DVD Talk Collector Series Cassavetes Set – Five Films – Blu-ray Ifyou havenever seen a film by John Cassavetes before you might wonder why somefilmsfans have become so enamored by his movies. The works of Cassavetes areoftendescribed as being the “truth” — films that manage to bring  real acting, emotion, and stories to thecinema.
Recommended The Movie: Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1961, La Notte follows a wealthy married couple, wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) and her husband, an author named Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni), as they travel around their home city of Milan.
Highly Recommended Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) was more or less my first exposure to Japanese animation. A friend of mine, who had spent several years of his childhood in Japan, owned both domestic VHS versions of the film in the early 1990s: one was subtitled, the other was dubbed in English. Not surprisingly, the film’s mature subject matter, intense atmosphere and jaw-dropping visuals …
Highly Recommended First released in Great Britain as Expos and in the United States as Trauma , the now-titled House on Straw Hill (1976) is an extremely minor, muddled erotic thriller with slight horror movie elements, and notable only as the lone British film on the original list of “Video Nasties” compiled by the Department of Public Prosecution. Severin Films’ new Blu-ray presents it …
Recommended The Movie: For as much I have generally railed against the work of Melissa McCarthy, and think that in between her television work in Mike & Molly and her more recent movie work in Identity Thief , I just do not get or understand the reason for her success, little more than everyone gets a laugh out of watching the big girl fall down. But she comes back to one of the causes of her …
Rent It THE FILM: Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution. British import I Give It a Year is part successful bawdy comedy and part tiresome romantic melodrama. Rose Byrne makes anything better, but so much of Director Dan Mazer’s film rests on its unimpressive romantic-comedy foundation that the final result crumbles into a bore
Recommended THE FILM Please Note: The images used here are from promotional material provided by The Cohen Media Group and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. I’m prepared to accept that smart, crowd-pleasing French filmmaker Fran ois Ozon ( 8 Women , Swimming Pool ), whose work I’ve often enjoyed and appreciated, is middlebrow, a skilled and intelligent writer/director whose …
Recommended THE FILM: Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution. Solid voice talent and animation raise The Croods slightly above similar mid-tier animated flicks. Nowhere near as polished as the best efforts from Disney and Pixar, The Croods is still an appealing family adventure from DreamWorks Animation.
Rent It THE FILM: Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution. Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling re-team for Only God Forgives , a beautifully shot, vacuous and violent film about a drug dealer avenging his brother’s murder
Rent It THE FILM: Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution. I had only seen bits and pieces of Kevin Hart’s standup work on YouTube before viewing Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain , which presents his complete 2012 performance at Madison Square Garden. Hart uses the venue to riff on his recent divorce, worldwide tour, romantic relationships and everyday challenges as a newly …