Highly Recommended Friends have been raving to me about Downton Abbey (2010-present), the British (and partly American-financed) television drama contrasting the lives upper- and servant-class residents of a large manor house in post-Edwardian England. I had been meaning to catch up with it eventually and gradually but, perfect timing, along comes PBS’s release of Downton Abbey: Seasons 1, 2 & 3 …
Highly Recommended Nevermind how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; how many soldiers can you fit on the flipside of a bottle cap? Quite a lot, as it turns out
Recommended THE FILM: While Curse of Chucky shares a director – Don Mancini – with Seed of Chucky , the previous sequel in the Child’s Play series, it mostly drops the black humor of that film in favor of returning to the franchise’s horror roots. This direct-to-video sequel is actually much better than expected, and it moves the story forward in an interesting way. Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif …
Recommended The Movie: Directed by Sebasti n Cordero, 2013’s Europa Report isn’t going to appeal to everyone. It’s a slow movie and much like 2001: A Space Odyssey it sometimes get self-indulgent not because it betters the story to do so, but because it can. Add to that the fact that the movie is basically a found footage’ style narrative, something that seems to turn a lot of viewers off simply …
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 …
Recommended Well, we’ve got the third “Monster High” release within a year, and the first one to be given the honor of a Blu-Ray release. For the uninitiated, “Monster High” is a line of toys, animated specials and other merchandise for kids (whom I earlier jokingly referred to as “Goth girls-in-training”).
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 …
Highly Recommended A fiftysomething-year-old Peter Cushing, knife in hand, wrestles with a topless hooker in this British proto-slasher from the class of 1968. I can — and I will! — write a long, rambling review about Corruption , but that one, singular sentence really does tell you everything you need to know
DVD Talk Collector Series Note : For whatever reason, Universal Pictures has not yet set a US release date for Fast & Furious 6 . This is a review of the UK’s disc, which is completely region free and will play without any problems in a US Blu-Ray player. In 2009, after the box office fizzle of Tokyo Drift , Fast & Furious made a surprise bid to bring the series back from the edge of DTV by …
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 …