Author: BO

Although he’s already celebrated the end of the View Askewniverse, and even threatened to retire from filmmaking altogether, Kevin Smith can’t seem to quit his most enduring creation. Last seen onscreen in 2006’s “Clerks II,” Jay and Silent Bob return to the realm of animation for “Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie,” a low-budget affair that plays directly to the Smith fanbase with copious amounts of inside references, crude humor, and weed-scented shenanigans. It’s easy to dismiss the softball screenwriting, but there’s a definite speed to the picture that’s encouraging, sprinting through bits of awful humor in an irreverent manner befitting these stoner superheroes. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Moms’ Night Out” is a tamer take on the “The Hangover” formula, electing to play out its mischief as peacefully as possible to preserve its PG rating and respect its Christian inspiration. There’s an acceptable message on the fallibility of motherhood in here somewhere that’s worth screentime to develop, but that purity of feeling is buried under multiple layers of lame jokes and dim supporting performances, while the anarchic spirit the premise hints at never snowballs into a charming, mischievous comedy. “Moms’ Night Out” plays like a failed television pilot, consistently heading in the wrong direction while searching for funny business. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Locke” joins a special breed of movies that play out within a single location. Despite such an enticing filmmaking challenge, this is no thriller. Nobody’s been buried alive or pinned down in a phone booth, this is just the relatively simple tale of a man who’s devoted his entire being to a sense of order enduring the worst night of his life. Tension is conjured through tortured acts of recognition and passes at denial, while lead Tom Hardy delivers an exceptional performance that’s subtle and strong enough to hold viewer attention for 85 minutes, articulating an emotional breakdown with absolute precision. Although it might sound like unbearable directorial showmanship, “Locke” is a crisply defined drama that delivers on suspense and a swirling storm of heartache. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With his first two pictures, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “The Five-Year Engagement,” director Nicholas Stoller proved himself skilled at navigating the “everything improv” mentality that’s absorbed all reaches of American comedy. He showed good judgment, balancing story and silliness with laudable timing, making sure the features held some type of emotional resonance even as they sprinted into stupidity. His latest, “Neighbors,” slips out of his control early and Stoller never quite recovers, forging ahead with a slapdash effort that continually blows its potential on a series of sketch comedy bits that have no connective tissue. “Neighbors” is a blunt instrument, which will be appealing to some, but when one steps back and considers the possibilities of the premise, the disappointment is crushing. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Between the release of “Oz The Great and Powerful” and the 75th anniversary reissue of the 1939 classic, “The Wizard of Oz” is officially back in business. “Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return” hopes to continue this financially lucrative run, only here the focus is on CG-animation, executed with a smaller budget than most big studio offerings, hoping to reawaken author Frank L. Baum’s world for box office dominance one more time. Filled with musical numbers and celebrity voices, “Dorothy’s Return” isn’t the expected embarrassment from untested independent film producers, but it’s not exactly magic in the making. More bizarre than charming, the feature has a pleasingly earnest quality about it, but no rousing creative ambition. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With 2010’s “Submarine,” writer/director Richard Ayoade proved himself to be a visually stimulating filmmaker with an addiction to idiosyncrasy, which nearly blocked out the dramatic power of the picture. “The Double” travels deeper into oddity, only here there’s a surreal story of identity to back up such cinematic detours. Inhaling the power of his favorite moviemakers, Ayoade submits a valentine to powerlessness with “The Double,” helming a mild comedy that’s eventually evolves into a technical exercise with the occasional blip of surprise. It’s a fantastic looking picture, but images are the only memorable element of this psychological puzzler, which works extremely hard to register as mischief. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The saga of the West Memphis Three has been recounted in three documentaries by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, and another documentary by Amy J. Berg. That’s a lot of screentime devoted to a single crime, and while the tangle of evidence and suspects is considerable when detailing the arrest and prosecution of Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin, most, if not all emotional and legal developments have been covered at this point. “Devil’s Knot” has the unfortunate task of dramatizing only a mere slice of the story, and its very existence is puzzling, arriving after so many other filmmakers have dissected the absurdities of the case. Although director Atom Egoyan has a commendable approach, “Devil’s Knot” is overwrought and, frankly, feels like old news. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/directors Lucky McKee (“May”) and Chris Sivertson (“I Know Who Killed Me”) tried this once before. In 2001, the partners created “All Cheerleaders Die” during the infancy stage of their careers, using the little-seen horror picture as an example of filmmaking ability in the genre. 13 years later, the pair has elected to remake their debut effort, reawakening the feature with a fresh perspective and a larger budget, hoping to use early inspiration to fuel a new round of macabre highlights. “All Cheerleaders Die” is certainly ghoulish, with a pronounced nasty streak that keeps it on edge. It’s how this fury interacts with lighter material that poses a problem, with McKee and Sivertson perhaps too entranced with their own creation to fully appreciate how uneven it is. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Whitewash” is the strangest survival story you’ll see all year. A Canadian production, the film employs a criminal element of murder to lure viewers into an impossibly tight place with the lead character, watching desperation take hold in a forbidding, frozen landscape. And then, slowly but surely, the picture reveals bits and pieces about the crime and the men involved, moving away from mysterious intentions to play out as a game of endurance with a side of hypothermic madness. It’s a specialized viewing experience for more adventurous audiences, but “Whitewash” is accomplished, darkly humorous, and features a focused turn from actor Thomas Haden Church, showing rare commitment here. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

I’m not sure what Elizabeth Banks was hoping to gain by agreeing to star in “Walk of Shame,” but I’m certain she’s not going to feel much in the way of positivity once the public begins sampling the picture. Uselessly crude and insistently moronic, “Walk of Shame” features the type of story that could be completely washed away if the main character simply stopped to explain herself. However, that approach would negate the movie, leaving writer/director Steven Brill to groggily dream up nonsensical ways to keep this attempt at a screwball comedy on the go, subjecting Banks to lethal screenwriting and aggressive supporting performances. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Revenge stories tend to celebrate violence, cashing in on the visceral appeal of righting wrongs with extreme aggression. “Blue Ruin” is a familiar tale of pent-up distaste, though writer/director Jeremy Saulnier works diligently to avoid expectations of stylish comeuppance, returning the drive of revenge to its most feral state, where gut-rot anxiety overpowers any fantasy of psychological liberation. An exceptionally composed and imagined film, “Blue Ruin” finds suffocating spaces of contemplation, doing a masterful job exposing the frightening yet functional steps of murder as it plays with the conventions of an operatic blood feud. Saulnier establishes himself as a major talent with “Blue Ruin,” displaying refreshing care for emotional wreckage and abrupt acts of violence. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Stage Fright” merges the worlds of musical theater and slasher cinema. The disparate traditions might not seem to be an ideal mix, yet writer/director Jerome Sable finds a splendid middle ground of camp and suspense, filling the picture with memorable songs and a traditional display of bloodshed. It’s certainly a bizarre movie, but also immense fun and surprisingly well-produced, having a ball as it dreams up ways to weave through musical numbers and stalker sequences. With the horror genre always chasing repetition to secure hits, it’s nice to see a feature that’s a little loopy and imaginative, delivering the goods with some hostility and a sense of humor. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The decision to bring multiple villains into a superhero extravaganza has always been a difficult one to digest. It works periodically (Christopher Nolan’s Batman films established a memorable community of foes), but, for the most part, it results in severe overcrowding, with the production failing to juggle the needs of the protagonist as it faces the wrath of numerous antagonists. “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” a quickie sequel to the 2012 effort, suffers from too much, too soon, cramming three different villains, a parental backstory, a tepid love story, and comic book hero adventuring into a single picture. The fatigue is immediate, even when director Marc Webb struggles to jazz up the feature with event movie excess, resulting in a mediocre follow-up to a mediocre original, with the production’s speed to explore spin-off possibilities damaging the dramatic potential of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There have been a few penis-centric comedies throughout the years (perhaps most notably, the 1988 Doris Dorrie picture, “Me and Him”), but “Bad Johnson” has the right approach for such an iffy cinematic premise. Instead of working around the oddity of a human organ suddenly attaining consciousness, the feature elects to personify the male member as a living, breathing wiseacre, thus allowing the movie breathing room to work out its plot. Mercifully, “Bad Johnson” has an adequate sense of humor, providing some hilarious punchlines here and there, but miscasting is the tight leash that keeps the film from truly inspired madness. When it comes to penis comedies, it always helps to cast funny people in the leading roles. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com