Denied the opportunity to make an official Star Wars movie, director Zack Snyder tossed together his own knockoff space epic, complete with a remarkably similar story about a farmboyfarmgirl from a distant world who joins a rebel alliance to take down an evil galactic empire. In addition to other direct plot lifts and familiar recycled… Read More Seven Space Samurai | Rebel Moon: Part One (2023) on Netflix
Nostalgia is a trap that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny both comments upon and falls victim to. The fifth entry in the venerable franchise arrives fifteen years after the last one, which was itself already nineteen years after everybody already assumed that the Indiana Jones Trilogy had satisfactorily concluded. Coming so late, the… Read More Yesterday Belongs to Us | Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) 4K Ultra HD
How long does a chicken live, anyway? According to Google, five to ten years. Yet here we are more than two decades since Aardman Animations released Chicken Run to theaters in 2000 and along comes a belated direct-to-Netflix sequel featuring almost all the original characters, if not all the original cast. Does this old bird… Read More A Happy Chicken Is a Tasty Chicken | Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) on Netflix
The first feature film produced by Aardman Animations, creators of the beloved series of Wallace and Gromit shorts, Chicken Run was a fairly significant box office hit in 2000 and, remarkably, still holds the record as the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time. Even that being the case, I feel that the movie didn’t… Read More Poultry in Motion | Chicken Run (2000)
The new Netflix film Leave the World Behind presents a vision of the apocalypse perhaps a little more disturbingly plausible than most. It has no zombies, alien invasions, giant monsters, asteroid collisions, or coordinated global fungal pandemics. Instead, the movie shows how rapidly modern civilization will crumble when… shudder to even consider the possibility… the… Read More No Going Back to Normal | Leave the World Behind (2023) on Netflix
Before leaving his native Hong Kong, John Woo had already established an international reputation as one of the most exciting action film directors in world cinema. Naturally, Hollywood eventually came calling, luring him westward with the promise of bigger projects and bigger paydays. It would take a few attempts to get there. First, he’d make… Read More The Most Van Dammerous Game | Hard Target (1993) 4K Ultra HD
Intended as his final movie for the Hong Kong film industry before leaving for the bigger paydays awaiting him in Hollywood, 1992’s Hard-Boiled was also something of a Greatest Hits package for director John Woo. Featuring his frequent leading man Chow Yun-Fat, the film playfully recycles many of the themes and tropes the two of… Read More Tequila Straight Up | Hard-Boiled (1992) Hong Kong Rescue Blu-ray
If the financial failure of Blade Runner in 1982 posed a serious setback for the director, his next feature project, Legend, was the film that broke Ridley Scott. Although his career would recover and he’d go on to be nominated for several Oscars over time (some of dubious merit, if you ask me), the film’s… Read More No Light without Darkness | Legend (1985) Arrow Video Limited Edition Blu-ray
In the decade between its disastrous theatrical failure in 1982 and the more triumphant reception of its 1992 Director’s Cut, Ridley Scott’s science-fiction masterwork Blade Runner endured as a cult item with a small but loyal fandom. The film’s fortunes started to turn around with the accidental discovery of an unfinished workprint version screened as… Read More You Were Made As Well As We Could Make You | Blade Runner: Workprint Cut (1982) Blu-ray
Released on Max streaming over the past month with little fanfare and I’m sure little attention paid, the animated science fiction survival adventure drama Scavengers Reign is one of the most fascinating, creative, at times frustrating, and very often downright baffling new television series to come along in ages. After watching the first few episodes,… Read More This Place, It’s Like a Puzzle | Scavengers Reign Season 1 (2023) on Max
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