DVD Reviews

Get On Up director Tate Taylor faces head-on the overwhelming challenges inherent to creating the all-encompassing biopic. His story of musician James Brown could have easily become just another conventionally-told rags-to-riches story tailor made for VH1. And  ...

It isn’t quite January just yet but Liam Neeson’s next big action flick is already in theaters.  That’s right, Neeson – our beloved “January Man of Action” - is back on the prowl as a troubled ex-cop  (is there any other?) bringing Old Testament justice to the violent streets of New  ...

The creative wizards over at Laika, who previously brought you Coraline and Paranorman, have waved their wands and – POOF! – done it again.   The Boxtrolls is another morbidly funny entry in their 3D stop motion animated film catalog and, while not as friendly as the  ...

James Wan’s smartly made The Conjuring gets its first spin-off with Annabelle.  The demonic doll that kicked off Wan’s movie gets her own headlining gig.  You shouldn’t go into this film with high expectations, though.  Annabelle is a certifiable disappointment.  Oh, it might  ...

Former high-powered New York couple Amy and Nick Dunne – she a well-to-do trust fund baby, he a former magazine journalist – are now struggling to make ends meet in the recession-riddled Midwest. On his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick (Ben Affleck) arrives home to ...

The verdict is in. The Judge is one of the better films I have seen this year. The unstoppable force meets the immovable object, in a Downey-fied, Duvall-laden holds-no-punches emotional slobber knocker. Downey, continuing his journey up the “mountain,” of stardom has  ...

Machismo gets a proper dusting in writer/director David Ayer’s Fury.  This WWII tale of American soldiers at odds with themselves and the Germans around them is as grizzly and as violent as the war genre gets.  While it might not be an entirely true tale, a revisionist’s view  ...

Michael Keaton is Birdman. The actor who, in my opinion, played the best cinematic version of Batman turns the role on its head (or is that on its wings??!) in Birdman, the latest art house flick from writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Babel).  Michael Keaton’s ...

Jake Gyllenhaal sheds 20 pounds and packs on the “creep” as a hapless drifter resigned to selling pilfered copper and chain link fencing in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, a film that skewers the bloodthirsty world of today’s “gotta have it now” media while simultaneously   ...

Relativity is finally portrayed correctly on film thanks to the efforts of Christopher and Johnathan Nolan BUT, with a running time at close to 180 minutes and a climactic event happening offscreen, Interstellar’s voyage has an opposite effect upon its audience  ...

In Laura Poitras’ gripping documentary Citizenfour, whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency who leaked classified documents on the agency’s top-secret surveillance programs, continually insists he’s not the story. But in  ...

Holy crap.  Holy crap.  HOLY CRAP. That’s the only thing I could stammer after releasing my grip from the theater armrests upon the completion of writer/director Jennifer Kent’s chilling The Babadook.  This intelligent horror film does more than make you jump out of your seat ...

Peter Jackson doesn’t exactly save the best in his misguided The Hobbit trilogy for the very last. Much of the final film – in fact, too much of it – is all Jackson's epilogue with no real Tolkien story to tell, setting up the exposition for The Lord of the Rings movies. Damn you, Shakespeare. ...

Director Tim Burton returns to the landscape of the unconventional biopic and combines the strength of Ed Wood with the emotion of Big Fish and Edward Scissorhands and introduces us to the storytelling world of Walter and Margaret Keane, a pair of social misfits who made   ...

On Sunday, January 4th, PBS and Masterpiece debuted the newest season of the popular British show, Downton Abbey.  For PBS that meant 10.1 million viewers joined their network as Season Five opened.  For those in the dark on this insanely popular sumptuous costume  ...

"You can't hypnotize me...I'm British!" Burned by Roger Ebert upon its original release but made popular by British audiences, At the Earth’s Core is a harmless rubber-suited monster party for children and B-movie lovers.  Set below the earth’s crust, this is the second  ...

If you are tired of Johnny Depp or think he’s “played out” then you should stop reading this review right now.  In fact, don’t step foot anywhere near Mortdecai because you won’t be amused with anything you see.  I’ll give you a minute to collect your things and vacate the premises.  ...

“I’ve never been an actual Luddite.  I don’t hate technology.  I just hate the religion around it.” – Terry Gilliam. Visoinary director (of the abstract dramedy) Terry Gilliam takes viewers back to the future with his latest offering of dystopian delicacies in The Zero ...

Romance - past romance, present romance and the promise of future romance - is in the air for As the Abbey Turns!  For a program that began its life intending to be merely a seven-part miniseries that ended on the brink of World War I (and which then won six Emmys), Julian Fellowes' ...

From producer Guillermo del Toro and director Jorge Gutierrez comes The Book of Life, an animated comedy with a unique visual style.  The film was (mostly) ignored upon its release last October.  It is, in fact, one of the must enchanting and exciting visual surprises of  ...

Are you ready kids?!  Stephen Hillenburg’s TV toon that’s all about nautical nonsense returns to the silver screen with The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water. While the television show and its hour-long specials have moved on past the glories of the first three seasons ...

A soulless and very much psychotic totalitarian government gets a proper “F--- You” in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.  Named after a song from 1939 (“Aquarela do Brasil”) that’s often heard playing in the background or hummed by its lead character, Gilliam’s movie is possibly more   ...

From the silent opening sequence to the arrival of Ndugu’s drawing at the very end, About Schmidt is a fantastic depiction of a lone man facing important choices at several of life’s crossroads all at the same time.  It is a film that breaks a lot of the dramatic rules with comic aplomb  ...

Matthew Vaughn – the acclaimed director of Layer Cake, Stardust, Kick-Ass, and X-Men: First Class - returns to the comic book-minded genre with the wildly irreverent Kingsman: The Secret Service and kicks some serious cinematic ass in doing so.   Loosely based on  ...

A child history buff.  Six angry dwarfs spat out from one closet.  One hell of an adventure.  You guessed it.  Time Bandits has returned.  Writer/director Terry Gilliam’s classic fairy tale mixes science fiction with comedy and gives audiences a timeless movie full of historic ...

John Candy had Uncle Buck.  Bill Murray has St. Vincent.  The role of the grizzled and unexpected father figure makes its comeback with the release of Murray’s latest on blu-ray this week.  Written and directed by newcomer Theodore Melfi, the by-the-numbers dramedy is made ...

Writer/director Adam Green is still the horror genre’s independent darling.  His Hatchet trilogy kicked up a fair amount of dust among Horrorhounds but it was the Hitchcockian Spiral and the chilling Frozen that really delivered the promise in his particular brand of madness  ...

Roger Corman, famed producer and director of exploitation cinema from the 1950s through the early 1980s, captures the very essence of the biker counterculture years before Easy Rider would the be the be all and end all of the genre.  Hindered by B-movie trappings and  ...

Bringing the dead back to life is tricky business. Director David Gelb (last seen behind the lens of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi) doesn’t unearth any new treasures with The Lazarus Effect, his narrative film debut. He does; however, manage to dig up enough  ...

Originally titled The Mask of Satan, Mario Brava’s feature length debut, released here in the United States as Black Sunday, was a gothic-sized hit for Roger Corman’s American International Pictures.  The hype was all about its shocking images.  While tame when ...