DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

Romance - past romance, present romance and the promise of future romance - is in the air for As the Abbey Turns!  For a program that began its life intending to be merely a seven-part miniseries that ended on the brink of World War I (and which then won six Emmys), Julian Fellowes' ...

From producer Guillermo del Toro and director Jorge Gutierrez comes The Book of Life, an animated comedy with a unique visual style.  The film was (mostly) ignored upon its release last October.  It is, in fact, one of the must enchanting and exciting visual surprises of  ...

Are you ready kids?!  Stephen Hillenburg’s TV toon that’s all about nautical nonsense returns to the silver screen with The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water. While the television show and its hour-long specials have moved on past the glories of the first three seasons ...

A soulless and very much psychotic totalitarian government gets a proper “F--- You” in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.  Named after a song from 1939 (“Aquarela do Brasil”) that’s often heard playing in the background or hummed by its lead character, Gilliam’s movie is possibly more   ...

From the silent opening sequence to the arrival of Ndugu’s drawing at the very end, About Schmidt is a fantastic depiction of a lone man facing important choices at several of life’s crossroads all at the same time.  It is a film that breaks a lot of the dramatic rules with comic aplomb  ...

Matthew Vaughn – the acclaimed director of Layer Cake, Stardust, Kick-Ass, and X-Men: First Class - returns to the comic book-minded genre with the wildly irreverent Kingsman: The Secret Service and kicks some serious cinematic ass in doing so.   Loosely based on  ...

A child history buff.  Six angry dwarfs spat out from one closet.  One hell of an adventure.  You guessed it.  Time Bandits has returned.  Writer/director Terry Gilliam’s classic fairy tale mixes science fiction with comedy and gives audiences a timeless movie full of historic ...

John Candy had Uncle Buck.  Bill Murray has St. Vincent.  The role of the grizzled and unexpected father figure makes its comeback with the release of Murray’s latest on blu-ray this week.  Written and directed by newcomer Theodore Melfi, the by-the-numbers dramedy is made ...

Writer/director Adam Green is still the horror genre’s independent darling.  His Hatchet trilogy kicked up a fair amount of dust among Horrorhounds but it was the Hitchcockian Spiral and the chilling Frozen that really delivered the promise in his particular brand of madness  ...

Roger Corman, famed producer and director of exploitation cinema from the 1950s through the early 1980s, captures the very essence of the biker counterculture years before Easy Rider would the be the be all and end all of the genre.  Hindered by B-movie trappings and  ...

Bringing the dead back to life is tricky business. Director David Gelb (last seen behind the lens of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi) doesn’t unearth any new treasures with The Lazarus Effect, his narrative film debut. He does; however, manage to dig up enough  ...

Originally titled The Mask of Satan, Mario Brava’s feature length debut, released here in the United States as Black Sunday, was a gothic-sized hit for Roger Corman’s American International Pictures.  The hype was all about its shocking images.  While tame when ...

Few film genres evoke the silly, impulsive giddiness we experience from a good con or heist flick. There’s just something supremely fascinating about watching some hapless rube get fleeced of all his worldly possessions at the hands of a well-oiled con team. That   ...

The 80s just pumped out classic after classic. They took risks back then. They gave us some of the most memorable genre pictures in cinematic history. This was the decade of new horror icons galore, of Indiana Jones, and E.T. This was also the decade where Richie  ...

In a world where the word terror has become synonymous with maniacs the world over hurting or killing innocent people in the name of their cause, revisiting this 1991 action thriller has reminded this reviewer it is hardly a new phenomenon  ...