DVD Reviews

There’s a key scene about halfway through A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood in which cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), utters under his breath, "he's about the nicest person I've ever met.” Of course, Lloyd is talking about Fred Rogers, the host of ...

 The first time I heard the name Mike Mignola was after I received a set of his Topps comic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As a lifelong comic reader, I’m ashamed to say I’d missed his ...

Misery is just about this reviewer’s favorite Stephen King adaptation. Its director, Rob Reiner, was the only one entrusted with that adaptation because the author knew the director would adapt it well. The reason that King knew he would adapt it well ...

Filmmaker Sam Mendes gets down and personal with his new film, 1917 about two young British soldiers sent on an impossible mission to save hundreds of their fellow soldiers. Though largely fictionalized, his tale comes from an actual account told by his paternal grandfather who served in the ...

If one of the final moments of director J. J. Abrams’ Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker - two lightsabers sinking into the sands of Tattooine - hits you rather hollow, it is by the director’s choice.  The Skywalker Saga is over with this film, but what’s shocking is that it really doesn’t feel ...

The Bourne series is currently five films in (as of the writing of this article) and had definitively made its mark in the action/spy genre. In a perfect storm of confluences, it hit its mark with an audience desperate to break with convention and be given something unseen in the ...

There are touchstone pictures that transcend any generation, no matter when they were born, that fall under the MUST WATCH category. They are masterpieces. Films like Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of Sierra Madre, (I know! Bogart nut) it doesn’t matter. If you are a film aficionado, a general viewer, a ...

Raise your hand if the news of yet another adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel, Little Women coming to theaters on Christmas Day failed to jingle your bells. Okay, we can all put them down now. After all, with so many previous adaptations – including 1949’s version starring Elizabeth Taylor and ...

At one point in Just Mercy, the new film from director, co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton (The Glass Castle), the film’s main character Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) points out that “the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth, it’s justice.” Those words set the tone for the tangle of legal and  ...

Somewhere in Colts Neck, New Jersey there sets a horse farm owned by Bruce Springsteen.  And on those 378 acres there is a two-story barn which, on certain nights, doubles as a performance area for Springsteen, his wife Patti Scialfa, and some close friends.  The voices coming out from  ...

Tenacious is the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Sylvester Stallone. He was once one of the highest-paid and most successful actors in cinema’s history, and, like most, has had his fair share of career highlights and—lets be kind—lulls. ...

Movies like Miracles from Heaven and Heaven Is for Real tell allegedly true stories of divine intervention. The latest such movie is 2019’s Breakthrough. About four years ago in Missouri, teenager John Smith (Marcel Ruiz) fell through the ice of a frozen lake. After 15 minutes underwater he clinically died. But when ...

2004’s Hellboy was a well-received if unspectacular performer at the box office, and the studios were not in a hurry to spend on another one. Undeterred, Guillermo Del Toro pressed on pitching various iterations of what could be the follow up. Oh, and since he had some time to kill ...

What does a filmmaker do when attempting to revive a franchise that has lain dormant for more than a decade? In the case of Bad Boys For Life, directors Adil and Bilall do what most other filmmakers have done: they adapt the story to fit a new cultural landscape, they riff  ...

The last decade of the 20th Century in movies saw the pinnacle of star-powered excess-driven extravaganzas peak with Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. One of the biggest stars in the world, at the time, he could write his own ticket, dictate all terms, and will anything he wanted into existence. That ...

Where have you been, Guy Ritchie? We’ve missed your language, your punch, your sleight of hand, and that self-referential swagger that defined your early days as a filmmaker. We got hardly any of that as you set out for more commercial ventures like Swept Away, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,  ...

Who wasn't frightened as a child by the horrifically grim childhood fairy tale about an evil witch who bakes pastries to lure children into her home so she can cook and eat the youngsters for dinner? It’s a wonder any of us made it out of childhood without totally losing all of our marbles ...

I’ll start this review with a question. 4K has been out for a few years now, and although this reviewer has only recently dipped into this new resolution, I wonder why companies like Arrow are still going to the effort of releasing restored definitive and feature-laden movies from days gone by, at scanned  ...

Though more than eighty years have passed since Claude Rains donned the dark sunglasses, smoking jacket, and yards of ACE bandages in 1933’s The Invisible Man, the character still holds a firm place in the pantheon of Universal’s classic movie monsters. That’s not only a testament to the legacy of the studio’s monster ...

What's the first question everyone asks whenever you’ve just watched a new Pixar film? “Where does it rank?” Of course, they’re asking where it fits within the hierarchy of Pixar films. And let’s face it, even a bad Pixar film tops most cinema fare these days, so when we say that Onward ranks ...

What if they made a movie and nobody came? That was the fear when the horror satire The Hunt was scheduled for release last fall before being delayed by a series of unfortunate events. First, it was the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings. Then a tweet about the film from our ...

The latest iteration of Bob Clark’s ultra-gory yule tide slasher, Black Christmas, promises a modern take on the cult horror classic that stoked the fears of every sorority girl back in 1974  ...

There’s a shocking, telling moment late in the movie Harriet (2019). Referring to a group of escaped slaves, the villain Gideon (Joe Elwyn) calls them “three bucks and a female with foal.” Of course, he does much worse throughout the movie. But that ...

Star Wars’ new caretakers, Disney, have gone to painstaking work to be able to release this series of films for the first time in 4K. After purchasing the franchise from George Lucas, acquiring 20th Century Fox, and continuing the Star Wars saga with (so far) 5 new ...

The greatest sequel ever made… There. Done… Oh, you want more? All right then. Star Wars changed cinema forever. Some say to its detriment. Its penetration into the world’s lexicon was all encompassing. It was in everyone’s vernacular after 1977, and made the left of field auteur George Lucas the ...

This film would be the culmination for a generation of Star Wars fans, and we couldn’t have been better primed for it. We would wait three years to learn the answers to the most tantalizing cliffhangers ever conceived. Was Han Solo gone forever? Was Darth Vader lying to Luke? I can  ...

Episode 2 made a couple of firsts in Star Wars history. Firstly, it would be the first of them shot entirely digital. Secondly, and unfortunately, it would be the first of the episodes to debut with a now tarnished perception. The Phantom Menace had not gone down well with the critics and a great ...

 Twice now, in different decades, Star Wars has resurrected itself and rewarded Lucas handsomely. With the recent sequel trilogy now behind us, the parallels between their reception and the era of the prequel trilogy are difficult to ignore. Both critics and the Star Wars fan base have major issues with ...

2005 saw the end of the prequel trilogy, and what a job it had before it to finally deliver what we’d been promised since the trilogy was announced: the descent of Anakin Skywalker to the dark side and the rise of Darth Vader ...

When Harley Quinn has a bad day, it’s a good day for the rest of us. And Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is the proof. The very bad, rotten day had by Harley (Margot Robbie, I, Tonya), is told in side-splitting detail in the 24-hour comical frenzy ...