Out of the Furnace is one of those movies that spends so much time building mood and character that by the time the plot really kicks in, you realize it was in the service of nothing terribly special.
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Eric Melin
All is Lost is a stranded-at-sea survival story with almost no dialogue and a soulful lead performance from 77-year-old Robert Redford.
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‘Nebraska’ bears the familiar Payne stamp of melancholy mixed with hard-edged satire, while still feeling very personal.
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McConaughey is a wonder. The actor lost 50 pounds to play the tightly coiled antihero, and he gives Woodruff a determination that’s practically unhinged.
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Through a rich, grueling portrait of the machinery of institutionalized slavery, Steve McQueen asks us to examine the rotten core of slavery and how it permeates our entire culture, not just to ponder life as it was in the 1840s.
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The buddy-cop movie ‘2 Guns’ is surprisingly fun, and Fox re-issues the film that defined multiple personalities forever, ‘The Three Faces of Eve,’ in a beautiful Blu-ray transfer.
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Blue is the Warmest Color, the nearly three-hour French character study of a lesbian relationship, is a remarkable film. The film’s notorious sex scenes are just a small part of the larger picture, because the movie asks a lot of timeless questions about love and devotion.
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Two new Blu-ray releases: A melancholy Christmas story and another opportunity for Roland Emmerich to blow up the White House.
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As Marvel’s cinematic universe extends into its second phase, Thor: The Dark World finds itself sandwiched between movies seven and nine in the franchise (or one and three, depending on how you look at it).
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The supernatural-inflected teen romance genre butts uncomfortably up against an apocalyptic survival story in How I Live Now, which opens this weekend at AMC Studio 30 in Olathe and Liberty Hall in Lawrence.
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The new documentary Muscle Shoals, which opens this weekend at the Tivoli Cinemas in Westport (please check out their Kickstarter page to upgrade their projectors to digital and stay in business), posits that the spirit of community forged by the musicians that created this music was part of its magic, and listening to it in the movie, it’s hard to argue.
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Ultimately, what makes writer/director Gavin Hood’s streamlined adaptation of Ender’s Game successful is its devotion to the awakening conscience of its main character, criticized by some as “the innocent killer.”
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What happens when you watch John Cassavetes: Five Films, the new Blu-ray set from The Criterion Collection, is a deeper appreciation for a writer/director who was interested in telling stories about people.
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Inevitability is a theme that is foreshadowed, warned about, and then played out in grisly fashion throughout The Counselor, which is crammed with so much nihilistic philosophizing that it makes the fatalistic tirades of Killing Them Softly seem like Fried Green Tomatoes.
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Blu-ray picks up the deep reds and blues that populate so many of the shots and displays them in breathtaking high definition. When coupled with the film’s penchant for brutality, the result can be as terrifying as it is alienating.
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