Recommended The Movie: Make no mistake, Andrew Lau’s The Guillotines is an epic tale of honor, brotherhood, sacrifice and betrayal, set in Qing Dynasty era China. There are enough sword fights, chases through crowded streets and sprawling battles to satisfy any action aficionado. However, it’s also a bit confusing and incoherent, and leans a bit too heavily on bathos.
Recommended Though I’ve never been a big fan of hip hop music, I’ve found that movies centered around it are usually enjoyable. 8 Mile for example worked for me even though it was clich d with the whole poor-person-struggling-to-hit-it-big theme, but on the other hand there have been movies like Turn It Up which were extremely forgettable and seemed to just be preying upon their target audiences …
Rent It Star Trek is the most popular franchise in movie and television history, so it makes sense that it’s been treated well in high definition. Two of the five Trek TV series are currently in the middle of a successful Blu-ray campaign, including a complete overhaul of Read the entire review
Skip It THE FILM: I can say with some confidence that this isn’t the worst science fiction film Roger Christian has ever directed. That would be Battlefield Earth , the John Travolta/Scientology in space disaster that won four Golden Raspberry Awards and lost Warner Brothers a ton of money
Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials and other sources, not the Blu-ray edition under review. Comedy can be serious business, particularly when it is making light of dark subjects. When Mel Brooks made The Producers in 1967, two decades after World War II, he met resistance from people who didn’t think Hitler and his Nazis should be …
Recommended Producer Walter Mirisch’s Midway (1976) cleverly presented a huge scale, all-star (Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, James Coburn, etc.) war movie on a deceptively modest budget, a fraction of the cost of movies like Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). Where those movies recreated epic battles full-scale, with thousands of extras and real military …
Recommended THE FILM Please Note: The images used here are taken from the standard-definition DVD version of Blancanieves also included, not the Blu-ray edition under review. Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is a pastiche of selectively recruited silent-film stylings that, like its inevitable comparison-point The Artist (a film that beat it to the punch even though Berger’s was already well into …
Rent It Oh, Movie! You had me [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] at ” Frankenstein’s Army “.
DVD Talk Collector Series Submarine movies come in all shapes and sizes, from the highs of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and The Enemy Below (1957, really half a submarine movie) to the depths of Hellcats of the Navy (1957, not nearly as bad as its reputation) and the absurdities of Atomic Submarine (1960). But Ren Cl ment’s The Damned (1947) is the most authentic submarine movie I’ve ever …
Highly Recommended It seems a bit odd reviewing a Blu-ray disc that sold out even before this reviewer received his own copy in the mail, but hopefully that’s an indicator of Columbia/Sony need to reissue movies like this on its own, or at least allow current distributor Twilight Time another print run. It’s also a sure sign that Body Double (1984), a Brian De Palma movie raked over the coals by …