DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

A small little underdog of a movie: it’s hard to believe but that’s exactly what Silence of the Lambs was. It was a film nobody wanted to make. Gene Hackman, who had paid for half the rights, bowed out, claiming it was too violent; Michelle Pfeiffer rejected the soon to be Oscar-winning role for the ...

Achieving the impossible is easy. All one needs is a clear vision, a lofty dream, and a brazen plan to make it come true, right? At least that’s what Richard Williams would have us believe. After all, Williams – father of tennis greats Venus and Serena – had a vision in the late ‘70s that two ...

This low budget ($300,000 USD) slasher film, made by a USC graduate in the late 70s, would spawn countless sequels and give its backers some serious profits, the world horror auteur John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis. Those things make the love for this simple tale worth it alone. It’s cementing  ...

Only three years after Halloween swept the world up in the antics of Michael Myers, John Carpenter reluctantly returned to write the follow up, after pressure from Akkad and especially producer Irwin Yablans. Halloween 2 would be financed, written, filmed and released in 1981. They didn’t mess  ...

In today’s world of divisiveness and animosity fueled by the 24 hour news cycle that mines its content from our dissimilarities and opposing views, we could all be better served by appreciating and accepting the connections that allow us to understand one another. That’s the central  ...

The run of Daniel Craig as James Bond comes to its stunning and long delayed conclusion with No Time to Die, an action-packed spectacle of fun and tears that seriously delivers.  For “final” Bond films, this one satisfies on every level connecting the dots and plot points of previous entries  ...

Eddie Brock has a BIG secret! It takes a couple of views, but Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a fun, fast-paced flick that, easy to swallow, gets straight to the point as Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) continues to live with the unwanted shape-shifting symbiote known as Venom (also voiced by ...

In just five short years since the much-maligned Spider-Man 3, Marvel’s Spider-Man gets the rebooted remake in Marc Webb’s thrilling The Amazing Spider-Man.  While, before seeing the picture, one could argue the rationale of such a move on Columbia’s part, the necessity however becomes  ...

Wasted talent. That’s the most economical way to sum up The 355, a female-led globetrotting espionage action thriller that finds its multi-racial cast of Hollywood A-listers muddling through a script so lazily written it gives generic a bad name  ...

Perhaps one of, if not the most important film movement in cinema’s history is that of the French New Wave, that made its audacious emergence in the late 1950’s and lasted until about the late 1960’s. Throwing out every rule of the dominating studio system, this movement took to the streets  ...

Well, this one definitely flew under the radar.  After its initial premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Mass quietly made its festival rounds, then only to be played in a very few select theaters, until finally in December, it got a VOD release, and now, to the thanks of Bleeker Street, we finally are  ...

Ghostface is back! Though it has been ten real-life years since we last saw the sad-faced masked murderer on the big screen, he’s still terrorizing the teens of the fictional town of Woodsboro where all the killing began some 25 years ago in 1996’s Scream ...

Ah, yes, there WILL BE blood.  Double Walker, one of my favorite independent offerings from last year, arrives on Blu-ray via Kino Lorber and its recent partnership with Cranked Up Films.  While it has no bonus features, this release is certainly very welcomed ...

“Are you looking for laughs…or are you soul searching?” The reception of Douglas Sirk films have been…let’s say: mixed. Audiences of the time of its release in 1956 flocked to his pictures, but critics of the time dismissed his melodramas. They figured them as being too concerned with ...

There’s no aliens invading or giant tsunami waves or even an earth-killing meteor on its way. No, this classic keeps it simple. With Robert Aldrich in the director’s chair and Hollywood legend, James Stewart, leading the charge, The Flight of the Phoenix is a well-written, old-school disaster movie ...