Before he became a brand unto himself with a rabid cult fandom slavering to see his latest three-hour-long, bombastic IMAX spectacle, Christopher Nolan started his filmmaking career with a very modest, small art film called Following that was little seen by anyone until the Criterion Collection picked it up on home video. To be honest… Read More Nolan’s Inception | Following (1999) Criterion Collection Blu-ray
It seems that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade wasn’t Indiana Jones’ last crusade after all. Just shy of two decades after director Steven Spielberg and star Harrison Ford seemingly closed the book on their iconic archaeologist adventurer, producer George Lucas convinced them to pull the old fedora and bullwhip out of storage one more… Read More That Can’t Be Good at All | Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) 4K Ultra HD
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade almost was, and in many fans’ estimation probably should have been, the last adventure for the iconic screen hero. After the disappointing (yet still extremely profitable) Temple of Doom, the film was a significant return to form and offered many unmistakable notes of closure to bring this blockbuster trilogy… Read More You Call This Archaeology? | Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) 4K Ultra HD
Whether it be a case of selective memory or rose-colored glasses, I find it fairly amusing the way disgruntled Indiana Jones fans, when complaining about how much they dislike later entries in the series, tend to either forget that Temple of Doom happened or act like it was ever one of the good ones. The… Read More Anything Goes | Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) 4K Ultra HD
Author H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines has been popular fodder for movie and TV adaptations over the years, most of them sadly not very good. Of the various attempts to bring it to screen, the most successful and arguably best was the 1950 version starring Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr, which… Read More A Woman on Safari? No Thank You! | King Solomon’s Mines (1950) Warner Archive Blu-ray
With the combined talents of George Lucas as producer and Steven Spielberg directing, I don’t think anyone ever doubted that Raiders of the Lost Ark would be another big smash. Between Jaws and Star Wars, the two men had each only recently held the title for the highest-grossing movie of all time, back-to-back, Spielberg handing… Read More It’s Not the Years, Honey | Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 4K Ultra HD
An infamous box office bomb and target of critical ridicule, winner of both Worst Picture at the 1996 Razzie Awards and later Worst Picture of the Decade in 2000, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls was, for many years, a movie that few people liked, and fewer still would actually admit to liking. Over the ensuing decades, the… Read More Ain’t You Got No Shame? | Showgirls (1995) Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra HD
Coming up on three decades into his filmmaking career, Wes Anderson has put such a distinctive stamp onto all of his movies that none of them could be mistaken as the work of anyone else. Nor could anyone adopt Anderson’s style without being labeled a copycat. Looking back on it, the director’s debut feature Bottle… Read More Crime Does Pay | Bottle Rocket (1996) Criterion Collection Blu-ray
With recent news that Disney, as current owner of the 20th Century Fox library, has censored Best Picture Oscar-winning police drama The French Connection across all streaming and TV broadcast outlets, fans and collectors have run to buy up uncensored physical media copies of the film wherever they can find them. Doing so will encounter… Read More A Public Advisory Regarding The French Connection (1971) on Blu-ray
The first live-action Transformers movie directed by someone other than Michael Bay is, not coincidentally, the first live-action Transformers movie that’s any good. Because we live in an unjust world, 2018’s Bumblebee was also the lowest-grossing Transformers film up to that point by some considerable margin. As someone who grew up in the 1980s with… Read More That Was Radical! | Bumblebee (2018) 4K Ultra HD
