Blu-ray Movie Reviews

As if to illustrate that point, too-cool detective Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) is finally tying the knot, while his partner Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) suffers a near-fatal heart attack that compels him to reevaluate his life.

Once again, the studios have saved some of their very best releases for the warm weather months. Settle in with a cool drink for a wide variety of films—and a couple of soundtracks—both high-profile and under-the-radar, across a range of genres, decades, and even different languages.

After several Hollywood adaptations for both the big and small screens, Edward Berger is now the first German director to adapt his countryman Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Here, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) is a young German man who finds himself caught up in the patriotic fervor of World War I Germany and, along with his friends, enlists in the military to fight. Upon arriving at the Western Front against France, Paul and his friends are confronted with the reality of trench warfare, which is vastly different from the glory they imagined.

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!)