DVD Reviews

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 ...

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  ...

Many years ago, there used to be such a thing as life without reality programming on the television.  Call it boring.  Call it slow.  Call it whatever you want.  The fact remains that the medium used to have atypical production values.  Miss Marple, a co-production between the  ...

Filmmaker David Robert Mitchell turns horror on its head with his It Follows, a creepy little bugger of a film that has been lighting up the film festival circuit over the past year and even made quite the fuss at Cannes with an appreciative nod in the Critic’s Week Grand  ...

Don’t Go In The Woods … Alone!, a cult horror film from 1981, is the attention-grabbing title that always screamed at me to watch when I used to frequent the VHS rental store tucked inside a row of seedy businesses in Vista, California. The title said it all. Oh, yes,  ...

Ronald D. Moore, the showrunner who turned a rebooted Battlestar Galactica into a modern classic series, is back again doing what he does best. This time, though, his aim is not for the stars. It’s 1743 Scotland by way of a postwar England circa 1945. Working with Diana  ...

Suddenly, every other horror movie coming out this year now looks better.  Thrusting audiences straight into the horror of isolation, Muck takes that GEICO commercial – the one spoofing the horror genre – and turns into a 90-minute feature. The problem is that the movie isn’t nearly as funnay or as smart ...

You’ve probably already heard the bad word of mouth about Get Hard, kiddos. The critics have spoken. Now, you get your say. Oh, it’s a dumb comedy and full of offensive jabs at almost every living thing to be sure BUT I was never expecting Shakespeare or, hell, Laurel   ...

Operating like a fever dream about some bizarre nightmare in a haunted house, The Beyond – directed by Lucio Fulci – is still considered the director’s masterpiece.  This underrated film is still, in my opinion, a movie without the proper audience.  Unique in its ability to mesmerize  ...

Hyperbole in this century is rampant. Every second nitwit is a hero; the latest doohickie will ‘change the world’. Drives this reviewer nuts. So when I say that this film undoes a great injustice and sheds light on a man who did, in fact, change the world, you better believe me.  ...

Because we don’t give up on family. Spanning Tokyo, the Dominican Republic, Azerbaijan, Abu Dhabi and LA, the gas tank of Furious 7 should already be sputtering on empty. The fact that the series – and specifically this movie - is fresher and more energetic than it has any ...

Gather your wits, the elderly super-sleuth returns for a second round of investigations.  While many actresses have filled her shoes, none but the great Joan Hickson can boast about being “favorite” to play the part of Miss Jane Marple by the author, Agatha Christie  ...