Author: BO

Horror films are a dime a dozen, often viewed chasing trends or lazily
slopping the frame with blood to complete the genre task at hand. When a
production comes around that seeks out a different tonal direction,
it’s easy to notice the atmospheric changes. “Jug Face” is such a movie,
with the presence of originality helping to make helmer Chad Crawford
Kinkle’s debut feature stand out from the suffocating pack. It’s short
(80 minutes long), sparingly severe, and mysterious, asking viewers to
follow an unusual premise doesn’t reward with shocks, but a steady pulse
of dread, making the macabre aspects of the work all the more
unsettling. It’s a terrific picture, smartly made and sharply acted, and
it’s one of the best chillers of the year. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Woody Allen has been in a romantic mood lately. With the
fantasy “Midnight in Paris” and the farce “To Rome with Love,” Allen
was swept away by a golden European glow, scripting tales of life and
love with his special neurotic stamp. “Blue Jasmine” isn’t a
particularly friendly movie, returning the filmmaker to areas of
psychological warfare and social discomfort that have informed his
finest pictures. A satisfying blend of behavioral severity, “A Streetcar
Named Desire” homage, and laughs, “Blue Jasmine” is distinctly
Allen-esque, but dominated by Cate Blanchett’s stunning lead performance
— a masterful tightrope walk of delusion and deliberation that keeps
the effort absorbing and darkly comic.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s strange that the producers of “Blood” have decided to use a
six-part miniseries as the inspiration for this endeavor. Remakes are
difficult enough to pull off gracefully, but reducing multiple episodes
of narrative breadth and character arcs to a single 90 minute feature
feels like dramatic suicide, forced to compact nuanced relationships and
burn through conflict in a full sprint. Thankfully, there are powerful
performances to cling to, watching the actors conjure full-blooded
depictions of guilt to patch holes left behind in the script. There’s
powerful work here to savor while the story searches for ways to define
its direction, keeping “Blood” convincing when it should rightfully fall
apart.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“We’re the Millers” feels oddly retro with its bawdy sense of humor,
resembling a long lost Farrelly Brother film from 1999. It’s an
audience-pleaser with its mind in the gutter, playing up its R-rating
with gusto, offering oodles of sex jokes, foul language, and a moment of
graphic nudity, unwilling to break any new ground in the genre.
Thankfully, the movie is also funny, though rarely hilarious, holding to
a steady rhythm of absurdity and slapstick antics that manage to
please, with a few highlights hinting at a more interestingly devilish
picture than the McDonald’s meal director Rawson Marshall Thurber
ultimately slaps together here.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s actually surprising to be confronted with a sequel to the 2010
release, “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.” While
a modest success, the picture didn’t inspire the type of pop culture
ubiquity that normally shadows blockbuster franchises, but the producers
aren’t giving up just yet, submitting the more compactly titled “Percy
Jackson: Sea of Monsters” to the moviegoing public, hoping to build on a
foundation poured by director Chris Columbus. There is noticeable
improvement here, with a general muting of slapstick tendencies to shape
the material into a straightforward adventure/visual effects orgy,
finding helmer Thor Freudenthal conjuring the forces of Spielberg and
Rowling to craft a fantasy romp that, much like its predecessor, is far
too tense with exposition to really let ‘er rip.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Filmmaker Brian De Palma has always been an acquired taste, often seen
storming through seedy material that plays to his strengths of
seduction, suspense, and stylized cinematography. He’s fallen on hard
times in recent years, with his last picture, 2007’s Iraq War lament
“Redacted,” arguably the worst movie of his career. “Passion” won’t win
over any new fans, but it’s an acceptable cleaning of the creative
gutters for De Palma, who orchestrates his traditional serving of sin
with aplomb, even if the material is somewhat lacking in cohesion and
venom. At its finest when whipped into a frenzy of implausibility,
“Passion” is a bubble gum thriller with plenty of snap, returning the
helmer to a place of excitement that’s been missing from his work for
far too long.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The miracle of “Shaun of the Dead” has cast a long shadow on the British
filmmaking scene, especially any production that dares to touch the
balance of horror and comedy concerning the plague of the undead. That
“Cockneys vs. Zombies” is a blood-splattered delight isn’t a shock, but
how the picture manages to find a personality of its own while treading
on the same battleground of genre highlights as “Shaun” turns out to be a
major surprise. Silly, gory, and always on the go, “Cockneys vs.
Zombies” is an entertaining romp with nitwits and monsters, keeping to
the essentials of makeshift warfare while preserving all the necessary
funny business. All that’s missing from the effort is a translator for
American audiences.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Perhaps “Drift” would be more appealing with the mute button engaged.
Without dialogue in the way, the feature is left with its picturesque
Australian locations and impressive surfing footage, creating a cool
summer view of beach life in the 1970s, with its rolling waves and
heavenly sunshine. Unfortunately, “Drift” is no travelogue, but a
melodrama concerning the rise of modern surfing, and it employs a host
of clichés to develop a tale of two brothers working to make their mark
on the industry. Certainly atmospheric but depressingly predictable,
“Drift” is more stimulating visually than dramatically, unable to
provide a gritty look at careworn lives looking for a path to
fulfillment. Instead, it’s a soap opera, but one infused with tremendous
cinematographic presence.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s almost too much plot swirling around “2 Guns,” though it’s not a
particularly deep film. Striving to give the buddy cop picture a
criminal spin, the material offers plenty of double-crosses and
squinty-eyed showdowns, striving to puff itself up to appear significant
when it’s really just another tale of corrupt people making bad
decisions. Credit star Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington, who provide a
strong core of charisma that carries the feature through numerous rough
patches. It’s violent and brimming with nonsense, but there’s a pulpy
quality to the work that keeps it compelling, even while it tries to
script itself into unnecessary situations.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There are expectations with “Europa Report” that are thankfully never
met. From the outside, the picture appears to be another
stranded-in-space saga, inspecting tensions between astronauts while an
unidentified life form creeps menacingly into view. However, director
Sebastian Cordero and screenwriter Philip Gelatt aren’t interested in
chasing cheap genre highs, preferring to play “Europa Report” as science
fact, contributing one of the most realistic depictions of a space
mission the screen has seen in ages. The effort is wonderfully
suspenseful and exhaustively mysterious, but the true grip of tension is
founded in procedural behaviors, gifting the film a striking realism
that makes it superior to the average B-movie.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Canyons” opens with a main title sequence spotlighting abandoned,
decaying movie theaters. Presumably, this is a comment on the dwindling
appeal of the theatrical experience, with “The Canyons” potentially
greeting most of its viewers through Video on Demand services, an
industry distribution system currently being hailed as the savior for
independent cinema. It’s a disturbing showcase of lost cinematic
elegance, but if this picture is meant to represent the future of film,
these theaters are better off in complete ruin. Insufferable and
eternal, “The Canyons” has spent the greater part of its production life
dodging bad press, only to deserve every single journalistic lash.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Blackfish” is an incomplete documentary with its heart in the right
place. Outraged by the “facts” that were passed around after the death
of SeaWorld orca trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010, director Gabriela
Cowperthwaite decided to strike out on her own, surveying the history of
Tilikum, the killer whale responsible for the horrific incident. Her
cinematic summation of animal abuse and destructive business practices
when it comes to the welfare of SeaWorld’s creatures is expectedly
upsetting and often riveting, exploring the insanity of orca
domestication and the devastating price of such tight confinement.
However, as enlightening and passionate as the picture is, Cowperthwaite
fails to summon the type of comprehensive journalism this type of story
deserves.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 2011’s “The Smurfs,” we learned that Smurfs are capable of breaking
wind. In “The Smurfs 2,” it’s established that Smurfs have testicles.
I’m not entirely certain why the moviemakers are so consumed with the
bodily functions of these little blue creatures, but the humor remains
fixed at that level for much of the picture. Picking up where the last
endeavor left off, “The Smurfs 2” shows some badly needed progression in
the emotional resonance department, but the rest of the sequel is mired
by an oddly joyless atmosphere of evildoing, while the promise of a
fresh location is abandoned to pursue some of the lamest attempts at
humor viewed in a family film this year.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While greeted with robust box office, 2009’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”
was met with fan apathy, with most complaints stemming from the studio’s
attempt to make a colorful, cartoony mutant nation movie out of a solo
effort (wedging will.i.am into an acting role didn’t exactly help the
cause either), crowding out the central appeal of the picture. With “The
Wolverine,” the boat now rocks in the opposite direction, stripping
away the theme park vibe of the previous film to craft a more pained
take on the clawed superhero’s ongoing tango with mortality, eschewing
big action for furrowed brows and Japanese melodrama. The change in
scenery is attractive, yet “The Wolverine” is missing fire in its belly,
feeling mummified by its intentional downshift into a mood piece.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com