DVD Reviews

Metallica Through the Never might be the best heavy metal concert I’ve never attended. Filled with explosive performances from a band still hard at work and a catalog of songs that won’t stop its assault on the ears, the 3-D concert is the IMAX experience that you won't ...

Perhaps Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) says it best because there literally is “no place to hide” from this nearly three-hour continuation of Peter Jackson’s overwrought three-picture adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien’s beloved pint-sized children’s book The Hobbit ...

How’s this for reaching into the cob-webbed bag of arcane source material and pulling out a shiny gem of a TV-to-movie adaptation? Mr. Peabody and Sherman comes from the beloved but largely-forgotten animated TV series Peabody’s Improbable History, that originally  ...

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a serious slice of paranoid espionage. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the puny kid transformed by Stark’s science into Captain America, returns to kick all kinds of ass in this resolute thriller that ties in nicely with the Marvel Cinematic  ...

Thank God for originality, even if it does make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Based off the short film Oculus Chapter 3: The Man with the Plan; Oculus, directed by Mike Flanagan (Absentia, Ghosts of Hamilton Street) creates an intriguing   ...

After the epidemic of remakes, reboots (or as the cynic might say, ‘we’ve milked this cow in its current incarnation as much as we can, so here’s a new version!), there is something truly ‘amazing’ in that these things continue to make astounding money. Batman, after a significant  ...

In a pleasant little case of art imitating life, filmmaker Jon Favreau leaves the world of big-budget extravaganzas to return to his indie roots with Chef, a film in which he stars, directs, and writes about a celebrated chef who exits his high profile job at a popular Los Angeles ...

Blazing Saddles, the penultimate western comedy, has been unseated by Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West. This take-no-prisoners comedic assault is both a farce of the western genre and of our consistently inconsistent human nature. Do not attempt  ...

Darker.  Bolder.  DreamWorks Animation corrects their sequel mistakes of the past and produces a heartwarming masterpiece of animation that holds up (and then some) to its predecessor.  Mounting a second installment to a commercial and a critical darling must have ...

Does Hollywood even recognize and appreciate the stinging jabs we movie-going public take at the industry for its absurd need to build a franchise out of any movie that makes a buck. Does it laugh at its own doings when a film’s title is longer to the right of the colon than  ...

Reflecting the futuristic nihilism of such genre stalwarts as Blade Runner and Mad Max, the awkwardly titled Snowpiercer is a heavily-layered, captivating example of what we want the dystopian genre to do: entertain while also providing a somewhat convincing prediction  ...

Deliver Us From Evil is perhaps one of the most stomach churning, no holds-barred films I have seen in recent years. Fresh from a recent spew of rather unpopular exorcism films, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Devil Inside and The Possession, it is fair to say that the ...

Finally. Want to see an ape win an Academy Award? Look no further than Andy Serkis as Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes for the chance. He is seriously that good and the two hour movie, expanding on the brawn and greatly improving the brain of 2011’s   ...

Once again, a film company bungles a summer marketing strategy. This time it is Paramount and MGM with Dwayne Johnson in Hercules. The trailers for this sword and sandal picture simply suck and leave its beefy star looking strangely miscast, as if he is too old and too  ...

Twin Peaks. Regardless of your feelings about this two season show, there is no denying that David Lynch’s vision of small town America left an impact on the popular culture – one as deeply felt as the Seinfeld crater in its 9 season run over at NBC. Maybe it isn’t quoted as ...

See truck stop owner Jack Palance take on mentally ill veteran Martin Landau! See an alien on-the-hunt collect Cub Scouts in an isolated shack! See the madness as a young David Caruso gets taken down by a tall extraterrestrial played by Kevin Peter Hall! See Predator  ...

I knew we’d get to the third film in this series eventually. I just didn’t think we’d have to live through a disappointing sequel to get to it. While it certainly feels like a better entry in the series of aging action stars, The Expendables 3 doesn’t really learn from the mistakes of ...

Iceland finally gets a road trip movie with Land Ho!, a pleasant little tale about two lonely septuagenarians searching for happiness in new places. With the film, filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens also explore new territory by turning the genre on its head  ...

The dead amusingly live again! Life After Beth is not only a play on words (just think about that title for a second) but also a comedic look at the ups and downs of young love when it is past time for two people to part ways and move on. Zombie mania has taken over our pop  ...

With Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre as its reference point, Motel Hell is a seriously delicious horror film that exploits all the typical genre markers for the sake of comedy. And it’s all because director Kevin Connor (From Beyond The Grave, At The Earth’s Core)   ...

Sex.  Violence.  Crisp cinematography.  Frank Miller’s black and white comic canvas with splotches of color from time to time.  Welcome back to Sin City.  It’s been nearly a decade since last we walked its violent stylized streets.  And how well you enjoyed the first one  ...

Following the discovery of a wrecked Soviet submarine and a spiked flask of vodka, one undersea mining crew is about to have a very bad day in George P. Cosmatos’ Leviathan.  This undersea monster movie came and went to theaters in 1989 but has recently been ...

There are two superheroes from New Jersey. The first, of course, is Bruce Springsteen. The second is Melvin Junko. Not ringing any bells? Well, you might know good ol’ tutu-wearin’ Melvin by his other name, The Toxic Avenger, and this month Troma Entertainment  ...

Ray Harryhausen and his stop-motion work is legendary. While his stuff is slow to trickle out on blu-ray, the high-def picture and the clarity it provides is always insightful into his creative processes. The latest to be released is a twofer featuring 20 Million Miles to Earth   ...

Ah, the glory of the small-scale UK cinema. Full of tightly-wound tension and white-knuckled suspense, The Legend of Hell House is the quintessential haunted house for the ages. Screenwriter Richard Matheson adapts his own novel, appropriately titled “Hell House”, and  ...

With more grit and ambition than your average television series, The Walking Dead continues its mad march toward total zombie annihilation with the release of its 4^th season on blu-ray.  The season story curiously breaks up our group of survivors after their bloody showdown ...

With more corpses buried underneath its streets than there are people currently living above ground, the city of Paris seems like the perfect setting for As Above, So Below, a rambunctious little horror film that hopes to turn the labyrinth of catacombs and tunnels running beneath  ...

Alfred Hitchcock has many classics under his none-too-skinny belt, but arguably none are as universally beloved as the 1954 thriller Rear Window. Based on the short story by writer Cornell Woolrich called ‘It Had to Be Murder’, Hitchcock guided new screenwriter John ...

That one sentence often accompanies many reviews, lists, and assessments about Darryl F. Zanuck’s 1962 epic, honouring of D-Day. Before it had even rolled a frame of film, this film was in trouble. 20^th Century Fox was in financial ruin, thanks to Elizabeth Taylor’s star   ...

Filmmaker Charlie Paul’s documentary For No Good Reason isn’t as sharply focused as it could have been.  Steadman, who famously illustrated Hunter S. Thompson’s most famous works, is a fascinating artist and, as he continues to churn out some seriously  ...