Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Technologies that distribute audio and video around a home are incredibly cool—if you can afford them, if you can tolerate complicated installation, and if you can figure out how to use them once they’re in. I’ve long assumed a big consumer electronics company like Samsung or Sony would invent a more practical multiroom A/V solution, but it seems the technology that finally gets us past the old paradigms may be Apple’s AirPlay.

Technologies that distribute audio and video around a home are incredibly cool-if you can afford them, if you can tolerate complicated installation, and if you can figure out how to use them once they're in. I've long assumed a big consumer electronics company like Samsung or Sony would invent a more practical multiroom A/V solution, but it seems the technology that finally gets us past the old paradigms may be Apple's AirPlay.

There’s a particularly wonderful scene in The Illusionist, the animated movie adapted and directed by Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville) from a previously unfilmed script by Jacques Tati. When the Monsieur Hulot-like character familiar to fans of Tati goes into a movie theater, there’s Tati’s Mon Oncle up on the screen in live action.

A brown leaf floats on brilliantly clear water that flows over rich green seaweed. That’s just one of the many lyrical images that fill the opening sequence of Solaris. A horse trots along in the background. A cup of tea overflows in a momentary thunderstorm — the rain stopping as quickly as it started, leaving the sound of dripping water and then a serene silence.

William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon relates the colorful adventures of an Irish itinerant who tries his hand at war, gambling, and financially profitable marriage while traveling through 18th-century Europe. Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 adaptation, like many of the director’s other films (including Paths of Glory, Dr.