Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Al Griffin | Nov 16, 2009 |

No longer content to be tethered to A/V systems alone, many new Bluray Disc players augment their basic BD-Live online capability with streaming services like Netflix, Pandora, Vudu, YouTube, and CinemaNow.

Wish I Was Here

Josef Krebs | Feb 09, 2015 |

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In this family affair—both in subject and moviemaking— Zach Braff directs and stars while co-writing and co-producing with his brother Adam. Together they’ve created a gently comic, small, oddball drama that, like Braff’s Garden State, often feels lightweight and silly but somehow manages to deal profoundly with the biggest questions and challenges of people’s lives in a resonating and moving manner. The family is that of Aidan Bloom, an immature, 35-year-old, out-of-work L.A. actor trying to live his passionate dream while holding his family together. The crisis comes to a head when he must remove his two children from their school because Aidan’s unforgivingly judgmental, sarcastically (and funnily) scathing father Gabe (Mandy Patinkin)—who was staking the kids’ education so long as it was in a Yeshiva school—needs the money for experimental cancer treatment, forcing Aidan to half-assedly home-teach his kids.

Blu-ray Movie Reviews

With a Bang or a Whimper

Thomas J. Norton | Jul 03, 2005 |

Avoid a Blue Tuesday by capping off your holiday weekend plans with the end of the world! Whether we will become extinct as a species from within or without is the subject of two movies on DVD, one an environmental-disaster flick of dubious distinction, the other a classic loosely based on the Victorian novel that in turn has inspired a current remake. Thomas J. Norton and Fred Manteghian report on 2004's The Day After Tomorrow: All Access Collector's Edition and 1953's The War of the Worlds.

Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Wolf Totem

Brandon A. DuHamel | Apr 22, 2016 |

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After he and his film Seven Years in Tibet (1997) were banned from China, director Jean-Jacques Annaud returns to the country for his visually stunning Wolf Totem, an adaptation of Jiang Rong’s semi-autobiographical novel.

Set during China’s Cultural Revolution of 1969, Wolf Totem is an environmentalist tale that follows Beijing student Chen Zhen (Shaofeng Feng), who is assigned to China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to teach its nomadic shepherd population. Instead, Zhen becomes attached to the land, its people, and the balance between them and their most feared enemy, the wolves.

Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Woman in the Dunes

Josef Krebs | Dec 16, 2016 |

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Stark, disturbing, disorienting, director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) is a masterpiece of macabre metaphor. An entomologist searching for specimens of insects in a desert at the edge of a seaside misses his bus back to Tokyo and is offered to spend the night in the hut of a young widow at the bottom of a sand dune surrounding it on all sides. He discovers the next morning that the ladder has been pulled up by the local villagers trapping him with the woman for years to come.

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Wonder Woman

Chris Chiarella | Jan 19, 2018 |

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Many filmmakers would surely crack under the challenges of finally bringing Wonder Woman to the big screen. But the remarkably gifted Patty Jenkins (writer/director of 2004’s Monster, her last feature) tackles the ambitious production—an action-heavy World War I– era period piece—with educated gusto, thoughtfully honoring and expanding upon the beloved heroine’s legacy. Of course, none of that matters without the right star, and Gal Gadot’s Princess Diana combines strength, brains, and innocence to give this movie an irresistible heart.

Blu-ray Movie Reviews

World's Greatest Dad (Blu-ray) World's Greatest Dad (Blu-ray)

David Vaughn | Dec 07, 2009 |

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/greatdad.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) learns that fame and fortune may not always be the key to happiness when in the wake of a freak accident his lifelong dream of being a famous writer comes to fruition, but at what cost?

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Wrath of the Titans

Thomas J. Norton | Oct 01, 2012 |

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Zeus, king of the gods, enlists the help of his half-human son Perseus in defeating Perseus’ brother Ares, who has allied with Hades in an effort to release Kronos, the leader of the Titans and the father of Zeus and the other gods. But Perseus just wants to be left alone to live as a human with his son.

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Wreck-It Ralph

Thomas J. Norton | Jul 31, 2013 |

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Ralph plays the bad guy in the decades-old video game Fix-It Felix, Jr. Each time the game is reset, he trashes the high-rise apartment building that serves as the game’s main setting, only to have Felix instantly repair the damage. It’s a living, but Ralph lives alone in a junk pile, the other characters in the game want nothing to do with him, and he finds relief only in a Bad-Anon support group. As another member of that group argues, he may be a bad guy, but he isn’t a bad guy.

Blu-ray Movie Reviews

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Blu-ray)

David Vaughn | Sep 22, 2009 |

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/wolverine.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Hugh Jackman returns as the iconic character, revealing his tortured past from boy to man to mutant. Conflicts with his brother Victor Creed (Live Schreiber) his membership in Team X, his adamantium rebirth, and his memory loss all fuel his quest for revenge.

Blu-ray Movie Reviews

X-Men Trilogy (Blu-ray)

David Vaughn | May 03, 2009 |

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/xmen.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to grow from a single-cell organism into the dominating species on the planet. This process is slow, taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward. Prof. Charles Frances Xavier

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X-Men: Days of Future Past

Chris Chiarella | Jan 21, 2015 |

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You’d think that the unique power to control metal, or the weather, or other people’s minds would be awesome, but no. In the world of the X-Men, mutated superhumans with such gifts are feared and hated and—in one possible future—will be hunted to the brink of extinction by an army of killer robots. Even worse, these deadly machines will also begin targeting us ordinary human beings, and the world we know now appears doomed.

Blu-ray Movie Reviews

X-Men: Days of Future Past–The Rogue Cut

Chris Chiarella | Oct 23, 2015 |

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Remember reading that Oscar winner and True Blood star Anna Paquin was going to reprise her role as the mutant Rogue in the most recent X-Men movie, Days of Future Past? And then the movie came out and she was in exactly two shots with nary a word of dialogue, and even that moment came a scant four-and-a-half minutes before the end? Well, there was in fact more planned for her, and the new “Rogue Cut” reinstates her scenes as part of a rethought, expanded version of the movie. To be frank, it’s largely the same story you’re probably used to. Rogue’s return has minimal impact on the plot, but there are lots of other little changes along the way too, successfully enhancing the overall drama.

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XXX: Return of Xander Cage

David Vaughn | Sep 22, 2017 |

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It’s been several years since Xander Cage has been on the scene, but he’s brought back into the fold when a device called Pandora’s Box falls into the wrong hands. It has the ability to bring down any satellite and turn it into a weapon of mass destruction as it crashes down on the planet. One of his conditions for coming back to the CIA was that of recruiting his own team so he can ensure their absolute trust and his own personal safety.

Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Y Tu Mamá También

Fred Kaplan | Oct 29, 2014 |

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Is Y Tu Mamá También (rough translation: So’s your mama) a wry and trenchant story about class, friendship, sexuality, and globalization in a rapidly changing Mexico—or is it a gussied-up piece of soft porn? Both, I think, but it’s all done so affably and naturally (the sociology, the politics, and the porn) that it comes off as a work of great charm and comedy and sadness. A gorgeous young married woman and two rambunctious teenage boys—best friends, one wealthy, one poor but aspiring—take off on a road trip to Mexico’s rural beaches.

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