Rent It The Film: Underutilized actor Nick Stahl, best known from his roles as an earthy super-powered prophet in HBO’s Carnivale , continues his streak of flimsy direct-to-video appearances with On the Inside , an institutional drama-thriller from Haunting in Connecticut director D.W.
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are provided by Music Box Films and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review.
Recommended THE FILM: Say what you will about Mel Gibson’s personality, but the man can make a solid movie, both in front of and behind the camera. Get the Gringo , released by Gibson’s own Icon Productions, may have been poisoned by Gibson’s latest foray into sexism and bigotry, as it failed to receive a wide theatrical release in the United States. That’s too bad, because Get the Gringo is …
Highly Recommended The 2004 film Torque came and went, dismissed by most as a forgettable Fast and the Furious knockoff that replaced cars with motorcycles and called it a day.
Highly Recommended I’d seen the medical thriller Coma (1978) once before, not during its original theatrical run but soon thereafter, and didn’t think very much of it at the time. Probably I was expecting something closer to medical science fiction (which, technically, this also is), that rare sub-genre in which Coma ‘s director, Michael Crichton, got his start as the author of the bestseller …
Rent It The Movie: When I revisited the 2011 World Series earlier in the year, I really enjoyed how the series’ momentum between the Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals swung back and forth many times through the course of the series, and that Game 6 “was the most tension-filled and perhaps one of the best in recent Series memory.” And to presumably further the case of this, A&E (in …
DVD Talk Collector Series THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are stills provided by Cinema Guild and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. “Even the embers went out.” Anything resembling conventional narrative is dispensed with quickly and tersely, at the very beginning of Hungarian film maestro B la Tarr’s superlative The Turin Horse
Highly Recommended Made during a particularly bleak period for Hammer Films, Twins of Evil (1972) is a pleasant surprise. While still exhibiting the same desperate components of the company’s other horror films of the period – gratuitous nudity, an obviously low budget, and feeble attempts to create a new franchise/horror star – its screenplay is much more intriguing than most early-’70s Hammers …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials and the 2009 Criterion DVD edition , not the Blu-ray edition under review.
Highly Recommended THE SHOW: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the series’ promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. The second season of HBO’s New Orleans drama Treme takes the series into a comfortable stride, settling deeper into the characters and the city’s culture and proving that David Simon ( The Wire , Generation Kill ) is one of the more expansive …