DVD Reviews

Director Andrew Traucki thrives on inferring undersea menaces.  In 2008, he brought to life alligator attacks in the terrifying thriller Black Water and now, in The Reef, he strands his five-member cast in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and...

Drugs are bad, mkay?  Except when they aren’t.  As bad for you, I should add.  Science suggests that we only use something like 15% of our brain’s potential at any given time (or maybe throughout our lifetime). What a waste.  It’s a...

Turf wars get extraterrestrialized in Writer/Director Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block.  The film is rich in concrete jungle atmosphere and gritty laughs making its urban dynamics so grossly enjoyable. Energetic in its attempts to recapture the ...

For many long decades, people have scanned the horizons and wondered if humans were alone in the universe or if there were other creatures just waiting to communicate with us.  Yet, fear always sets in and our imaginations turn to galactic invasions and ...

Before making some of the finest films of the Silent Era, Buster Keaton (under the financial guidance of Joseph M. Schenck) made nineteen two-reelers that would define his well-known persona as “The Great Stone Face” comedian. Keaton was already established...

There seems to be a resurgence of stylized medieval actioners of late.  From Black Death to Centurion, these mostly independent features are side-stepping traditional Hollywood paths and pursuing a limited release in theatres, then settling into the Home Theatre market ...

Playing more like a poor man’s episode of The X-Files, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night doesn’t have much bite in its tale of vampires, zombies, and werewolves.  It’s an interesting attempt to revitalize the darker nature of vampires upon the streets of New Orleans ...

Going back to the start of Pierre Boulle's mythology, Rise of the Planet of the Apes sets the stage for the ape revolution and delivers their first uprising.  Half the movie is welcomed sci-fi soul courtesy ...

Popcorn epics don’t get much better than with director John Milius’ action-packed Conan the Barbarian.  This is sword and sorcery at its most rugged and (sometimes) goofiest.  Yet, never does it lose its sense of fun and ...

How quickly the mighty can fall.  In the mere two years since the original premiered, Conan the Destroyer presents us with the family friendly version of a barbarian who has no business being friendly or hanging around a family. The film ...

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 ...

While never released in America, Blitz is immediately entertaining. This gritty London-based serial killing actioneer might not have the smarts to survive even the most rudimentary of afterthought analysis, but Blitz is a total ...

While this American remake of the 2007 Israeli feature film called Ha-Hov will never hold up to the accolades received by its Israeli counterpart (four nominations for Israel’s Academy Awards equivalent), The Debt is nonetheless a ...

Suffer the Sadomasochistic!  Murder the Merrymakers!  Court the Claustrophobic!  Your perfect host for the evening’s anguish has arrived! Turning the tables on a fugitive-turned-party crasher is done deliciously in writer/director ...

It’s disappointing to be letdown by a film that wants to be warmly received by all its audiences.  While not ever as sharp or as blissful as Adventureland, the aim for its emotional appeal is the same. And, yet, it doesn’t quite make the mark. ...

Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike is one of the few films ever made that absolutely deserves to be touted as a visual tour-de-force.  From its spirited beginning to its cattle-slaughtering end, the film’s moving camerawork and inventive ...