DVD Reviews

Tom Cruise might be returning as Ethan Hunt but director Brad Bird, responsible for helming the beloved animated films Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles, is the real hero of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.  His live-action debut is a ...

Four years after they struck cinematic gold with the oddball indie hit Juno, Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman are at it again, but this time minus the slangy clangor and stylistic flourishes for which they were so unfairly derided in the film that made it fun to laugh at teen pregnancy. Ironically, this ...

Produced by Lawrence Bender, directed by Scott Spiegel (writer of Evil Dead 2) and starring Sam and Ted Raimi, Intruder is exactly the type of supermarket slasher film you’d expect from those wacky minds.  Intruder has one hand slopped in a bucket of gore and the other hand in the era of slapstick ...

Celebrating the 20^th anniversary of Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer, Disney – at long last – allows the film to breathe a bit in spectacular High Definition.  Let the fist pumping and high-fives begin!  Created by writer/illustrator Dave Stevens, the character ...

Love is a funny thing and, in the hands of master comedian Buster Keaton, it is celebrated as a fantastic riot of elaborate setpieces and outrageous stunts.  Seven Chances, from 1925, is Keaton’s sweet answer to the subtleties ...

Opening with a movie-within-a-movie sequence that promises actor Jean Dujardin as George Valentin, Hollywood action star, absolutely will not speak, The Artist, a silent film about Hollywood during the late 1920s as it transitions ...

With a “whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it” half-baked mentality, Colombiana offers virtually no surprises in the overstuffed female-as-action-star genre that could be so much more than what it currently is.  Actioneer Luc Besson ...

With the current crop of technology pretty much unshackling anyone with a half decent imagination to realize whatever they can dream up, it’s easy to forget that, not so long ago, it wasn’t always the case. In the early 90s, Stephen Spielberg ...

Not since Sylvester Stallone in Rocky has a fighting movie had such an exceptionally profound statement to say to its own era.  Warrior, directed by Gavin O’Connor (Pride and Glory), pits two estranged brothers against each other in an improbable but ...

Awkwardly purposed and haphazardly constructed, Phyllida Lloyd’s biopic The Iron Lady takes a look at one of the twentieth century’s most powerful and influential political leaders, Great Britain’s former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. While certainly a significant genre switch for ...

Like its main character, Dee Rees’s Pariah is a fickle chameleon of a film, bearing a skin of many colors reflecting the viewer’s own world view. The coming-of-age drama will likely have a difficult time finding a wide audience as some will perceive it a...

The “found footage” phenomenon hits an all-time low with this budget-friendly piece of horror schlock.  Mixing hand-held footage with scratchy camcorder video, The Devil Inside uses the medium of the stylized mockumentary well, but doesn’t have an ...

With In the Land of Blood and Honey, first-time writer and director Angelina Jolie sets out to bring to the world’s attention the dangers of ethnocentric and nationalistic ideology and the devastating effects of doing nothing about it. While her grim ...

There are two trains of thought barreling toward each other when it comes to Contraband and both share the same track.  One train speeds on a course that suggests actor Mark Wahlberg has outgrown this one-more-big-time-thrill-and-I’m-out-type flick and ...

Opening with a three-minute reminder of where we’ve been with the previous installments, Underworld Awakening, rather surprisingly, soon ditches its celebrated mythology of werewolf vs. vampire and lets the human beings weigh in on the bloody war ...

Traffic, directed by Steven Soderbergh, does more to address the complex topic of illegal drugs in and out of this country than the actual “war” on drugs does. Considering the largely naïve and inadequate government policies since ...

Ever since playing the Albert Nobbs character in Simone Benmussa’s off-Broadway stage short back in 1982, the idea of bringing the story of a woman passing as a man in order to work and survive in 19^th century Ireland to the big screen has been a passion project ...

The Grey is a survivalist’s Holy Bible.  It looks unassuming and, chances are, you’ll roll in to it not expecting much, but – lo and behold – hell hath no fury like humans and their will to live.  It’s a tight story without an inch of flab and, with strong ...

Really good horror is hard to pull off.  It takes restraint, attention to story, and a deft director to handle the many, many mechanics of strong atmosphere.  Director Lucky McKee, behind the camera for The Woman, does exactly that and produces one of the ...

When it was first announced that Piranha, the 1978 original spoof of Jaws, which was directed by Joe Dante, written by John Sayles, and produced by Roger Corman was going to be remade, an audible groan was heard from the masses. This would never work so...

With the release of The Woman in Black, director James Watkins addresses three particularly hot topics that have been searing the brainpans of we movie fans of late. First, will the film aid the re-launch of Hammer Film Productions, which had its heyday ...

Released in 1955, Disney’s Lady and the Tramp was the first ever animated feature to be geared for the true CinemaScope experience.  It was also the first to be told specifically from a canine’s point of view.  It’s all legs and feet all of the time; a dog’s eye view ...

As a ravenous consumer of all things horror, I have seen the frightening, I have seen the exhilarating, I have seen the okay, the passable, and even the so bad its good; and every now and then I have seen the crap, the detestable, the waste of time and money ...

Take an ‘it’ director, hot off the heels of a major franchise success, and high concept idea with a punchy title (Cowboys Versus Aliens! Magic!) that promises a new hybrid of a film, an epic cast with a respected leading man, a Hollywood legend, and a supporting ...

Twenty years after the days of Captain Kirk, Bones, and Mr Spock, Gene Roddenberry was invited by Paramount to create a new Star Trek show; something to which he had little interest in doing. His original cast were finding success on the big screen; he had been ousted from creative control ...

Ripped from the headlines of the Los Angeles Police Department’s late-1990’s corruption investigation known as the Rampart Scandal, brilliant noir writer James Ellroy’s story of Rampart narrows its focus down to Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), a crooked L.A. street cop who takes the ...

Safe House, directed by Daniel Espinosa, is exactly the formula you expect it to be.  Action meets Thriller meets Spy vs. Spy.  Unfortunately, Safe House plays it a bit too safe and, in spite of its engaging cast, is completely forgettable.  If you’ve seen one spy-type thriller, then ...

B-movie enthusiasts and cult film fanatics can rest easy now.  The darling no-budget creature feature from 1983 finally has found a welcomed home in dazzling high definition.  Released by Elite Entertainment, The Deadly Spawn finally completes many a freak’s quest ...

While better than its predecessor in antics, acting and special effects, the dynamic directing duo of Neveldine/Taylor doesn’t exactly crank the mayhem up to the levels one might expect. It’s largely a performance piece directed by ...

Hard-hitting and full of nightmarish promise, The Ford Brothers absolutely deliver a visually stunning Zombie flick in The Dead.  It’s brutal in its gore and situationally nasty in all the write (get it?) places.  Released by Anchor Bay Entertainment, The Ford Brothers ...