DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

Director: Dominic Sena
Writer: Bragi F. Schut
Cast: Nicolas Cage; Ron Perlman; Claire Foy

Well, it’s January and sometimes that’s all you need to know about the quality of the releases being dumped onto the unsuspecting public.  Occasionally, like with the Underworld series, Hollyweird finds an eager audience hungry for their brooding darkness, but mostly the January releases just suck air and whatever money they can from an unsuspecting public.  Unfortunately, in spite of its fun-looking trailers, Season of the Witch, directed by Dominic Sena, is a total bust.  From beginning to end, this witchy monster-of-the-week movie is exactly the quality of its subject: an abominable beast.

There’s a memorable scene about halfway through Blue Valentine in which a young couple playfully performs an impromptu song and dance number – he, strumming the ukulele while warbling the lyrics to Doris Fischer and Alan Roberts’s...

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action.
Director: Phillip Noyce
Writer: Kurt Wimmer
Cast: Angelina Jolie; Liev Schreiber; Chiwetel Ejiofor
Genre: Action
Memorable Movie Quote: "My name is Vassily Orlov. Today, a Russian agent will travel to New York city to kill the President. This agent is KA-12."
Release Date: July 23, 2010
DVD Release Date: December 21, 2011

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi fantasy violence and brief sexuality
Director: Casey Affleck
Writer: Casey Affleck: Joaquin Phoenix
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix; Casey Affleck; Jack Nicholson; Billy Crystal
Genre: Comedy
Memorable Movie Quote: "Do the snow angel, dude. I can reach you, do the @#$%& snow angel. Dude, do the @#$% snow angel. Do the snow angel, man. Do the @#$%& snow angel, dude. Do the @#$%& snow angel!"
Release Date: September 10, 2010.
Blu-ray Release Date: November 23, 2010.

There was a time when a Ron Howard film meant something; a mark of quality, a stroke of genius. The man has an incredible amount of talent and an incredible amount of films under his belt, but – in the last ten years or so...

In what might go down as the most critically polarized film of January 2011, Seth Rogan, star of such crude charmers as Knocked Up, Funny People, and Observe & Report, busts out the superhero mask in his turn as The Green Hornet...

Director: Sergio Leone
Writer: Harry Grey
Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern; Joe Pesci; Tuesday Weld

The story behind the scenes goes like this: master director Sergio Leone actually turned down an offer to direct The Godfather in order to focus on his lengthy adaptation of The Hoods, written by Harry Grey.  It must have been a tough decision. Especially since The Godfather and its sequel came out before his envisioned version of The Hoods saw the light of the day and also because both were hailed by his contemporaries as masterpieces of the medium. The critics and the public were content with their Gangster drama.  They needed no more. Yet, Leone remained relentless in his pursuit of telling the story of “growing up gangster”; he had a vision and it had to be told – even if it took 13 years from the day he turned down Paramount’s generous Godfather offer...

20th Anniversary Extended Cut Edition

Director: Kevin Costner
Writer: Michael Blake
Cast: Kevin Costner; Mary McDonnell; Graham Greene

There is a glorious peace that kicks up around the edges of the frame in Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves. It’s a pastoral sense of emotion that is accompanied by John Barry’s brilliant score; it beckons; it whispers; it brings out a feeling of compassion and understanding from its audience. While the film’s major themes might be heavy in thought, suggesting steely-eyed imperialism and national conquest, its little hand tickings are what makes the film run like clockwork. As a result, Dances with Wolves - twenty years later - might just be the most sincere film to ever come from out of the (mostly) deplorable depths of Hollywood.

Director: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Writer: Robert Glaudini
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman; John Ortiz; Robert Petrocelli; Amy Ryan

Bringing a stage play to the big screen poses some problems, but mostly it can open the story up in exciting ways – which is exactly what happens with this film adaptation of Bob Glaudini's 2007 stage play. No longer is this a play strictly about “pot heads” in love.  Suddenly, with an embracing of seldom seen New York locations and a story allowed to breathe and to expand, we have a genuine and nuanced film about people in love. Directed by its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Goes Boating is a charming and funny film that flows nicely without a single disturbance in its waters.

The Company Men, the debut film of TV veteran John Wells (ER, The West Wing), takes a sobering look at what America went through during the financial and economic collapse of 2008. But whereas the images we watched play out before us on...

Doing exactly what he does best, Jason Statham delivers the body count numbers that matter in this re-imagined and re-tooled 1972 Charles Bronson action revenge flick.  The action is bloody and high-spirited and the dialogue is low, making...

Director: Mike Leigh
Writer:Mike Leigh
Cast: Jim Broadbent; Leslie Manville; Ruth Sheen; Imelda Staunton

A Mike Leigh film: people; situations; reactions; misery as a by-product of happiness. In examining his entire scope of work, from 1988’s emotion-packed High Hopes to the latest little unassuming masterpiece, Another Year, it becomes crystal clear that the British filmmaker has an incredibly captivating way of turning the least significant of human interactions into a momentous movie event.

There’s a bit of cruel irony at play in The Roommate, Christian E. Christiansen’s debut film in which its lead character Sara (Minka Kelly) plays an aspiring designer who moves to L.A. to get her college degree in fashion design...

Based very, very, very loosely upon the events of an Australian cave-diving accident in 1988, Sanctum provides a chilling look at heavy-handed adventure and at Hollywood acting inside what can only be described as one prolonged IMAX film. The...

From its stylized opening, Hatchet II begins with much better production values than its predecessor. Yet, the homage to 1980’s horror schlock remains.  Adam Green’s Hatchet II picks up exactly where the original ended...