Highly Recommended The Movie: Based on the novel by Scott Heim, Gregg Araki’s 2004 film Mysterious Skin takes place in rural Kansas where we meet two eight year old boys, Neil McCormack (Chase Ellison) and Brian Lackey (George Webster). When Brian was at a baseball game, he blacked out
Recommended THE FILM: Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution. Director Janet Tobias’ documentary No Place On Earth offers new perspective on the Holocaust and that alone makes the film worth watching.
Skip It THE FILM: Trashy B-movie thriller Scorned is really stupid, but damn if AnnaLynne McCord isn’t an engaging actress. She plays unhinged and pissed Sadie, a young woman who discovers that her boyfriend Kevin (Billy Zane) is sleeping with her best friend, Jennifer (Viva Bianca). She lures Kevin to a fancy house on a weekend getaway, drugs him and proceeds to make him wish he’d never laid a …
DVD Talk Collector Series In 10 Words or Less Cheever’s short masterpiece becomes a cult classic Reviewer’s Bias* Loves: Cult films, psychological dramas, stories of behind-the-scenes chaos Likes: John Cheever, Burt Lancaster Dislikes: Tales of tragedy, WASP-y troubles Hates: Artists being abused by businessmen The Movie The first time I really connected with something I was assigned to read for …
Highly Recommended The Movie: On the heels of creating A Separation , the movie that won Iran’s first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, writer-director Asghar Farhadi has returned with The Past , a film that echoes the mood and tone of A Separation (and his prior work) while shifting the setting from Iran to the outskirts of Paris.
Highly Recommended The Movie: Abel Ferrara’s 1981 rape/revenge film Ms .45 (also known as Angel Of Vengeance ) follows the story of a young woman named Thana (played by Zoe Lund credited here as Zoe Tamerlis, who was obviously quite young when the picture was made), a pretty young woman who works in the fashion district of Manhattan. Thana is incredibly shy and doesn’t talk, she communicates …
DVD Talk Collector Series Akira Kurosawa set out to make The Hidden Fortress ( Kakushi toride no san akunin or “Three Bad Men of the Hidden Fortress,” 1958) as “100% Entertainment.” In that he succeeds completely. The movie, later the basis for the first Star Wars (1977), to the point where Hidden Fortress star Toshiro Mifune was even considered for the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi, remains as …
Highly Recommended The Movie: Nothing is quite so exciting a movie experience as the claustrophobic thriller. Director Jeremy Lovering provides that closed in feeling inside of a compact car, roaming lost around the isolated byways of Ireland, in his tightly wound film In Fear .
Recommended Filmed in North Braddock, Pennsylvania (just outside of Pittsburgh) Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace (2013) examines a handful of characters in a town crippled by a failing economy, their own bad choices and/or quite a bit of bad luck. Our central characters are Russell (Christian Bale) and Rodney Baze (Casey Affleck), two brothers who have taken decidedly different paths in life …
DVD Talk Collector Series Reviewed by Glenn Erickson How does one write a critical review of a movie that plays as nothing less than perfect? It was a shock when, after receiving ten Academy Award nominations, David O.