DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

The body-swap flick gets a raunchy R-rated makeover in David Dobkins’ The Change-up, a film that fails to counter its smutty better half with anything other than schmaltzy, sentimental hogwash. So, instead of Wedding Crashers meets ...

“We’ve gone up a lot heavier than this.”  With that one sentence, the fate of seven people - all desperately trying to catch a flight to Johannesburg - are sealed together forever in Sands of Kalahari.  It’s a survival film from 1965 – a few years before the survival film ...

Releasing a meaningful movie at the very end of summer is grossly unheard of from the executives up in Hollyweird and yet that’s exactly what Dreamworks and Touchstone Pictures have done with The Help.  Powerful and powerfully moving ...

Offering a new take on ghosts, mysticism and matters of life and death, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is also a bit tedious at times. The film is also a critical darling due to its ...

Splashy but predictable and a wee bit uninspired, Rio will certainly keep the kids in check but adults looking for something a bit more out of the unusual will have to go elsewhere.  It’s from the makers of Ice Age – and while that might garner some attention...

Snaking its way through 30 Minutes or Less, the sophomore big screen effort from Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer, is a foreboding sense of dread and darkness that permeates the humor like a stabbing reality check ...

For these turbulent times, there simply is no other film as influential and as important as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.  Its black-and-white images are gritty and powerful and uncommonly modern for its 1966 date of production ...

Were Marcus Nispel’s Conan the Barbarian remake only 30 minutes long, it might be heralded as the only blood-riddled version you ever need to see of Robert E. Howard's scantily clad hero.  Schwarzenegger be damned. Unfortunately, the remake is not...

Beginning during the coldest part of the original Bambi, this direct-to-video sequel fills in the gaps of Bambi’s maturation under his father’s guidance. The animation isn’t as sharp as the original just a bit more glossy in its overall look. Bambi 2’s heart ...

Disaffecting, miscast, and thinly written, One Day is the pitch-perfect example of all the things that can go wrong when attempting to adapt a highly acclaimed novel to the big screen. Especially when the source material tells the story of an ever-evolving long-term ...

More than half a century since its original release, the announcement made from The Killing still rings loud and clear: director Stanley Kubrick, the auteur of the detached antirealism voice in cinema, has arrived ...

With my “cool” card revoked for my favorable review of Fright Night, let me go ahead and suggest that maybe the mid-to-late 1970s and '80s were a better fit for writer/director John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing). After a nine-year-absence his latest ...

The collective cry of The Big Lebowski’s cult has been answered.  Finally, after many DVD releases and Special Editions and whatnot, The Coen Brothers’ detective farce of mayhem, murder, and marijuana gets its HD debut. It’s been out for over 13 years and is....

Producer/Writer/Director and genuine gothic genius Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) continues to flirt with the idea of man and monster cohabitation in his latest production. Reducing the size of the monster to something no bigger than a ...

Regardless of what the film’s title may suggest, Ned (Paul Rudd) isn’t really an idiot. It’s just that his brutal honesty is perceived as stupidity. And that’s where screenwriters David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz find their hook in Our Idiot Brother, a ...