DVD Reviews

We are so spoiled for choice in this day and age that sometimes brilliance and gold that should never be missed can get left in the wake of unending wave of stuff. In a world of remakes, amazing movie magic, remakes of Planet of the Apes are not as instantly well known as ...

When Una (Rooney Mara) was 13, her neighbor Ray molested her. They carried on a secret 3-month long relationship, at which point they planned to run away together. But then Ray (Ben Mendelsohn) disappeared. He wound up serving 4 years ...

‘It’s a mad house! A mad house!’ So it felt to me finding the entire Planet of the Apes cinematic journey in this new mammoth sized 50th anniversary set in the mail. I’ll try to keep the review succinct as there are 5 movies in the original series, the Tim Burton remake and the  ...

If the last couple of years have taught us anything it should be never underestimate Sylvester Stallone. He was mocked at the beginning of his career and brought us Rocky. His popularity waned in the late 90’s and when word trickled down he was reviving not only his famous ...

Three years would pass before another go around with John Rambo and produce the most (at the time) violent action movie ever made. It marked a continued tonal shift of the character that had good intentions hidden in cartoonish, ham fisted  ...

For a very long time, I wished that First Blood had been a one and done deal. But it arrived in the 1982, and anything from the 80s onward that made the studios money would like get a sequel with a roman numeral next to it. The remainder of that decade saw ...

Although this isn’t the first of Disney’s attempts to redo their animated back catalogue, I think it had the hardest job. The mastery of motion capture technology and the sophistication that computer generated animation has reached allows them to deliver ...

Pixar never cease to surprise me. On the sole summary of one of their stories, I almost never get a sense of just how much I may fall in love with whatever they’re dishing out. Toy Story, The Incredibles, Coco, you name it, I’ve underestimated their power to completely ...

I don’t cry in movies. It’s just not my way. But I have to confess that twenty years ago, upon sitting down to watch Steven Speilberg’s World War II magnum opus, the recreation of the Normandy invasion put a lump in my throat and fogged my eyes with tears for its ...

There’s a key scene about halfway through A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood in which cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), utters under his breath, "he's about the nicest person I've ever met.” Of course, Lloyd is talking about Fred Rogers, the host of ...

 The first time I heard the name Mike Mignola was after I received a set of his Topps comic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As a lifelong comic reader, I’m ashamed to say I’d missed his ...

Misery is just about this reviewer’s favorite Stephen King adaptation. Its director, Rob Reiner, was the only one entrusted with that adaptation because the author knew the director would adapt it well. The reason that King knew he would adapt it well ...

Filmmaker Sam Mendes gets down and personal with his new film, 1917 about two young British soldiers sent on an impossible mission to save hundreds of their fellow soldiers. Though largely fictionalized, his tale comes from an actual account told by his paternal grandfather who served in the ...

If one of the final moments of director J. J. Abrams’ Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker - two lightsabers sinking into the sands of Tattooine - hits you rather hollow, it is by the director’s choice.  The Skywalker Saga is over with this film, but what’s shocking is that it really doesn’t feel ...

The Bourne series is currently five films in (as of the writing of this article) and had definitively made its mark in the action/spy genre. In a perfect storm of confluences, it hit its mark with an audience desperate to break with convention and be given something unseen in the ...

There are touchstone pictures that transcend any generation, no matter when they were born, that fall under the MUST WATCH category. They are masterpieces. Films like Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of Sierra Madre, (I know! Bogart nut) it doesn’t matter. If you are a film aficionado, a general viewer, a ...

Raise your hand if the news of yet another adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel, Little Women coming to theaters on Christmas Day failed to jingle your bells. Okay, we can all put them down now. After all, with so many previous adaptations – including 1949’s version starring Elizabeth Taylor and ...

At one point in Just Mercy, the new film from director, co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton (The Glass Castle), the film’s main character Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) points out that “the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth, it’s justice.” Those words set the tone for the tangle of legal and  ...

Somewhere in Colts Neck, New Jersey there sets a horse farm owned by Bruce Springsteen.  And on those 378 acres there is a two-story barn which, on certain nights, doubles as a performance area for Springsteen, his wife Patti Scialfa, and some close friends.  The voices coming out from  ...

Tenacious is the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Sylvester Stallone. He was once one of the highest-paid and most successful actors in cinema’s history, and, like most, has had his fair share of career highlights and—lets be kind—lulls. ...

Movies like Miracles from Heaven and Heaven Is for Real tell allegedly true stories of divine intervention. The latest such movie is 2019’s Breakthrough. About four years ago in Missouri, teenager John Smith (Marcel Ruiz) fell through the ice of a frozen lake. After 15 minutes underwater he clinically died. But when ...

2004’s Hellboy was a well-received if unspectacular performer at the box office, and the studios were not in a hurry to spend on another one. Undeterred, Guillermo Del Toro pressed on pitching various iterations of what could be the follow up. Oh, and since he had some time to kill ...

What does a filmmaker do when attempting to revive a franchise that has lain dormant for more than a decade? In the case of Bad Boys For Life, directors Adil and Bilall do what most other filmmakers have done: they adapt the story to fit a new cultural landscape, they riff  ...

The last decade of the 20th Century in movies saw the pinnacle of star-powered excess-driven extravaganzas peak with Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. One of the biggest stars in the world, at the time, he could write his own ticket, dictate all terms, and will anything he wanted into existence. That ...

Where have you been, Guy Ritchie? We’ve missed your language, your punch, your sleight of hand, and that self-referential swagger that defined your early days as a filmmaker. We got hardly any of that as you set out for more commercial ventures like Swept Away, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,  ...

Who wasn't frightened as a child by the horrifically grim childhood fairy tale about an evil witch who bakes pastries to lure children into her home so she can cook and eat the youngsters for dinner? It’s a wonder any of us made it out of childhood without totally losing all of our marbles ...

I’ll start this review with a question. 4K has been out for a few years now, and although this reviewer has only recently dipped into this new resolution, I wonder why companies like Arrow are still going to the effort of releasing restored definitive and feature-laden movies from days gone by, at scanned  ...

Though more than eighty years have passed since Claude Rains donned the dark sunglasses, smoking jacket, and yards of ACE bandages in 1933’s The Invisible Man, the character still holds a firm place in the pantheon of Universal’s classic movie monsters. That’s not only a testament to the legacy of the studio’s monster ...

What's the first question everyone asks whenever you’ve just watched a new Pixar film? “Where does it rank?” Of course, they’re asking where it fits within the hierarchy of Pixar films. And let’s face it, even a bad Pixar film tops most cinema fare these days, so when we say that Onward ranks ...

What if they made a movie and nobody came? That was the fear when the horror satire The Hunt was scheduled for release last fall before being delayed by a series of unfortunate events. First, it was the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings. Then a tweet about the film from our ...