Author: BO

2014’s “In Order of Disappearance” was a special Scandinavian movie (receiving a U.S. release in 2016), taking the framework of a traditional revenge saga and turning it inside out, making the experience about blood and rage, but also character and calmness, with director Hans Petter Moland finding ways to give the film eccentricity without dipping into quirk, also guiding star Stellan Skarsgard to one of the best performances of his career. The picture was fantastic. “Cold Pursuit,” the inevitable American remake of “In Order of Disappearance,” isn’t. While Moland returns to duty, trying his hand at the Hollywood game, his sense of darkness has been severely dulled, stuck trying to translate something with specific cultural ties for the Liam Neeson Hit Factory, which only seems interested in broad comedy and tuneless performances. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The world of “Alita: Battle Angel” is massive, and it requires the control of a filmmaker who can manage the bigness of action and the intimacy of character. Robert Rodriguez, despite landing a handful of creative successes, is not someone with a track record that inspires confidence is his abilities to whisk audiences away to a complex fantasy realm. There’s a lot to unpack with this feature, an adaptation of a 1990 manga, and Rodriguez isn’t quite up the challenge of providing engrossing storytelling. “Alita: Battle Angel” is teeming with technical achievements and ambitious epicness, but it’s winded easily, frequently caught up in expositional quicksand, failing to make something exciting while it spends a substantial amount of screen time trying to verbally itemize a world that’s better off revealed in purely cinematic ways. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

We live in an entertainment world where no-budget films with few redeeming production values are created, often using outrageous titles simply to attract attention (e.g. “Sharknado,” “Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus”), suckering in those on the prowl for wacky good times. “The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot” absolutely qualifies as B-movie identification of the highest order, offering an eye-catching promise of Asylum-style nonsense, playing up a connection between real-world evil and one born from myth. Mercifully, writer/director Robert D. Krzykowski isn’t interested in self-aware comedy, finding a way to turn such a genre-smashing promise into a meditation on aging and memory, perking up now and then to deal with the realities of wartime and forest extermination. “The Man Who Killed Hitler” is serious work, which is its greatest surprise, presenting severity of feeling and violence without feeling the need to rely on cheap shenanigans. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“What Men Want” is a remake of a 2000 Nancy Meyers comedy, which tried to make something silly and mushy out of Mel Gibson, back when that was still a possibility. It was a PG-13 production, as vanilla as it gets, with Meyers overseeing a mild battle of the sexes premise that shifted from frivolity to a deadly serious conclusion that touched on suicide. It was typical of Meyers’s uneven work, and the screenplay was certainly ripe for a do-over. Enter Adam Shankman, a crude helmer of terrible movies (“The Pacifier,” “Rock of Ages”), who has the bright idea to play “What Men Want” as broadly as possible, stuck between his desire to craft a hard R-rated version of the tale and the perceived demands of the mainstream audience, with sincerity trying to worm its way into a film that has no use for it. Shankman doesn’t know what he’s doing with the feature, so he does nothing, coasting on painfully inept jokes and sporadic ugliness to complete the job. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Asghar Farhadi is primarily known for his Iranian dramas, scoring major critical successes with efforts such as “The Salesman,” “A Separation,” and “About Elly.” Ready for more global awareness, the helmer takes baby steps toward the mainstream with “Everybody Knows,” which utilizes a sampling of star power to nab attention, finding Farhadi teaming with actors Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem to help carry a kidnapping mystery. However, “Everybody Knows” is not a nail-biter with chases and whiplash turns of fate. It remains in line with Farhadi’s previous work, with primary attention placed on the internal churn of decision-making and the troubles that come with longtime relationships and secretive connections. Those expecting something more explosive from the filmmaker this time out might be disappointed, but slow-burn tension is there, realized through accomplished performances from the entire ensemble. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Making her debut as a writer/director is Emma Forrest, who chooses an L.A. tale of mismanaged love in “Untogether,” making use of a large ensemble to create tight spaces of relationship woes. As career launches go, Forrest doesn’t select the most original route for her storytelling journey, dealing with broken people making terrible decisions, but there’s an effort found in select scenes to resist cliché, to find the real impulses behind sexual unions that are clearly masking other needs. “Untogether” drops sharpness and nerve as it goes along, eventually ending up a puddle of feelings and ideas in search of a more prepared filmmaker, as Forrest loses her way early and never gets back to the core display of confusion she begins with. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Darren Lynn Bousman was introduced to the world as a horror moviemaker, proving his speed with low-budget hits in “Saw II,” “Saw III,” and “Saw IV,” playing his part in the continuation of a series that wasn’t big on variation to begin with. Bousman remained with fright films, some imbued with musical numbers, determined to make his mark on the genre, despite ample evidence that perhaps the conjuring of screen violence just isn’t his forte. After dragging along with tedious work in “Abattoir” and “The Barrens,” Bousman keeps his dream alive with “St. Agatha,” which turns to evil nuns to bring on the nightmare fuel. Of course, other helmers have beaten him to the punch when it comes to the secretive ways of religious servants, and “St. Agatha,” which strives to be stylish, has nothing interesting to share on the state of Catholic imprisonment, with Bousman returning to his old bag of tricks to emphasize an agonizing situation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Matt Walsh is a comedic actor who’s been pushing his way into bigger and better roles over the last decade. He’s been in a lot of things, often portraying uptight characters, playing into his naturally submissive presence, and he’s managed to amass an impressively detailed filmography. With “Under the Eiffel Tower,” Walsh graduates to leading man status, taking command of a “Sideways”-style tale of a man’s mental breakdown while visiting what many would consider paradise. Co-writer/director Archie Borders puts a lot of faith in Walsh, whose job here is to create a dimensional character with peaks and valleys of fallibility but still remain approachable, even understandable. Walsh does fine in the part, but “Under the Eiffel Tower” has a problem with likeability, which becomes an issue with a movie that’s hoping to make a warm impression on viewers. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Does the Amityville name mean anything to horror fans these days? It’s been 45 years since the original family murder spree committed by Ronald DeFeo Jr., and 40 years since the ghastly incident was turned into “The Amityville Horror,” a dim production that turned into one of the highest-grossing features of 1979. People were once insatiable when it came to all things Amityville, but the hunger for new versions of old violence diminished long ago, especially after a sustained wave of sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, with 20 movies in all trying to squeeze the true-crime teat dry. Faced with impossible odds for success, writer/director Daniel Farrands tries his luck with DeFeo misery, offering “The Amityville Murders,” a prequel of sorts to “The Amityville Horror,” going back to the scene of the crime to understand the motivation behind the killings that shocked a nation and punished entire generations of genre fans. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s been difficult to take director Catherine Hardwicke seriously, as she’s built a filmography made up of misfires and mediocrity (“Twilight,” “Red Riding Hood,” “Miss You Already”), always finding her way into overkill, even with delicate material. Her aggressive style seems like a fine fit for “Miss Bala,” which is a remake of a 2011 Mexican thriller, giving the helmer a template for panic and scenes of intimidation, as the story covers kidnappings, across-the-border drug running, and acts of revenge. And yet, Hardwicke manages to turn it all into a mushy pile of cliches and noise, treating “Miss Bala” as her ticket into the Michael Bay School of Fetishistic Violence. Star Gina Rodriguez seems bewildered by it all, trying to keep up with Hardwicke’s excesses and limited interest in dramatic support, in need of a moviemaker with more patience and taste to successfully execute the unfolding nightmare presented here. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

The “How to Train Your Dragon” series has become big business for Dreamworks Animation, who’ve gone beyond movies to deliver video games, books, and multiple television shows that detail the epic fantasy world where humans and dragons are learning to live with each other, often heroically. That’s all well and good, but the real magic of the franchise is found on the big screen (the biggest, of you can find it), with “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” the most awe-inspiring and thrilling of a trilogy that began in 2010. Closing out the saga of Hiccup and his pal Toothless, writer/director Dean DeBlois gets a little sentimental with the second sequel, but his aim is to end things as excitingly as possible, delivering a healthy amount of action and discovery, along with plenty of Viking tomfoolery. While lacking the sweep of the last chapter, “The Hidden World” makes up for the loss in other ways, with DeBlois crafting a divinely animated, supremely felt effort. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

“Velvet Buzzsaw” has an initial stance of satire. Writer/director Dan Gilroy (“Nightcrawler,” “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”) picks a rather easy target for mockery, the modern art scene, and showcases the lives of pretentious people trying to make their mark on a cutthroat world and collect a fortune in the process, wielding weapons of judgment and pettiness. Gilroy definitely has his moments of exaggeration, but he’s using the setting and the participants to create a horror film, delving into the genre with welcome strangeness and specificity. “Velvet Buzzsaw” doesn’t have many left turns, just a gradual tonal shift from art world commentary to blood-spurting terror, and Gilroy gets what he needs from the picture, though some viewers might come away disappointed that he doesn’t remain with the artists and their battle to survive social and professional tests of empathy. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2014’s “The Lego Movie” enjoyed the element of surprise. Little was expected of the project, which was initially believed to be a lengthy commercial for Lego merchandise. However, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller didn’t simply want their film to be a highlight reel of available products, but a sharp animated comedy that used the brick-flinging spirit of Lego to develop a world of heroes and villains, ending up with a tale of bonding between a distracted father and his son. It was a wonderfully strange feature with incredible comedic speed and lust for satiric jabs at superhero formula and character. Instead of jumping right back into the flow of things for a sequel, other projects were developed, including “The Lego Batman Movie” and “The Lego Ninjago Movie,” with both pictures failing to offer the same creative mayhem and emotional hook. Finally, there’s now a follow-up, but “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” can’t always shake a feeling of staleness, finding the screenplay trying a bit too hard to be strange when it should be focusing the same level of humor that made the original effort such a treat. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com