DVD Reviews

Some 27 years after it’s release, one might be forgiven for forgetting what a game changer Jan de Bont’s Speed was. No scratch that, you should remember! Back in the early 90s, the big muscles, full testosterone action picks from Sly, Arnie, Segal, Van Damme and the like were started  ...

Marvel does Bourne!  With plenty of globe-hopping and mouth-dropping action sequences, Black Widow finally arrives in theaters after an over yearlong delay due to Covid-19 and reminds us of why we absolutely love the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its many characters.  With heart ...

These are STILL not the ninjas you are looking for.  Sure, they might go by the same names as those in the outstanding G.I. Joe universe, as developed by Marvel Comics from 1982 to 1994 in the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero comic series, but the film adaptations have yet to do Hasbro  ...

If your maitre d’s offer of free private access to a secluded beach that you will share with only a few select fellow guests seems too good to be true, it’s probably because it is. ...

“You want your supply? I need my pig.” In his feature film debut, Pig, writer/director Michael Sarnoski does not give us a revenge-seeking, blood-soaked, over-acting Nicholas Cage that mows down an array of adversaries who stand in the way between him ...

What are you willing to sacrifice to protect your family? Would you give up your freedom? Are you prepared to unequivocally accept the consequences of your singular actions? Does your answer change if you are in a foreign country? ...

Not much has changed since 1955 when the Jungle River Cruise ride was introduced. The romance of the swashbuckling adventure yarn returns courtesy of the chemistry between Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in Jungle Cruise.  Is it perfect?  Nope.  But watching them come together in ...

“Is it wrong to want greatness for you?” David Lowrey’s new visual marvel, The Green Knight, challenges the very notion of greatness and honor in this 21st-century retelling of the 14th-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. What exactly does achieving greatness and honor ...

What if all the non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games – the background characters controlled by the game's artificial intelligence (AI) rather than by a gamer – suddenly broke out and began taking control of their own destinies? Would anyone play a video game that awards points for  ...

What makes for great horror? Some prefer in-your-face blood and graphic violence, while others are spooked by the unsettling things that can’t be seen – the things that happen just off screen or in the corners of the frame. Fans of the latter, do we have a film for you! ...

Candyman. Do you dare say it? We’re coming up on 30 years since the hook-handed killer – known affectionately as the Candyman – haunted the honeycombed halls of the Cabrini-Green housing project in 1992’s Candyman. And now he’s back to paint those same corridors red in a ...

The intense stage lighting. The stylized production design. The black gloved-hand killer. The dramatic and often weirdly over-stylized music with electronic throbbing Goblin-like rhythm and pulses.  And, yes, the buckets of blood splashed everywhere.  If this were the 1970s, the best decade for  ...

Testicles. Who needs ‘em? While watching Prisoners of the Ghostland, it's best to - like the logic it usually requires to follow a normal film from beginning to its everlovin’ end - throw them both out the window.  Got your attention?  Good.  Love it or leave it, Prisoners of the Ghostland is ...

Despite the film’s strong foundation and rather rich themes, Paul Schrader’s newest project, The Card Counter, is unsuccessful in attempts to achieve a tense and mysterious tone, and ultimately ends up as a dull, messy drama full of awkward dialogue and performances ...

It’s time for Clint Eastwood to hang up his acting hat for good. There, I said it. And that’s coming from one of the guy’s biggest fans. Sure, the man is inarguably a true Hollywood legend having appeared in more than 50 films, from 1950’s sci-fis, to countless war dramas, to starring roles in a dozen or ...

If we are to believe the film’s promotional materials, namely its poster which asks “Who Made Tony Soprano,” then The Many Saints of Newark is an origin story for the fictional gangster played by James Gandolfini in David Chase’s groundbreaking, award-winning HBO drama series ...

Writer/director Julia Ducournau’s sophomore feature film, Titane, is definitely one of the wildest and most shocking films that you will ever see…but in all of the best ways. You will squirm. You will grip your arm rest. You will even spew out many “No”s at the screen (trust me, I did the same). But the  ...

“A fable from a true tragedy.” From the moment Spencer opens with these words, any preconceived notions that the audience has about sitting down for a conventional biopic is completely thrown out the window. Instead, director Pablo Larraín and writer Steven Knight place us right inside ...

Continuing his string of slow-burn, meditative science fiction films, director Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune has finally given the epic tale a much-deserved justice. Now…I am not here to drag David Lynch’s Dune (1984) through the dirt with a boat load of low-blow comparisons. (In fact, I think  ...

It’s quite hard to believe that the writer/director of such a modest, coming-of-age tale like Songs My Brothers Taught Me is the same person who just delivered us Marvel’s latest installment, Eternals. Though undoubtedly Chloé Zhao’s style is ingrained in the blockbuster, it is just a difficult task  ...

A small little underdog of a movie: it’s hard to believe but that’s exactly what Silence of the Lambs was. It was a film nobody wanted to make. Gene Hackman, who had paid for half the rights, bowed out, claiming it was too violent; Michelle Pfeiffer rejected the soon to be Oscar-winning role for the ...

Achieving the impossible is easy. All one needs is a clear vision, a lofty dream, and a brazen plan to make it come true, right? At least that’s what Richard Williams would have us believe. After all, Williams – father of tennis greats Venus and Serena – had a vision in the late ‘70s that two ...

This low budget ($300,000 USD) slasher film, made by a USC graduate in the late 70s, would spawn countless sequels and give its backers some serious profits, the world horror auteur John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis. Those things make the love for this simple tale worth it alone. It’s cementing  ...

Only three years after Halloween swept the world up in the antics of Michael Myers, John Carpenter reluctantly returned to write the follow up, after pressure from Akkad and especially producer Irwin Yablans. Halloween 2 would be financed, written, filmed and released in 1981. They didn’t mess  ...

In today’s world of divisiveness and animosity fueled by the 24 hour news cycle that mines its content from our dissimilarities and opposing views, we could all be better served by appreciating and accepting the connections that allow us to understand one another. That’s the central  ...

The run of Daniel Craig as James Bond comes to its stunning and long delayed conclusion with No Time to Die, an action-packed spectacle of fun and tears that seriously delivers.  For “final” Bond films, this one satisfies on every level connecting the dots and plot points of previous entries  ...

Eddie Brock has a BIG secret! It takes a couple of views, but Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a fun, fast-paced flick that, easy to swallow, gets straight to the point as Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) continues to live with the unwanted shape-shifting symbiote known as Venom (also voiced by ...

In just five short years since the much-maligned Spider-Man 3, Marvel’s Spider-Man gets the rebooted remake in Marc Webb’s thrilling The Amazing Spider-Man.  While, before seeing the picture, one could argue the rationale of such a move on Columbia’s part, the necessity however becomes  ...

Wasted talent. That’s the most economical way to sum up The 355, a female-led globetrotting espionage action thriller that finds its multi-racial cast of Hollywood A-listers muddling through a script so lazily written it gives generic a bad name  ...

Perhaps one of, if not the most important film movement in cinema’s history is that of the French New Wave, that made its audacious emergence in the late 1950’s and lasted until about the late 1960’s. Throwing out every rule of the dominating studio system, this movement took to the streets  ...