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
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
The qualities that caused Dragonslayer to fail at the box office in 1981 are very likely the same reasons the film has endured for so long as a cult item with many passionate fans. Released at a time when what passed for movies in the fantasy-adventure genre were typically jokey and juvenile in nature (see… Read More We Shall Live and the Beast Shall Die | Dragonslayer (1981) 4K Ultra HD
As a young film student in 1993, I walked out of the theater ecstatic about Tony Scott’s True Romance. I went back to see it a couple more times, but couldn’t convince any of my friends to go with me. From the title, they all assumed it must be a sappy rom-com that would hold… Read More If I’m With You, Then I’m With You | True Romance (1993) 4K Ultra HD
Released in the highly-competitive 1999 fall movie season against dozens of good-to-great films from other major artists, Steven Soderbergh’s modest crime thriller The Limey slipped through the cracks and drew little attention. Although kindly received by critics, it made no money and, even a couple decades later, remains one of the director’s least-seen works. Yet… Read More You Tell ‘im I’m Coming | The Limey (1999) 4K Ultra HD
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
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
The feature filmmaking debut for up-and-coming author Clive Barker, Hellraiser represented an attempt to produce what we might now call an elevated slasher movie. That was a risky proposition to deliver into a cinema landscape dominated by jokey genre schlock at the time. Amazingly, despite initially mixed reviews and modest box office returns, the little… Read More Demons to Some, Angels to Others | Hellraiser (1987) Blu-ray
Following two previous attempts that performed acceptably at the box office but were little loved among fans of the original property, Hasbro and Paramount framed their third live-action G.I. Joe movie as a solo outing for the franchise’s most popular character. Unfortunately, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins has little in its 121-minute length recognizable as… Read More Strident Interlude | Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021) 4K Ultra HD
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