DVD Reviews

The trailers for Night School looked so promising. With talented comic actors like Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) and Kevin Hart, how could they go wrong? Rob Riggle, rapper Fat Joe and Taran Killam of Saturday Night Live fame round out a usually funny ensemble cast, but they can ...

One of the toughest challenges faced by screenwriters when developing a sequel – especially to a wildly popular animated film – is how to best capture the same spirit and vibe of the original while also taking the story and characters we love to new ...

Swing for the lights! I am not sure there is any other film in cinema that screams out AMERICANA as much as The Natural does.  It is steeped in everything that makes AND breaks America. ...

The #metoo movement wouldn’t stand a chance in John Shaft’s world. The most badass private detective to ever don a leather duster gets a modern-day update in Tim Story’s revisit to the Shaft franchise that kicked off the blaxploitation movement back in the early ’70’s ...

Bad news: Toy Story 4 is Pixar’s biggest money grab to date. Good news: This is Pixar, so it never feels like one. It is not a stretch to say that the company couldn’t make a bad movie if it tried. After all, none of its films ...

A good movie always begins with a killer premise. And Yesterday, the new film from director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Richard Curtis has a great one. It takes on the idea of what our world would be like today if The Beatles never existed ...

Making any film is a tricky endeavor, let alone a film in a franchise that shows no duds. Added to which, this latest incarnation has been balanced carefully between ...

Here’s a bit of life advice. Never trust the remote village that no one has ever heard of, especially if it puts on a pagan celebration that even fewer are aware of. I promise, you’ll thank me later for this. ...

Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood has everything you expect in a Tarantino film; extreme violence, black humor, loving tribute, and plenty of pop culture iconography. It’s all there. We’ve become experts at spotting his stylistic trademarks ...

If you’re watching God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness, chances are you already believe in God. Like its two previous installments, God’s Not Dead 3 comes from family friendly studio Pure Flix and stars David A.R. White as Pastor Dave Hill, who had been introduced in ...

Times were so much simpler when the Fast & Furious franchise first got underway back in 2001. The tragic events of 9/11 had not yet complicated our world, $150 million + movie budgets weren't commonplace, and VCR players were the much-coveted electronic  ...

Pokémon Detective Pikachu is a cute movie.  I will give this family friendly flick, directed by Rob Letterman, that, but none of its cute and cuddly chumminess makes up for the fact that this movie doesn’t really know what or where it is.  The buddy picture borrows from all sorts of genres but is supremely ...

Your new favorite monster movie, clocking in at a zippy 75-minutes, will have you stomping your way toward extinction thanks to laughing so damn hard at its rubber-suited antics, its 1980s shock and schlock kicks ...

One of the kids at the center of the new comedy Good Boys confidently tells his two best friends, “It’s a tampon. Girls shove it up their butts to stop babies from coming out.” The object in question is indeed a tampon, they got that part right. But, of ...

Featuring a special needs character in a film is always a risky proposition that has the potential to cross that fine line between exploitation and exposition. ...

When Stephen King’s doorstop novel was adapted for TV in the 90’s, it accomplished what shouldn’t have been possible. King’s novel is a behemoth tome, with dozens of characters, and was one of his truly graphic forays into the horror genre for ...

Polish the silver, set out the good china, and put a kettle on. The Crawleys are back! Fans of the popular PBS television series that aired for six seasons can once again spend a little time at the sprawling English countryside estate as the film version of Downton Abbey finally hits theaters. And even ...

Octavia Spencer has been a staple in movies for years. She’s a talented, larger than life actor that almost always stands out in an ensemble, or kills it in a cameo. Quite rightly, she has been campaigning for a lead role in something that steps out of what she’s usually offered and  ...

In 1991, New York biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) finds herself in dire straits: she has lost her job, fallen 3 months behind on rent and can’t afford the vet bills for her beloved sick cat. Her agent (Jane Curtin) is less than helpful, ignoring Lee’s phone calls ...

Joker was frightening proposition for this reviewer, who has been a lifelong Batman fanatic. Firstly because it presumed to make the focus of its narrative on one of the greatest antagonists in storytelling history, without the hero; secondly because it wasn’t going to stick with ...

Ca-Ca-Crazy lives here and, if you are anything like me and my warped sensibility, you are gonna love it  ...

Rarely does conventional wisdom hold in Hollywood. Particularly with regards to the notion that less is more and that simplicity is superior to elaborate embellishment. Take, for instance Jerry Bruckheimer, the titan of TNT, who subscribes to the theory that if a candle is needed ...

Very early in the history of film different filmmakers sought to tell the story of the world’s infamous vampire. Bram Stoker’s most famous creation has influenced popular culture, in all its’ incarnations, since it appeared in 1897 - some might argue to the point of oversaturation. In the ...

Back in the early Noughties, Joss Whedon was synonymous with punchy genre series that, more often than not, dealt with strong female protagonists and thrilling plots. As if cursed by his own success, Whedon tried to branch out from vampires and slayers to the sci-fi with the ...

One look at Spielberg’s filmography and it’s hard to imagine the man has ever set a foot wrong. But alas, just before the 1980s dawned, he took a misstep with the (at the time) expensive comedy 1941. Not to rest on his laurels, he doubled down in 81 and 82 and introduced the ...

This low budget ($300,000 USD) slasher film, made by a recent (in the 70s) USC graduate, 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 ...

This reviewer is a little slow to update to new technologies. When it came time to replace some of my old equipment, I dove deep into the pros and cons of the next (and many say last) generation of home movies: 4K. The pros and cons of yet another format are involved and not a blanket statement. For example ...

The road trip through the zombie apocalypse continues with Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland: Double Tap, which comes some ten years after his Zombieland caught the front end of the zombie resurgence in the ‘90s and rode it into undead lore. ...

Stanley Kubrick was a director of unparalleled technical mastery in his time. There isn’t a film fan, or filmmaker out there that hasn’t delved deep into the many works he produced over three decades before his untimely death. His subject matters were always ...

In the late 70s and early 80s, the short form ‘mini-series’ was a chance for networks to stretch their muscles with event storytelling. Long before HBO and Netflix and Amazon showed that feature film budgets and top shelf talent could not only match the quality of storytelling in cinema, but best ...