Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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Top Gun
Corey Gunnestad  |  Aug 09, 2013  | 
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I was a senior in high school when Top Gun came out in 1986. After that, every guy in my class, including myself, wanted to be Tom Cruise. He just epitomized coolness in a way that transcended even his iconic turn in Risky Business. Our Navy recruitment officer was extremely happy that year because enlistment was at an all-time high. No, they didn’t ensnare me, thankfully. My admiration for Mr. Cruise and this film went only as far as the box office and not swabbing decks on some aircraft carrier. But I remember we drove an extra 20 miles out of our way to see Top Gun at a brand-new theater that was the first in the state equipped for THX sound. And it made all the difference.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Top Gun: Maverick
Chris Chiarella  |  Nov 12, 2022  | 
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Someone once posited that the way to gauge the quality of a sequel is to plot the delta—better or worse—from the movie that spawned it. Employing that metric, Top Gun: Maverick might be the best damned sequel that I've ever seen.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Total Recall
Roger Kanno  |  Feb 05, 2021  | 
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Total Recall is a near-perfect mix of sci-fi action, plot twists, and the kind of warped tongue-in-cheek humor we expect from director Paul Verhoeven, delivered here with gusto by Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Douglas Quaid, a construction worker. More correctly, Schwarzenegger is Carl Hauser, a secret operative for the "Agency" who believes he is Quaid due to a memory implant. After being attacked by agents from the "Agency," Quaid escapes to Mars to aid the rebel independence movement and discover his true identity.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Touch of Evil
Josef Krebs  |  Jul 30, 2014  | 
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Touch of Evil is a tale of two cities, or at least two opposite towns sharing the same border. Coming from one side is priggish, by-the-book Mexican drug enforcement official Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston), who finds himself taking on brilliant, highly respected American cop Captain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), who plants evidence to bring the guilty to justice.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Toy Story 3
David Vaughn  |  Nov 02, 2010  | 
As Andy prepares to leave for college, his mother asks what he wants to do with his old toys. When they end up at a day-care center, Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) and Buzz (Tim Allen) must help the old gang escape from the toddlers' torture chamber and find their way back to Andy's room before he departs.

How do you top one of the greatest sequels ever made? Screenwriter Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine) somehow captures lightning in a bottle for the third time by taking our heroes and mixing them up with a new cast of characters that include Ken (Michael Keaton), a thespian hedgehog named Mr. Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton), and the evil pink teddy bear Lotso (Ned Beaty), who sentences the new toys to the toddlers' room.

Every Pixar release has been a demo showpiece, and this one is no exception. The 1080p video encode is perfect, and the DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 soundtrack features reference-quality dynamics, frequency response, and surround envelopment.

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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Toy Story 4
Thomas J. Norton  |  Dec 20, 2019  | 
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On her first day at pre-school, Bonnie, the kid who received Andy's toys at the end of Toy Story 3, makes (literally) a new friend out of a discarded spork. She calls him Forky and he soon becomes her favorite toy. But that's just the first act. On a road-trip with Bonnie's family, cowboy-toy Woody reunites with his old flame Bo Peep. Bo, now a "lost toy," has acquired the skills of an action hero—a sort of RamBoPeep.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Toy Story and Toy Story 2 (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Mar 17, 2010  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/ts1.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>The wizards at Pixar discovered that when left alone toys will come to life. In Andy's room his favorite toy is Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), an old-fashioned cowboy doll whose status is usurped when Andy is given the latest and greatest space toy, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen). With the social dynamics thrown into chaos, Woody and Buzz end up in the clutches of any toys worst nightmare&#151;Sid, the toy-torturing boy next door.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Tracking Surround: AC/DC: Live at Donington, on Blu-ray Disc
Ken Richardson  |  Apr 03, 2008  | 
Live at Donington Columbia
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Tracking Surround: Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds Blu-ray
Ken Richardson  |  Nov 04, 2007  | 

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Traffic (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Apr 27, 2010  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/trafficbd.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Penned by Stephan Gaghan, <i>Traffic</i> tackles the war on drugs from three different angles. In Washington, D.C. newly appointed drug czar, Judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), spends all of his time focusing on the drug war and doesn’t realize his own daughter is a prolific user. Javier Rodriguez (Benito Del Toro), a Tijuana police officer, fights his own battle against the drug trade but corruption in his department may be his biggest obstacle. Then there's Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whose life is turned upside down when her husband is accused of being the head of a drug cartel while two DEA agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) attempt to turn one of one of his employees against him.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Transcendence
Chris Chiarella  |  Oct 29, 2014  | 
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Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning go-to cinematographer Wally Pfister makes his directorial debut with this fantastical tale of a 21st-century ghost in the machine. Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) believes that mankind is on the verge of a new order of artificial intelligence. It involves “transcendence,” whereby the electrical impulses of the brain—the emotions, memories, and ideas that make up our consciousness—are uploaded into a supercomputer. And after Will is shot by a member of a radical neo-luddite group (no, seriously), that’s exactly what he does to himself, losing his physical form and becoming a being of pure software.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Transformers
David Vaughn  |  Aug 22, 2008  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/transformers.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Two competing factions from Cybertron&#151;the Autobots and Decepticons&#151;arrive on Earth seeking the Allspark, a device with enough power to save their planet. A human teenager (Shia LaBeouf) holds the key to where the Allspark is hidden, and unbeknownst to him, his recently purchased Camaro is an Autobot serving as his protector from the evil Decepticons until help can arrive.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Transformers - Dark of the Moon
David Vaughn  |  Sep 30, 2011  | 
In 1959, a UFO crash-landed on the moon and it was the true catalyst for space race between the US and Russia as they hurried to investigate the incident. In present day, the Autobots become aware of the crash and race to the moon to do their own investigation. Onboard the spacecraft they discover a deactivated Sentinel Prime who can only be reactivated by Optimus Prime, who is curious what happened so many years ago.

I wasn't a big fan of the original Transformers movie and skipped the critically panned sequel, but had heard good things about this one and was willing to give it a chance. The premise actually had some promise, but everything I disliked about the first movie is repeated here—shallow plot, poor acting, senseless characters, and a never-ending third act that repeats many of the action scenes witnessed in the first two acts. Granted, Michael Bay doesn't make these films to win Academy Awards for Best Picture, but he'll certainly never win a Best Editor award because the bloated run time clocks in at 154 fatiguing minutes.

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3D Blu-ray Movie ReviewsBlu-ray Movie Reviews
Transformers: Age of Extinction
Chris Chiarella  |  Nov 19, 2014  | 
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I guess people really like to watch robots breaking stuff. Transformers: Age of Extinction was another worldwide hit for the franchise, repeating more of the same paranoid nonsense (and lame dialogue and unfunny jokes) as its three predecessors. This time, a couple of suits decide they can build and control their own Transformers, using technology stolen from the evil Decepticons. How do you think that works out? The human ally this time is an underdog inventor (Mark Wahlberg) with a cutie-patootie daughter, in a mildly disturbing riff on Beauty and the Beast.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Transformers: Rise of the Steelbooks
Chris Chiarella  |  Jun 13, 2023  | 
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As editor Mark Henninger and I discuss on the regular, physical media has become not only about entertainment but collectability, and so we have seen the arrival of new editions that look snazzy on the shelf and that we can flaunt to our friends. Quite a few of the discs I've reviewed recently for S&V have arrived in step-up steelbook cases adorned with exclusive, genuinely inspired artwork. (Take that, streaming!)

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