Rent It Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials and other sources, not the Blu-ray edition under review. The TV Series: Time for more cha-cha music, manly men, swanky dames, and Rat Pack-era swellegance. In an unfortunate coincidence, we happened to watch the second and final season of the Starz “mobsters and mayhem in 1959 Miami” drama Magic City at the same time …
Highly Recommended The Film : In Sound of My Voice and Another Earth , writer/actress Brit Marling and her creative teams focused on fairly abstract emotional topics and themes, from how a cult community manipulates new recruits to how mourning the death of a loved one interacts with the existence of an “alternate reality”. Both are smart, boundary-testing challenges that operating in …
Skip It To the less-attentive viewer, Sisters & Brothers might seem like a complete and fully-formed movie, but it’s merely an optical illusion created by the film’s talented cast. At least six of the film’s ten central performers manage to lift impressive amounts of genuine emotion out of director / writer Carl Bessai’s scattershot, clumsy screenplay, infusing a number of scenes with a sense of …
Recommended “Space Junk,” made for IMAX theatres, presents us with a growing problem that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention (although it was the subject of an early song by Devo with the same name but not included here): Just what happens to satellites orbiting the Earth after they’ve outlived their usefulness? It turns out that many of them just stay there, some for several decades after they’ve …
Highly Recommended Homeland Season 2 Blu-ray Review Click onan image to view the Blu-ray screenshotwith 1080p resolution Read the entire review
Recommended A minor but reasonably entertaining action-thriller, Escape from Zahrain (1962) is a quirky little picture. Its small cast is a strange mix of actors while its screenplay is unusually unambitious for producer-director Ronald Neame, who had just made two outstanding British features, The Horse’s Mouth (1958) and especially Tunes of Glory (1960), Neame’s masterpiece.
Highly Recommended The Blu-ray cover art touts The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh as “The Original Classic,” an ironic proclamation considering that this 1977 animated feature is actually a compilation of three earlier featurettes with original bridging material and a new ending. Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966, originally shown with The Ugly Dachshund ) came first, followed by …
Recommended Let’s be honest: a lot of movies and TV shows from our childhoods just don’t hold up now, since kids are much more forgiving of…well, total crap. Disney’s loose adaptation of Robin Hood (1973) was a personal favorite growing up, mostly because a friend of mine always seemed to be watching it when I came over. He pretty much wore the cassette out after a few short years…but during …
Skip It THE FILM: Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution. I can give Black Rock credit for having a lot more to say than most horror films and survival thrillers. When three estranged women travel to the island where they camped as children, it appears the remote location may foster some healing between the three friends
Highly Recommended The Movie: Everyone enjoys Matthew McConaughey as a bit of a loose spoke on the bicycle wheel and hope that he does a Dave Wooderson with each movie role. But somewhat quietly, the last few roles he has brought his A game to his performances, whether it has been as a morally corrupt lawyer or a scout for the Texas Rangers or the owner of a strip club.