DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

Oscar-nominated director Denis Villeneuve teams up with Oscar nominees Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal in Prisoners, a twisting thriller that – while involving – is not nearly as smart as the screenplay thinks it is.  For the careful observer, much of Prisoners is ...

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is a masterpiece of sound and vision.  It achieves – in a crisp 90 minutes – everything that any filmmaker in love with the medium sets out to achieve.  Few attain it and most never produce a film as marvelous as the very Kubcrickian ...

Robert Rodriguez’s Mex-ploitation saga continues with the batshit crazy antics highlighted in Machete Kills.  While the print critics prematurely hammer nails into the character’s coffin, no amount of bullets can kill Danny Trejo.  He may be older and bit more stiff ...

Captain Phillips, the latest film to cover the tragic events surrounding the 2009 hijacking of the American container ship Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia, has Paul Greengrass all over it. The one-time documentarian who applied his kinetic style to two ...

Alan Taylor’s Thor: The Dark World might feel - with its Anthony Hopkins-narrated beginning concerning a war with elves – a bit like the next installment of The Hobbit but when it comes down to it, Marvel’s second trip through the Norse mythology is indeed magical ...

The heart of America – the real America that is – should be viewed in hard-bitten black-and-white photography.  Director Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) knows this about his Omaha birthplace and – while merging the brilliance of About Schmidt ...

The comets are coming!!  The comets are coming!!  Science fiction gets satirized in writer/director Thom Eberhardt’s fantastic Night of the Comet.  Released the same year as David Lynch’s Dune and 2010, this entry into the genre was – while the reviews were ...

Director John Carpenter does director Howard Hawks.  Call Assault on Precinct 13 the premiere urban western because, in the era before the action movie craze, that’s exactly what this lean and mean to the extreme movie is. In what amounts to an updated ...

Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, and its love affair with writer/director John Carpenter continues with the release of Showtime’s anthology of horror, Body Bags.  Comprised of three short films – two directed by Carpenter and one directed by  ...

Tom Holland’s 1985 vampire in your neighbourhood jaunt was a really enjoyable, of its time, funny and scary composite of a movie. It has a cult following, and in many people’s eyes, is a classic from a very fertile and brave era of filmmaking. A sequel followed a ...

Being an Australian, I remember American history not being a voraciously covered subject in school or of enormous interest to the general population thereafter. But there are some events that transcend continents, and embed themselves even in the disinterested ...

The Horror Show, directed by James Isaac, has an interesting release history.  Critically panned, the film was eventually released overseas as the third film in the House series although it has nothing to do with a haunted house.  Weird, right?  The producers ...

Writer/director George A. Romero (The Night Of The Living Dead series) might have made his name with the undead but he doesn’t always wear the horror helmet.  With Knightriders, a King Arthur-style Renaissance Fair movie complete with jousting on ...

When RED, the sleeper hit comedy of 2010, opened, the over-50 audience finally has something to cheer for.  So did the all the young turks.  That’s certainly an accomplishment when the most of the cast sports AARP cards and walkers. Based off the limited  ...

Having never even seen one episode of A&E’s Duck Dynasty, I went into this Blu-ray set knowing only two things about it: rich rednecks and camouflage.  I am now 46-episodes educated into what makes The Robertson clan so attractive to television viewers ...