Blu-ray Movie Reviews

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/youngfrankenstein.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Summoned to his late grandfather's castle in Transylvania, young Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) soon discovers the scientist's step-by-step manual explaining how to bring a corpse to life. Aided by his loyal assistants, beautiful Inga (Teri Garr) and ghastly Igor (Marty Feldman)&#151;who insists his name is pronounced "eye-gore"&#151;things don't work out so well when he reanimates a body using an abnormal brain.

The post-apocalyptic dystopian film is a staple of science-fiction filmmaking, but most of the films inhabit a similar space. Director Craig Zobel’s Z for Zachariah is one of the rare ones that change the formula. Z for Zachariah, based upon Robert C. O’Brien’s novel, still relies on some unknown radioactive, presumably nuclear event as the catalyst that brings down society, but the story is not focused on this. Instead, it is a character study about three people in one idyllic valley in the Southeastern United States spared by the disaster.

In what will surely go down in history as a textbook example of a successful online campaign to release a much-wanted movie, the #releasethesnydercut movement ultimately convinced Warner Bros. to complete and distribute director Zack Snyder's original vision for his DC Comics Extended Universe ("DCEU") team-up flick, Justice League. Snyder's departure from the project during production led to the hiring of Joss Whedon to oversee final work on the movie for its November 2017 theatrical debut, writing and directing new scenes on the way to a two-hour cut. That version largely left audiences cold, particularly fans of Snyder's previous DCEU films, despite co-star Gal Gadot's wave of popularity from her Wonder Woman solo film a few months earlier.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/zodiac.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>The Zodiac killer terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s with a handful of murders and cryptic messages sent to local newspapers, including the <I>San Francisco Chronicle</I>. Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) covered the story for the <I>Chronicle</I>, and cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) became so obsessed with the Zodiac story that it begins to affect his family life.

Zombieland: Double Tap revisits the characters of Tallahassee, Columbus, Wichita, and Little Rock (played by Woody Harrelson, Jessie Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin, respectively) 10 years after the original Zombieland takes place. There is plenty of clever dialogue and zombie kills to keep the film moving at an entertaining pace, even though it lacks some of the freshness of the original. This latest version of the zombie apocalypse also benefits from an excellent supporting cast that includes Rosario Dawson, Thomas Middleditch, Luke Wilson, Avan Jogia, and Zoey Deutch in an especially humorous performance.