Culture often seems to move in thirty-year cycles. Growing up back in the 1980s, it felt like nostalgia for the 1950s was everywhere, as my parents’ generation hit middle age and started pining for their own youths. Now here we are another three decades hence, only to find the United States in a renewed Cold… Read More Don’t Think, Just Do | Top Gun: Maverick (2022) 4K Ultra HD
The biggest blockbuster hit of 1986 and one of the most (if not the most) iconic films from that decade, Top Gun has remained enduringly popular over time – enough so that a sequel released 36 years later once again blew the roof off the theatrical box office. Is it actually a good movie, though?… Read More Take My Breath Away | Top Gun (1986) 4K Ultra HD
Confession time: As someone who has reviewed movies on home video for more than two decades, I simply cannot stand to watch most DVD or Blu-ray bonus features. The days when I might get excited for a director’s audio commentary or a lengthy making-of documentary about the film I just watched feel like a distant… Read More Remember When DVD and Blu-ray “Special Features” Actually Used to Be Special?
I seem to be out of step with both critical and popular opinion on Guillermo del Toro’s new stop-motion animated remake of Pinocchio. I watched that one without so much as checking Rotten Tomatoes or Letterboxd and thought it was kind of awful, only to find nearly everyone else in the world proclaiming it a… Read More No Strings on Me | Pinocchio (1940) Blu-ray
I have long since lost count of how many times I’ve watched the 1986 animated The Transformers: The Movie in my life. A pivotal part of my childhood, I know it practically backwards and forwards, and assumed it could hold no further surprises for me. However, the chance to sit with my 8-year-old son as… Read More Such Heroic Nonsense | The Transformers: The Movie (1986) 4K Ultra HD
I have a soft spot for Predator 2, even if the movie may fail pretty badly at its intended purpose as the sequel to a bona fide action masterpiece. Taken on its own, as a schlocky B-movie about a grizzled urban cop fighting a superhuman hunter from outer space, the picture has a lot of… Read More A New Player in Town | Predator 2 (1990) 4K Ultra HD
With Hellraiser under his belt, Clive Barker proved himself to be not just a compelling author, but also a talented filmmaker on the rise. Of course, more film projects went right into development. Unfortunately, his second movie, 1990’s Nightbreed, was both a critical and commercial dud that nearly derailed Barker’s directorial career. In fact, he’d… Read More Commies, Freaks, and Third World Y-Chromosome Mutants | Nightbreed (1990) Director’s Cut Blu-ray
Having subjected myself to one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s very worst movies, the only sensible course of action would be to revisit one of his very best. Although greeted with mixed reviews upon release, Predator was a sizable box office hit in the summer of 1987 and has grown substantially in critical appreciation over the years.… Read More Ol’ Painless Is Waitin’ | Predator (1987) 4K Ultra HD
By this point, 25 years since its debut, I suspect that the only people who would still willingly subject themselves to Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin must fall into one of three categories: 1) Franchise completists who feel compelled to watch every entry no matter what, 2) Bad movie aficionados who revel in its awfulness,… Read More Stone Cold Awful | Batman & Robin (1997) 4K Ultra HD
Riddle me this: I was enormously popular yet everyone hates me now. I star multiple Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning actors yet every performance is terrible. I feature the so-called “world’s greatest detective” and make him look like an idiot. What am I? Why, of course we’re talking about 1995’s Batman Forever, the first of two… Read More A Riddle Wrapped Inside an Enigma | Batman Forever (1995) 4K Ultra HD
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