Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
To Live and Die in L.A.
Chris Chiarella  |  Nov 10, 2023  | 
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Could the acclaimed director of The French Connection still be relevant in the MTV era? That’s a big 10-4, with William Friedkin delivering another edgy tale of cops and robbers in 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A., this time set on the left coast, and even helming the Wang Chung music video for the title tune.

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Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Top Gun
David Vaughn  |  Jun 05, 2020  | 
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One of my favorite movies from the 1980s, Top Gun stars Tom Cruise as Lt. Peter Mitchell, call sign "Maverick," a young hot-shot pilot picked to attend the prestigious "Top Gun" flight school and hone his air-to-air combat skills. Also appearing are Val Kilmer as "Iceman," Anthony Edwards as Maverick's RIO (radar intercept officer) "Goose," and Tim Robbins as "Merlin." Rounding out the cast is Kelly McGillis as Charlotte "Charlie" Blackwood, a civilian instructor who is an expert on Russian aviation.
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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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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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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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Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Trainspotting
Chris Chiarella  |  May 17, 2024  | 
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Hang on for a wild ride through ‘90s Scotland as Trainspotting returns, nastier than ever. Adapted from the book by Irvine Welsh, it traces the ups and downs of a group of working-class young friends, most of whom are habitual intravenous drug users. The movie gets right to the heroin and not in the way audiences of the era likely expected, proclaiming narrator Mark Renton’s (Ewan McGregor) love for the stuff even as it sends his life out of control.

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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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Trolls
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jul 14, 2017  | 
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There are many definitions of a troll, but as they appear here, in a form first conceived by a Danish woodcarver in 1959 (and subsequently as popular toys), they’re tiny, cute creatures with spiky, multicolored hair who do little besides sing, dance, hug, and party. The miserable Bergens, their enemies, believe that by eating a Troll they can be happy—at least for a day.
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True Romance
Chris Chiarella  |  Aug 26, 2022  | 
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These days you're not likely to see a Quentin Tarantino script directed by someone else, but there was a time when the young filmmaker-cum-video-store-clerk was raising funds to make his directorial debut (Reservoir Dogs) and sold True Romance, which was ultimately helmed by Top Gun's Tony Scott. The movie took a few years to find its audience—and current cult status—but is now hard to see it as anything but inspired and uniquely entertaining.
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Twisters
Chris Chiarella  |  Oct 28, 2024  | 
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The sequel that no one asked for but seemingly everybody enjoyed, Twisters takes advantage of decades of advances in meteorology and special effects technology to bring us a modern take on feisty storm chasers in the American Midwest.
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Two “Killer” Classics Slay on 4K
Chris Chiarella  |  Sep 28, 2024  |  First Published: Sep 29, 2024  | 
The Ladykillers (1955)
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Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
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This month, Kino Lorber Studio Classics has dropped a pair of classic crime flicks, a dark comedy and one of the all-time great whodunnits. I first discovered The Ladykillers back in film school, and its endearing British charm remains central to its enduring appeal.
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Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Ultimate Demo Disc? Planet Earth II on 4K Blu-ray
David Vaughn  |  Aug 01, 2017  | 
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It was about ten years ago that BBC debuted their original Planet Earth on both Blu-ray and HD DVD here in the United States to much critical acclaim. Not resting on their laurels, the Planet Earth team went to work on their next project, appropriately named Planet Earth II. While 1080p was cutting-edge a decade ago, simple HD wouldn’t cut the mustard any longer since we are living in a 4K world that expects wide color gamut (WCG) and high dynamic range (HDR)—or at least readers of Sound & Vision do.
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Unforgiven
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Aug 25, 2017  | 
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Unforgiven marked another turning point for Clint Eastwood and the Western genre. The deconstructed Western stars Eastwood as aged outlaw Bill Munny, who, after years of living a reformed life, is dragged back into his old ways. His wife has passed, and his pig farm is struggling, so an offer to avenge a brutalized prostitute is too much to pass up. He enlists his old running mate, Ned (Morgan Freeman), and they set off with the young “Schofield Kid” to collect the bounty.
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Us
Chris Chiarella  |  Jun 21, 2019  | 
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With Get Out, his first film as writer/director, Jordan Peele introduced us to a refined new form of horror. He was the only filmmaker who could do justice to his Oscar-bound script, finding just the right tone and wringing that last bit of mood from every line, every shot, every performance. Now, with Us, he has raised the stakes, telling a deeper story on a much grander scale.
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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Avi Greengart  |  Mar 02, 2018  | 
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Valerian is director Luc Besson’s passion project: He wrote and directed it based on a French comic book he loved as a child. It’s also the most expensive independent film ever, with a budget of around $180 million. It’s quite the spectacle, and the plot—involving displaced aliens amidst a multi-species space station—could be a reasonable foundation for a sci-fi adventure or sci-noir procedural. Unfortunately, the acting, character development, and dialogue are simply terrible. Ironically, the only believable character is a shape-shifting burlesque dancer played by Rihanna.
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