The only shock that registered when Spike Lee’s Oldboy was released in theaters was at how little money it made. It shows just how far violence in the movies has come in 10 short years, because this new Oldboy — released today on Blu-ray and packaged with a digital copy — is technically more overtly graphic.
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Costner is essentially playing the same over-the-hill, reluctant-but-badass gun-toting hero that Willis has been playing for years, and in 3 Days to Kill, he’s even saddled with something more challenging than killing bad guys with names like The Albino and The Wolf — keeping a teenage daughter out of trouble.
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There’s an immersive summer camp experience waiting for her Keri Russell in ‘Austenland,’ out on Blu-ray, where actors in period costumes play out the typical Austen roles as women like her live out their fantasies. Like strippers, however, there is no actual intimacy at Austenland.
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The satire is still there, albeit not as angry and way more obvious, and the targets have shifted ever so slightly to keep up with current events. Had the film been a carbon copy, though, there would have been no point in making it.
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The Armstrong Lie is a fascinating portrait of a man in denial, told from the firsthand perspective of Gibney, who himself was duped at a certain level by Armstrong’s own confidence and charm. Wadjda is about an 11-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia who longs for some of the same freedoms that women in the Western world take for granted.
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Stop-motion animation is a painstakingly long process, one point made perfectly clear by many of the excellent special features on the Criterion Dual Format Blu-ray-DVD combo of Wes Anderson‘s 2009 Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox.
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Out on DVD now, the independent horror movie Banshee Chapter is a weird amalgamation of a found-footage movie and a governmental conspiracy thriller.
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The 86th Academy Awards are Sunday, March 2 and your pals at Scene-Stealers, Lost in Reviews, and Downright Creepy are hosting the coolest movie party in Kansas City. This is your chance to see Hollywood’s best and worst dressed, watch the Academy Awards broadcast on the big screen with a bunch of other film nerds, drink to […]
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Unfortunately, it’s another in a long line of comedies that has guys behaving badly and treating girls like crap for the entire film and then lets them off the hook towards the end because that’s the structure of the typical romantic comedy — not because any of it makes any sense.
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If the broad lowest-common denominator comedy Last Vegas is The Hangover of oldster party movies, then the indie feature Old Goats is that genre’s Best in Show.
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Filmed in the docudrama style that has become Paul Greengrass’s trademark, ‘Captain Phillips’ is out now in a Blu-ray/DVD/Ultraviolet Combo Pack.
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One year before the death of Martin Luther King Jr., with the civil rights movement in full swing and the black power movement on the way, Hollywood produced a movie that used the classic Hollywood narrative style that people were used to, but in the service of a story they weren’t used to seeing.
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As long as the subsequent films in the franchise avoid turning Ryan into a superhero and keep their plots at least somewhat rooted in reality, the Jack Ryan franchise may stand a fighting chance. At least they finally have the right actor.
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‘Sunrise’ is a reminder of how quickly film language developed into something so remarkable in under 20 years and how few modern filmmakers today take advantage of the innovative concepts that Murnau and his fellow silent-film pioneers perfected.
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Experienced completely through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy named Bud, Terence Davies’ 1992 film The Long Day Closes is a deeply personal impressionistic triumph, out in a dual-format Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection.
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