Blu-ray Movie Reviews

One thing our ongoing pandemic lockdown continues to remind many of us music lovers of on a daily basis is just how much we all miss attending live concert events.

Around 1890, two lighthouse keepers—isolated on a remote New England island with just gulls, each other, and a large supply of liquor for company—begin to gradually lose their sense of reality, civility, and eventually their sanity in an atmospheric concoction not conveyed this intensely since The Shining. It all makes for a great (if grueling) two-handed drama.

Linda Hamilton is back as pistol-packin' mama Sarah Connor and badass as ever, her days dedicated to a familiar mission: ridding the world of killer robots. Dark Fate is James Cameron's first active role in the franchise he created—here as a producer and co-writer—since 1996's T2:3D theme park ride, which surely accounts for much of the movie's old-shoe feel.

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.

Is it the search for assorted MacGuffii—bank-heist loot, giant opal, camera that records brainwave images the blind can see—that sends self-destructive Claire, her writer ex, and a bounty hunter after thief Sam Farber? Or is it love? Threatening in the wings is a nuclear satellite plunging to Earth that, if shot down, could create a chain-reaction atomic pulse that wipes all electronic circuit boards, including the file of the novel the film is being based upon.

Winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or and Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and International Feature, director, co-producer, and co-writer Bong Joon Ho's classist farce, Parasite, focuses on the Kims, a family of poor but proud con artists. Presently scrabbling to get by on lowest-paid jobs in a bug-infested basement apartment in Seoul, South Korea, they dream of climbing up to a better life by tricking the rich using flattery, charm, and well-rehearsed scripts.

It Chapter Two picks up 27 years after the kids from The Losers Club in the first film have grown up and moved on with their lives. The killer clown Pennywise has returned, and a phone call from an old friend brings them all back to the town of Derry where they must face their fears and confront a past that has damaged them in more ways than they know.