to this lavish, live-action reimagining of Disney’s 1991 Golden Globe–winning (Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical) animated film Beauty and the Beast. The CGI-laden visual spectacle stars the lovely Emma Watson as the titular beauty Belle who is imprisoned in a castle by an irascible prince cursed by a witch for his failure to aid her on a stormy night and forced to live life out as the Beast (Dan Stevens).
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Unforgiven
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Aug 25, 2017  |  0 comments
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Unforgiven marked another turning point for Clint Eastwood and the Western genre. The deconstructed Western stars Eastwood as aged outlaw Bill Munny, who, after years of living a reformed life, is dragged back into his old ways. His wife has passed, and his pig farm is struggling, so an offer to avenge a brutalized prostitute is too much to pass up. He enlists his old running mate, Ned (Morgan Freeman), and they set off with the young “Schofield Kid” to collect the bounty.
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Doctor Strange
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Jun 30, 2017  |  1 comments
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Marvel explores its mystical side is in this mind-bending, psychedelic entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe directed by Scott Derrickson. Benedict Cumberbatch plays brilliant but egotistical neurosurgeon Dr. Stephen Strange, who loses the use of his hands, and subsequently his career, when he crashes his supercar. Strange travels to Kathmandu seeking a supernatural cure for his injuries. There, an immortal sorceress, the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), accepts him as her pupil, trains him in the mystic arts, and turns him into a powerful sorcerer.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Moonlight
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Jun 30, 2017  |  0 comments
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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.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Cinema Paradiso
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Jun 02, 2017  |  0 comments
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The entertainment glitterati love a work that glorifies the history and existence of themselves. Just look at the praise lavished upon such films like the neo-silent The Artist or the arguably overrated La La Land to get a sense of how much Hollywood is willing to revel in its own nostalgia. Writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 semiautobiographical paean to the films that framed his coming of age in Southern Italy revolving around the titular Cinema Paradiso movie theater is a prime example of such a work.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Phantasm: Ravager
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Apr 07, 2017  |  0 comments
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Thirty-seven years after the horror franchise Phantasm debuted, director Don Coscarelli passes the directorial reins to David Hartman for what is being billed as the final installment in the popular mind-twisting series. Although there isn’t much left here for fans of the original to really cling to, there is a sense of the series getting back to its roots. Actor Reggie Bannister returns as Reggie, and other series regulars A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, and Kathy Lester also return for a tale that brings the story right into the core of the Tall Man’s (Angus Scrimm reprising his role) home world.
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