DVD Reviews

The first thing you need to understand about Skyfall is that it's nothing like any of the other James Bond films you've seen. One of the grand things about Bond films is the variety of directors who approach the character, as well as the writer who pens the script...

Dan O’Bannon and John Carpenter’s crudely crafted science fiction comedy gets new life this month on blu-ray thanks to the archival efforts of VCI Entertainment.  Amazing that this film began its life as a student film project all those years ago and, while it’s ...

Greed and revenge are two of the most primal motivators in all of storytelling.  Combine these elements with a fantastical setting that practically bleeds brooding splendor and you have the dense dragontastic beginnings of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, a ...

Hollywood simply does not (and cannot afford to) make films as powerfully epic as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.  The Best Picture winner of 1962 - rather expensively shot on location in Jordan, Morocco, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and in Spain - is a masterfully ...

One of the most frustrating things this reviewer sees every Christmas is the list of perennial favourite festive season movies to watch, and this not on it. Richard Donner took time out from blowing shit up in Lethal Weapon movies to guide Bill Murray through ...

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 ...

Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy and American Dad, knows a thing or two about subversive comedy.  With Ted, he creates a live-action movie about a teddy bear that comes to life as part of a lonely boy’s falling star wish and the military technology that hard-wires ...

Much like the actual midnight raid that resulted in the discovery of and immediate killing of Osama bin Laden, Katheryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty sneaks up and packs a mighty powerful emotional wallop upside the head.  It’s an unsuspecting final result, to be sure ...

Something is wrong with the children of Mars and only Santa Claus can solve their mystery moodiness.  With enough misguided Christmas cheer to make the Hallmark channel all a-quiver with silent fright, a band of goofy green Martians (wearing green tights ...

“A Liberal Arts education will solve all your problems,” jokes writer/director/actor Josh Radnor (from CBS’ How I Met Your Mother).  It’s an ironic statement from the character he plays in his own Liberal Arts and one that certainly complicates matters between his ...

Judd Apatow is an unquestionably funny filmmaker. The man’s comedic genius knows no bounds of either box office potential or human decency. With his signature comedies The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, he showed that injecting a story with a warm heart and ...

Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk With Me reads more as a testimony from within the bleak halls of a go-nowhere relationship than about his marvelously dry stand-up comedy routine.  Yes, he sleepwalks and jokes about suffering from an REM behavior ...

Pixar’s first foray into fairy tale territory started life out as The Bear and the Bow, went through a change of directors—losing their first female director, Brenda Chapman to the usually quoted creative differences—and came out the other end ...

After the fiasco that was 1995’s Judge Dredd, fans of the popular character from British anthology 2000AD would wait almost two decades to see their beloved anti-hero return to the big screen. The order of the day for writer Alex Garland was to tell it straight ...

While it certainly isn’t high art and, at times, as awful as you expect it to be from the wrong-headed trailers, Texas Chainsaw 3D – being billed as the direct sequel to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original (and the only in a long line of sequels to claim as such) – isn’t, much ...

With a rat-a-tat throwback style that echoes the gangster films of yesteryear and a fedora-wearing swagger that suggests dark alleys and women with dangerous curves, director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less) brings audiences back to the ...