DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

It is a movie we didn’t know how to talk about. Released in 1999 and written on-spec by David E. Kelley, Lake Placid and its R-rated mixture of horror and comedy scared audiences away. Why? Because it was effective at its ambitions of being solely a trash-talking B-movie ...

Jason Bateman is on quite a roll. After having his career resuscitated by starring (and starring again) in Arrested Development, he seems to earn only goodwill from all his projects – even the ones that bomb. Bad Words, his directorial debut, is yet another win. Effectively   ...

Hailing from the early part of the dreaded 1980’s, it is safe to say that Deadly Eyes is not the most technically brilliant film ever made about marauding rats terrorizing humans and trains alike in subway tunnels. It is a Canadian low budget film made in the era of practical  ...

Grateful Dead.  Janis Joplin.  The Band.  Buddy Guy.  What do they all have in common?  Well, other than being fantastic rock bands, artists, and live performers, they once upon a time in 1970 shared the same train as it traveled through Canada and played a series of  ...

At the center of Saving Mr. Banks, the fascinating back-story of how Disney’s beloved classic Mary Poppins made its way to the big screen, is the relationship between the book’s prickly author, P.L. Travers and Walt Disney himself. A relationship that could be described ...

When it comes to the comedy of Harold Lloyd you just can’t top 1925’s The Freshman. In it, Lloyd plays Harold Lamb – and, yes, that IS the best character name in the Silent Film Era – and the movie traces his comedic journey to become the big man on campus. It is,   ...

Forget the grandma crawling on the ceiling.  The absolute BEST scene in The Exorcist III happens about halfway through the picture.  A killer is loose.  We have a static shot of a hospital hallway.  Clean.  White.  The camera is positioned far enough back to capture  ...

The flash of neon.  The absorbing synths.  The resounding thump of the bass.  Nerve is more than a movie; it is an interactive realm of total absorption.  Classifying its audience into two parts, Nerve is either for (a) players or (b) watchers.  And let me be the one to tell   ...

From the pages of bestselling author Lee Childs’ novels, comes a new movie hero. His name is Jack Reacher, and while he doesn’t fly, wear tights, or posses any otherworldy super-human powers, his goals are the same as those sought by our lycra-tighted friends currently ...

No new gound is broken with DreamWorks’ latest release.  Its simple theme isn’t genre-defying either.  But the hilarious hijinks never stop for very long as the first family of cave-dwelling, affectionately called The Croods, takes a family vacation of sorts in this highly ...

Start your engines!  The summer blockbuster of 2013 has arrived.  Yes, with Justin Lin’s Fast & Furious 6, our collective need for speed lives on.  Now, I was late to the franchise as a whole but – after an interesting fourth entry – I found myself watching the originals ...

Where to go and what to do with the sequel of a movie that got its traction from an evil villain turned into lovable hero? That’s the ultimate challenge faced by the makers of Despicable Me 2 which picks up where the original left off - with former(?) super-villain ...

In a summer chock-full of underwhelming tentpole features, superhero misfires, and a general box office malaise threatening to change how movies are made, it’s refreshing to find a bit of relief in the least likely of places: a film that stars Jennifer Aniston - the sweet ...

Horror movie convention gets turned on its bloody head with You’re Next, the latest visit to the home invasion slasher. Though the setup is a familiar one with the proverbial herd of sacrificial lambs converging on an isolated house for a family reunion, it’s what ...

Perhaps the timing of Riddick, the sequel to Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick is a stroke of genius.  After all, it’s a literal dead season for movies and there is just little of great interest out in theaters right now. Perhaps it is just having ...