DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

Rise of the Guardians, directed by Peter Ramsey, is what happens when various figures from our collective calendar holidays team up to play superhero against a soul-sucking force that threatens to steal their target audience away from them. The intelligence ...

Social taboos be damned! Opening with a statement that reads, “This picture is dedicated to those who are disturbed by today’s lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment”, 1974’s House of Whipcord opens a brand new gore-ific ...

Riddle me this, dear readers.  What’s sexy and snarky and full of enough world mythology tidbits to please any serious fan of Joseph Campbell? Here’s a hint.  It’s Canadian. Here’s another hint.  You probably aren’t watching it. Ah, you’re getting warmer ...

In the 1980s, DC Comics took their tales of Batman to new heights. Years before Tim Burton took the helm as director of Batman (1989), Frank Miller and Alan Moore took the Dark Knight to new heights and new intense worlds. Many of these graphic novels and ...

Andrew Dominick has a history with making movies like this. Back in 2007 he penned the screenplay The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a movie as long as it's title, that on paper was epic but ultimately failed to be.. It was bloated in ...

The Day is as trying and as bleak as its opening scene – of five savaged survivors on a wearily constant move - suggests.  Too bad it’s also as empty as the road they travel as far as meaningful film experiences go.  The drab post-apocalyptic setting suggests ...

For a kid who grew up in the Eighties, Saturday morning cartoons were a heavenly institution. Six solid hours of animated splendour! And, as the years progressed, and the likes of Transformers, Masters of the Universe, The Smurfs, (and I could ...

When asking someone what their favourite Disney film is, one rarely if ever hears this 1950’s era adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s immortal play mentioned. Yet, it is a favoured entry amongst the entertainment elite, with Stephen Spielberg doing a live-action sequel to ...

After E.T. stormed the box office and captured the hearts of about every kid in existence at the time, studios predictably tried their own riffs on the child/alien combo film with varying degrees of success. Setting aside any cynical viewpoint as to why the Eighties ...

Spielberg’s recurring motif of fathers and sons gets a cat-and-mouse twist in this comedic caper from 2002.  Starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio, Catch Me If You Can gets much of its gusto from their remarkable performances and Spielberg, working with ...

Anthology horror, especially if you grew up in the 1980s and thrived on those awfully bloody VHS finds you discovered, rarely gets any better than V/H/S.  That being said, if you don’t have a clue as to what the term VHS is referring to then this film is simply not for ...

If this is the future of filmmaking, count me out.  I hate to say it, folks.  It seems that writer/director Peter Jackson might have gone the way of Star Wars guru George Lucas.  In look, in tone, in spirit, and in adventure Jackson's long awaited and eagerly anticipated ...

The debut feature film of writer/director Benh Zeitlin is an unshakable force of nature that is not soon forgotten.  Winner of the Camera d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival as well as the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival ...

You’ve probably never heard of this film (and I suppose I’d worry about you if you had).  Be that as it may, the producers of Death Valley were betting that it’d be a hit back in the day with horror hounds and gore girls across America.  In 1982, Universal took another ...

Michael Ritchie’s The Island, written by Jaws scribe Peter Benchley and based upon his book, might have sunken quickly at the box office during its original deployment in 1980 but that hasn’t stopped it from coasting on a new wave of popularity ...