Highly Recommended THE PROGRAM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials provided by PBS, not the Blu-ray edition under review. The word “infrastructure” most often hits our ears when tossed off by one politician or another, but to what extent do we grasp what our cities’, states’, or nation’s infrastructure actually is — what it looks like, how it came to be, how …
Highly Recommended I must admit to taking Meryl Streep for granted most of the last 30 years. After a pretty amazing early film career in films like The Deer Hunter (1978), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), and Sophie’s Choice (1982), for me Streep’s movies began a big downward slide beginning with the absurdly overrated Out of Africa (1985).
Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials provided by HBO Films, not the Blu-ray edition under review. I have never seen the groundbreaking 1973 PBS documentary series An American Family , but I have long been aware of it; it’s often cited as the first step American TV took toward the televised “reality” that’s proven as enduringly popular as it …
Highly Recommended Madonna: Truth or Dare Blu-ray Review Madonna is one of the most well lovedmusic acts in the history of pop music. Her albums continue to top thebillboardsales charts with each release
Recommended Wizards Blu-ray Review RalphBakshi certainly seemed to recognize unique ways to createsci-fi/fantasyworlds in animation. Wizards doesn’t necessarilyseem reminiscent of anything else. Perhaps other Ralph Bakshi movies?Even thatdoesn’t seem to be a positive given because of how this particularfilmmakingexperience was aimed at appealing more directly to families and a wideraudiencethan …
Highly Recommended The Ring Blu-ray Review Have you heard the story of the haunted videotape? Peoplesay that it carries a curse with it. The idea might sound silly to someyoungeraudiences today, but The Ring introduced a terrifying concept: after viewing a video with frighteningandseemingly random images it led to a phone call with an ominous andforebodingvoice on the other end of the line.
Highly Recommended One of the great things about DVD and now the Blu-ray format is how, occasionally, heretofore long-unseen movies turn out to be a lot better than their terrible reputations would suggest, diamonds in the rough, as it were. This proved true, for instance, when in 2006 Fox released to DVD their Laurel & Hardy movies from the 1940s, pictures long regarded as unfunny, painful …
Recommended The Movie: One of a seemingly endless barrage of adaptations of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine , Chris Boger’s 1977 film, also known as Cruel Passion (which is the title that appears on the print used for this Blu-ray release), takes a mature and almost subdued approach to this well known tale of perversions and sexual excess. The film follows two sisters, Justine (Koo Stark) and …
DVD Talk Collector Series There have been far too many “reboots,” “reimaginings,” and “reimagineerings” lately. And, anyway, aren’t those terms merely euphemisms for “Sure, we’ve made truckloads of money, but we can generate even more dough starting from scratch over and marketing an ‘event,’ rather than a mere sequel”?
Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The screen captures used here are taken from promotional materials provided by Kino Lorber, not the Blu-ray edition under review. Celebrity profiles might seem to be one of the more disposable categories of entertainment, but like anything else, it’s all in the details and execution.