Author: BO

In 1982, fresh off the high they received after watching Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Mississippi teenagers Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala, and Jayson Lamb embarked on a perilous quest to meticulously reshoot the picture using locations, actors, and props available to them as adolescents. The moviemaking ordeal lasted seven years, during which friendships were forged and lost, lives were challenged, and obsessions were exhausted. The result was “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” (Read the Review), a thrilling celebration of big screen influence that, despite limited production polish, managed to thrill and chill with its Spielberg Jr. appeal. The boys eventually went their separate ways after production ended, but there was one scene left to complete, leaving “The Adaptation” missing a key part of the story. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Nils Gaup made a strong professional introduction decades ago with 1987’s “Pathfinder” and 1990’s “Shipwrecked,” a Disney picture that brought the helmer a more global audience. Gaup returns to duty with “The Last King,” which offers a frigid, action-minded take on Norwegian history, trying to butch up the details of civil war in a “Game of Thrones” era of swords, brawn, and scheming. “The Last King” is steeped in local culture and motivation, making it a complex sit for those not up on the minutiae of Norwegian conflict, but Gaup and screenwriter Ravn Lanesskog do their best to make sure the cinematic essentials are represented, delivering big action in a rarely explored setting, successfully transforming this slice of warfare into a compelling, wonderfully snowbound adventure. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Dominic Purcell has worked hard to become a big screen tough guy, surviving on a diet of B-movies that try to do something with his blank expression and bulky physicality, emphasizing his comfort with intimidation. He’s not an especially commanding screen presence, but, like most actors missing a defined personality, when used sparingly, his work is digestible. “Gridlocked” smartly downplays Purcell’s limited range, arming him with guns and giving him a co-star to stare at in this modest but violent mash-up of “The Hard Way” and “Die Hard.” “Gridlocked” is a fairly generic offering of action cinema, never developing conflicts to satisfaction, preferring gunfire to suspense, but it does periodically distract, finding a few stretches of inspired mayhem as it goes through the bullets and brawn routine. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

A few years ago, director Mike Mendez pulled off the impossible. Armed with a tiny budget and a jokey premise, Mendez managed to make something agreeable out of “Big Ass Spider,” keeping rhythm tight and humor approachable as he set out to create a CGI-shellacked monster movie in a marketplace that’s filled with them. Mendez’s spunky vision isn’t as successful for “The Last Heist.” Instead of smartly reworking the obvious and doing something substantial with suspense beats, Mendez simply survives this no-budget chiller. Filmmaking finesse is missing from the effort, which takes a neat premise and proceeds to pad the picture with banal dialogue and tedious characterizations, leaving actual time for hellraising limited, never taking full advantage of the oddball plot. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

A video game franchise that has endured since 1994, “Warcraft” finally makes it way to the big screen after years of development. Much like “The Angry Birds Movie,” perhaps the optimal time for a cinematic inspection of this sprawling material has passed, but co-writer/director Duncan Jones does an admirable job reviving the basics of combat between orcs and humans, emphasizing magic and troubled heroes with laudable sincerity, trying his best to respect the essentials of the brand name. Difficulty arrives with the ultimate digestion of such a complex universe, but the production isn’t making this picture for casual ticket-buyers. “Warcraft” plays strictly to the faithful, and if the opening five minutes of the movie feel exceptionally bewildering, the rest isn’t any easier to interpret. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2016 has welcomed a lot of strange, unnecessary sequels, but “Now You See Me 2” is perhaps the most superfluous of them all. The groundwork for a continuation was built into the original 2013 effort, and encouraging box office returns guaranteed a second round with these “magicians,” but now that the continuation is here, it really doesn’t have much to do besides reheat heist and thriller scenes that worked for select audiences before. “Now You See Me 2” is a better film than its predecessor, but that’s not much of a compliment. Director Jon M. Chu (“Jem and the Holograms,” “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never”) amplifies style and performances, but the core mixture of visual fluidity and smug trickery feels as empty as before, finding the production once again missing the point of magic and the value of suspense. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In a rather erratic career of hits and misses, director James Wan scored a major creative and box office victory with 2013’s “The Conjuring.” The summertime scary movie managed to unnerve audiences by repackaging old suspense tricks, while its foray into the case files of real-world paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren organically opened itself up to franchise possibilities, already explored to a slight degree in the 2014 spin-off, “Annabelle.” “The Conjuring 2” is a sequel with serious potential, but Wan isn’t comfortable with opportunity, eschewing the lean construction of the original film for a bloated, repetitive follow-up that’s certainly filled with frights, but lacks an engrossing story and variety of nightmare imagery. Much like his own “Insidious: Chapter 2,” Wan ruins a good thing by overthinking the obvious. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s no surprise that a documentary about disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner has arrived. What’s amazing is that the picture emerges with Weiner’s participation. A tale of lust and political ambition, of scandal and martial strain, “Weiner” has all the components of a riveting cinematic dissection, especially one where the controversial subject has permitted access to areas of his life that probably should’ve remained forbidden. Directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg have the story of a lifetime with “Weiner,” and it’s a doozy. While the feature doesn’t always cut as deep as it could, it still captures an alarming intimacy with Anthony and his family, measuring the abyssal depth of his narcissism and envious command of delusion. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

To describe “Urge” as a film is tricky, as it doesn’t carry itself like a traditional production. Bravely shedding key elements such as acting, story, logic, and suspense, director Aaron Kaufman tries to shape his debut feature into a sensorial swan dive, drenching the picture in style and noise, striving to make some kind of statement about the extremity of drug use. If the approach was intentional, “Urge” would be something to remember, but everything presented in the effort seems accidental and half-baked; the production tumbles through a brief run time with little awareness of what it wants to say and do. It’s a terrible movie, incoherent and absurd, with Kaufman completely incapable of inspiring anything besides a headache with what’s sure to be one of the worst films of 2016. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s difficult to know what YouTube is meant to be these days. Once home to odd videos and rampant copyright infringement, the site has evolved into a powerhouse of creative expression and rehearsed intimacy, turning everyday folk into celebrities in a faction-minded entertainment landscape. “Presenting Princess Shaw” isn’t a deep-sea dive into YouTube’s history, but it does summarize what the site is capable of achieving. While the documentary has moments of artificiality, “Presenting Princess Shaw” holds tight to sincerity, with director Ido Haar looking to understand the power of connection and creative liberation YouTube offers its users, while isolating a special story of personal expression that carries through music and across the world. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com