DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

Equal parts dishy expose and intimate confession, My Week With Marilyn is the fact-based memoir of Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) that recounts a brief period during the summer of 1956, in which the life of the lowly aspiring filmmaker crossed ...

Bigger than Ben-Hur’ has been in the world’s vernacular for generations, and having just seen the film for the first time in 30 years, William Wyler’s epic quickly reminded this reviewer why. For a film made in the 50s, the sheer scale of this production makes ...

It’s hard to reconcile fifteen years has already gone by since Wes Craven struck gold twice with a new horror franchise. It’s equally hard to reconcile that this style of self-referential and self-aware horror is nothing but a cliché. But of course ...

News broke that the Weinsteins were bringing Scream back to the masses, ten years after the last one. It actually got a lot of folk excited. I had forgotten what a good film Scream was and just filed it in ‘don’t give a shit’ with most of the horror ...

There are few genre fans in the world that don’t know the name Guillermo del Toro, but in 1997 he was still a relatively unknown entity to the western world. The Spanish director was hired by the Weinsteins to helm what was originally conceived as ...

If not because of its twisty, turny plot chock full of delicious intrigue and deception, then Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy cements itself as a rock in the pantheon of great spy thrillers with its strong performances. Especially from Gary Oldman, who commands every frame of the film and will ...

Tackling the territory of camp and schlock films from the 1950s with even more camp and schlock requires a bit of skill as those films, while insanely entertaining, were usually never meant to be the stuff of self-referential spoof.  Writers/directors Adam Rifkin ...

There are several things Steve McQueen’s Shame isn’t trying to be.  Sexy is one of them.  The titillating aspects of its explicit sexual content – as this is a movie about sex addiction – are icily downplayed in favor of a fascinating character ...

Writer/Director Wes Anderson is sort of a modern-day filmmaking hero of mine.  From the opening few minutes of Bottle Rocket, I felt I had a socially awkward brother out there; another who grew up on Woody Allen films and knew too much about The Kinks for ...

The sense of dread that comes bubbling from the soil of Martha Marcy May Marlene is an oily one indeed.  Sticky and messy, it is also rich with promise.  Within minutes, the pastoral opening of men slinging their tools and women prepping meals shifts seamlessly ...

Tom Cruise might be returning as Ethan Hunt but director Brad Bird, responsible for helming the beloved animated films Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles, is the real hero of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.  His live-action debut is a ...

Four years after they struck cinematic gold with the oddball indie hit Juno, Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman are at it again, but this time minus the slangy clangor and stylistic flourishes for which they were so unfairly derided in the film that made it fun to laugh at teen pregnancy. Ironically, this ...

Produced by Lawrence Bender, directed by Scott Spiegel (writer of Evil Dead 2) and starring Sam and Ted Raimi, Intruder is exactly the type of supermarket slasher film you’d expect from those wacky minds.  Intruder has one hand slopped in a bucket of gore and the other hand in the era of slapstick ...

Celebrating the 20^th anniversary of Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer, Disney – at long last – allows the film to breathe a bit in spectacular High Definition.  Let the fist pumping and high-fives begin!  Created by writer/illustrator Dave Stevens, the character ...

Love is a funny thing and, in the hands of master comedian Buster Keaton, it is celebrated as a fantastic riot of elaborate setpieces and outrageous stunts.  Seven Chances, from 1925, is Keaton’s sweet answer to the subtleties ...