DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

James Wan’s smartly made The Conjuring gets its first spin-off with Annabelle.  The demonic doll that kicked off Wan’s movie gets her own headlining gig.  You shouldn’t go into this film with high expectations, though.  Annabelle is a certifiable disappointment.  Oh, it might  ...

Former high-powered New York couple Amy and Nick Dunne – she a well-to-do trust fund baby, he a former magazine journalist – are now struggling to make ends meet in the recession-riddled Midwest. On his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick (Ben Affleck) arrives home to ...

The verdict is in. The Judge is one of the better films I have seen this year. The unstoppable force meets the immovable object, in a Downey-fied, Duvall-laden holds-no-punches emotional slobber knocker. Downey, continuing his journey up the “mountain,” of stardom has  ...

Machismo gets a proper dusting in writer/director David Ayer’s Fury.  This WWII tale of American soldiers at odds with themselves and the Germans around them is as grizzly and as violent as the war genre gets.  While it might not be an entirely true tale, a revisionist’s view  ...

Michael Keaton is Birdman. The actor who, in my opinion, played the best cinematic version of Batman turns the role on its head (or is that on its wings??!) in Birdman, the latest art house flick from writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Babel).  Michael Keaton’s ...

Jake Gyllenhaal sheds 20 pounds and packs on the “creep” as a hapless drifter resigned to selling pilfered copper and chain link fencing in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, a film that skewers the bloodthirsty world of today’s “gotta have it now” media while simultaneously   ...

Relativity is finally portrayed correctly on film thanks to the efforts of Christopher and Johnathan Nolan BUT, with a running time at close to 180 minutes and a climactic event happening offscreen, Interstellar’s voyage has an opposite effect upon its audience  ...

In Laura Poitras’ gripping documentary Citizenfour, whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency who leaked classified documents on the agency’s top-secret surveillance programs, continually insists he’s not the story. But in  ...

Holy crap.  Holy crap.  HOLY CRAP. That’s the only thing I could stammer after releasing my grip from the theater armrests upon the completion of writer/director Jennifer Kent’s chilling The Babadook.  This intelligent horror film does more than make you jump out of your seat ...

Peter Jackson doesn’t exactly save the best in his misguided The Hobbit trilogy for the very last. Much of the final film – in fact, too much of it – is all Jackson's epilogue with no real Tolkien story to tell, setting up the exposition for The Lord of the Rings movies. Damn you, Shakespeare. ...

Director Tim Burton returns to the landscape of the unconventional biopic and combines the strength of Ed Wood with the emotion of Big Fish and Edward Scissorhands and introduces us to the storytelling world of Walter and Margaret Keane, a pair of social misfits who made   ...

On Sunday, January 4th, PBS and Masterpiece debuted the newest season of the popular British show, Downton Abbey.  For PBS that meant 10.1 million viewers joined their network as Season Five opened.  For those in the dark on this insanely popular sumptuous costume  ...

"You can't hypnotize me...I'm British!" Burned by Roger Ebert upon its original release but made popular by British audiences, At the Earth’s Core is a harmless rubber-suited monster party for children and B-movie lovers.  Set below the earth’s crust, this is the second  ...

If you are tired of Johnny Depp or think he’s “played out” then you should stop reading this review right now.  In fact, don’t step foot anywhere near Mortdecai because you won’t be amused with anything you see.  I’ll give you a minute to collect your things and vacate the premises.  ...

“I’ve never been an actual Luddite.  I don’t hate technology.  I just hate the religion around it.” – Terry Gilliam. Visoinary director (of the abstract dramedy) Terry Gilliam takes viewers back to the future with his latest offering of dystopian delicacies in The Zero ...