Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Anyone assuming that this is a prequel to the four-movie Hunger Games trilogy — all based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling novels — might find themselves bemused. This time we focus on the winning side in Panem’s bloody civil war, with a thoughtful and fascinating character study of the saga’s central antagonist, the future president — all intensified on 4K Blu-ray.

Some sports movies are simply about baseball, boxing, hockey or whatever, while others manage to be about something else, and maybe even something more. Such is the case with The Longest Yard, which adds layer upon layer of subtext to the game of football until we can’t help but feel deeply invested in the final score.

When industrialist Bartholomew Bogue starts to terrorize and take control of the town of Rose Creek, its concerned citizens pool their money in order to hire a group of mercenaries to drive the villain—and his private army—from the town. The widow of one of Bogue’s victims hits the road and meets Sam Chisholm, who accepts the job and goes about recruiting six other men to the task, all with varying skills that complement one another in order to bring justice to Rose Creek.

The Marvels begins with Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel, journeying to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary. While investigating the strange phenomenon, her powers become inexplicably entangled with super-fan Kamala Khan, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, and Carol’s estranged niece, astronaut Captain Monica Rambeau. This unlikely trio must team up and work together to save the universe.

In The Matrix: Resurrections, Neo (Keanu Reeves) is a developer responsible for the most popular game trilogy, one that ponders what would happen if AI took over the world and we didn't realize it. In his everyday life, listless and disconnected, Neo is seeing a therapist called the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) who has been prescribing him blue pills so he can get his head right. Turns out that Neo is back in the Matrix and he doesn't know it, but he can feel it. Thankfully, people are trying to rescue him. They also stumble across something new in the Matrix, called "modals," where incidents from Neo's past are being replayed over and over, but the outcomes are slightly different each time.

Forget about the Mummy movies starring Brendan Fraser, which kicked off in 1999 and launched their own spinoffs. This version of The Mummy is in fact a reboot of Universal’s vaunted Classic Monsters franchises of the 1930s onward. Although it is meant to be a horror flick, this Tom Cruise vehicle directed by Alex Kurtzman—known more for his writing on TV series like Hawaii Five-0 than for directing—is less about horror than it is about big action set pieces.