Category: Film Review

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

Two years ago, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” attempted to redefine the longstanding comic book creation for a new generation, retrying the live action realm with help from highly detailed motion capture work, bringing the heroes into a modern world, guided in part by the heavy hand of producer Michael Bay. It wasn’t a much of a creative achievement, but it found an audience big enough to inspire a sequel. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” is the follow-up, but it really more of a reboot. Aware that fans were somewhat displeased with the original movie, the production makes a concerted effort to give the faithful what they want, resulting in a more exciting, cartoonish feature that delivers the turtle power goods with real widescreen heft. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

As approachable as “Me Before You” seems on the outside, there are actually two very distinct movies battling for screen time. On one side, there’s a polite romance developing between two people in need of companionship and a sense of stability, brought together through chemistry and kindness. On the other side is a study of assisted suicide and its practical use with those who can’t find a future for themselves due to physical agony. It’s an unexpected combination of moods, but screenwriter Jojo Moyes (adapting her own 2012 novel) manages to find a degree of dramatic care with “Me Before You,” with the production also aided by two strong lead performances from Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Comedy trio The Lonely Island was last seen hunting for big screen success with 2007’s “Hot Rod.” An amusingly strange effort, “Hot Rod” failed to attract much attention, returning members Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer, and Andy Samberg to album releases and Digital Short supremacy on “Saturday Night Live.” Almost a decade later, the gang returns to multiplexes with “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” a semi-parody of Justin Bieber’s whitewashed 2011 documentary, “Never Say Never.” The Lonely Island is a little late to the anti-Bieber party, but “Popstar” largely remains its own creation, having a ball making fun of enormous egos, the music industry, and the foibles of friendships. It’s a broad take on obvious targets, but the feature is absolutely hilarious and somewhat gentle with its pantsing, pursuing an arc of sincerity instead of simply banging away with cheap jokes. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Terence Davies doesn’t make movies very often, but when he does find time to pursue his cinematic vision, it’s usually a special event. Following up the domestic drama “The Deep Blue Sea” with another take on household intimacies, Davies brings Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel “Sunset Song” to the screen, which provides a special adaptation challenge as it details prolonged tragedy and hushed introspection, supported by a thrilling widescreen filmmaking event. Sensitive and true to the human experience, “Sunset Song” is best reserved for those who enjoy getting lost in a literary-inspired world, populated with defined characters and a vivid sense of location. The picture is evocative and beautiful, but also richly pained, with Davies finding a way to execute a simple tale of growth with sophisticated emotions. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director David Farr goes the Roman Polanski route with “The Ones Below,” and it’s an ideal match of filmmaking appetites. Filled with tension and unease, the feature shows surprising edge with its depiction of new parent paranoia, delivering darkness with special care from Farr, who preserves the psychological abyss the screenplay develops throughout the movie without slipping into mean-spirited violence. Supremely chilling and effectively slow-burn, “The Ones Below” isn’t about monsters or mayhem, but the creaky moments of blurred reality and suspicion, with Farr extracting superb suspense out of what’s really a minimal exercise in screen agitation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

For his directorial debut, Scot Armstrong decided to keep it simple. The co-screenwriter of hits such as “Old School” and “The Hangover: Part II,” Armstrong pays tribute to his periodic partner Todd Phillips with “Search Party,” which basically replicates most of his filmography. It’s slow-pitch softball for Armstrong, who doesn’t do anything new with the picture’s working parts, preferring to play it safe with a semi-raunchy tale of panic and problematic retrieval, trying to satisfy the audience with the basics in broheim comedy. “Search Party” isn’t completely without laughs, but a toxic cloud of sameness hangs over the feature, which wheezes from incident to incident, failing to build momentum through limp shock value. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

To tell the life story of musician Duff McKagan, “It’s So Easy and Other Lies” tries very hard to avoid resembling a traditional documentary, dealing exclusively in talking heads and a rigid storytelling arc of redemption. The picture is actually more of a book reading that incorporates musical moods, permitting McKagan to explore his ups and downs in a more theatrical manner, sharing his pain with the camera and a live audience. “It’s So Easy and Other Lies” has a lot of ground to cover when dealing with one of the founding members of Guns N’ Roses, but the production, while creative in its approach, isn’t interested in a true biographical examination, electing to cherry pick seminal McKagan moments, not identify the nuance of a life lived at top speed. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Thanks to last autumn’s “The Martian,” which ruled the box office and became a critical darling, the Red Planet is all the rage again. “Approaching the Unknown” is a very different film than the Ridley Scott blockbuster, but the movies share an interest in verisimilitude, trying to return the science into science fiction. While “The Martian” was big entertainment with a sense of humor to go along with its nail-biting sequences of survival, “Approaching the Unknown” takes a more introspective route, remaining inside the lead character’s head for 90 minutes as he contemplates life and death, facing discovery and failure. Writer/director Mark Elijah Rosenberg has the right idea with the feature, but there’s almost no attention to pace. The helmer forces the audience to drift through space with a determined but distant astronaut, making the effort something to acknowledge but rarely enjoy. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Do-Over” is the latest Adam Sandler production, and it’s a return to more traditional mid-budget goofballery after last winter’s western, “The Ridiculous Six.” Reviving his “every movie is a paid vacation” edict, Sandler brings this action comedy to tropical locations such as Puerto Rico, bathing the picture in sun and sand, while pal David Spade joins in on the fun, returning the star to his prized comfort zone. And yet, despite simplistic elements, “The Do-Over” works very hard to provide a complicated viewing experience, trying to blur expectations through screenwriting that offers elaborate plotting and a plethora of names to manage. Along with popcorn and soda, viewers may also want to consider a dry erase board to help track a story that provides potty humor and frat boy pranks, but also pokes fun at Alzheimer’s disease, explores the pain of mortality, and involves a hunt for a cancer cure. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2010’s “Alice in Wonderland” did a fine job defining Tim Burton’s recent directorial career, offering a dour, absurdly plasticized, green-screen-addicted adventure inspired by the beloved Lewis Carroll novel. It was a feeble film, highlighting Burton’s laziness behind the camera and revealing a shelf life for his quirk. But it made a billion dollars, so any possible follow-up wasn’t going to take the apology route. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” took its time to reach screens, bucking current trends of rapid sequelizations, and it’s about time as well, becoming both a prequel and continuation of “Alice in Wonderland” as the heroine zips around the years to save Underland. Burton has been replaced by James Bobin, but “Alice Through the Looking Glass” isn’t all that different a picture. Perhaps it’s a bit brighter, less violent, and more contained, and the effort does improve on the original movie, but a dearth of joy remains, returning to a realm in serious need of a practical set and some Prozac. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2014’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” provided an opportunity for director Bryan Singer to return to a film series he began in 2000, working to untangle a few narrative and tonal knots created by other helmers, who had their way with the franchise over the years. While the feature juggled timelines and labored to build a bridge between the Singer era and the prequel fixings of “X-Men: First Class,” it was a creative success, managing to breathe life into the ongoing narrative, saying goodbye to a few familiar actors while continuing to explore new ones. “X-Men: Apocalypse” is the first step in a new direction for the mutant superheroes, winding the clock back to the 1980s to reset the group as a burgeoning team combining efforts to take on evil. The community atmosphere is strengthened in “Apocalypse,” shifting leadership duties and dramatic emphasis to inspire even more mutant adventures. Singer’s passion for the material is evident throughout, returning to heroism for the 8th chapter, not just stroking angst. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s hard to believe that “The Nice Guys” is only Shane Black’s third directorial effort. The famed screenwriter’s influence (“Lethal Weapon,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight”) has reverberated throughout the industry for decades, but Black is only really getting started when it comes to personalized cinematic pursuits. His debut was 2005’s appealingly noir-ish comedy, “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” but that promise eventually found itself with a plastic grocery bag wrapped over its head for “Iron Man 3,” an enormous production that showed little patience for Black’s DNA. “The Nice Guys” returns the director to his old stomping grounds, finding a reason to revisit Los Angeles with a silly detective story that’s soaking wet with Blackisms. It’s not an especially successful film, but here’s a handy tip: if you’re not laughing within the first ten minutes, there’s no reason to hang around for the remaining 100. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2014’s “Neighbors” was a disappointment. Handed a surefire premise that encouraged sustained silliness, and the feature exhausted itself before it had a chance to truly begin, sticking to tired trends for humor, while periodic dips into bodily function business only emphasized a lack of production imagination. Bravely, “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” attempts to race the original film to the bottom. A slapdash sequel quickly churned out to cash in on a surprise box office performer, the follow-up doesn’t transform a simple plot into a franchise. Instead of innovation, “Sorority Rising” furiously rehashes original elements in a manner that makes “Die Hard 2” look like “The Godfather: Part II.” If you’ve seen “Neighbors,” you’ve already seen “Neighbors 2.” Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Angry Birds Movie” arrives a little late, trying to cash in on the video game’s popularity, which has been waning since 2012. The pop culture moment has passed, but the production is determined to make something exciting with the simple formula of birds and pigs going to war. There are no surprises in “The Angry Birds Movie,” though there is a curious lack of laughs when exploring this collision of combative animals, finding an interesting and varied voice cast powerless to bring the funny with unimaginative screenwriting and direction that favors chaos as a means to entertain. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After scoring a major box office success with 1988’s “Twins,” star Arnold Schwarzenegger explored comedy once again with director Ivan Reitman in 1990’s “Kindergarten Cop.” This time, the pairing pants Schwarzenegger’s action persona, challenging established brawn with the unpredictable energy and honesty of children, finding a unique way to celebrate the actor’s strengths by taking him out of his comfort zone in a broadly comic manner. It took 26 years for Universal to come up with a sequel, but they’ve gone the DTV route, replacing Schwarzenegger with Dolph Lundgren, hoping to find the same silly vibe with another screen behemoth invading a classroom filled with 5 year olds. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In the world of director Yorgos Lanthimos, up is down and down is up. He’s a helmer who embraces the surreal and the strikingly authentic, using elements of performance art to explore the human condition as it experiences unusual extremity and isolation. Lanthimos first caught attention with 2009’s “Dogtooth,” and he returns to US art-houses with another vision of codependency in “The Lobster,” which also gifts him a larger budget and name actors to guide through his peculiar world-view. “The Lobster” is meant to be a great many things, and it’s largely successful with all of them, but what really pops here is Lanthimos’s hunger for the strange and his obsession with the heart, taking the long way around peculiar character interactions to explore the meaning of companionship. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

“Men & Chicken” is the latest release from writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen, his first in over a decade. In his time away from the camera, it seems he’s built up a hearty appetite for dark material, masterminding a strange look at a dysfunctional family made up of possibly monstrous siblings. Darkly comic interests remain to keep the picture approachable, but the Danish production is pretty severe as it inspects brotherly love and philosophical reach. Thankfully, Jensen isn’t going for cheap laughs with the grotesqueries of “Men & Chicken,” instead working to find the soul of his screenplay and treat these oddballs with a degree of understanding and, if one squints hard enough, love. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Hard Sell” is the tamest take on a movie that’s kinda, sorta about prostitution. It’s not exactly “Risky Business,” but writer/director Sean Nalaboff has the opportunity to launch a bawdy teen comedy about opportunism and exploitation. Instead of raunchy entertainment, the helmer attempts something far more sincere, inspecting the emotional wounds of his damaged characters, searching for unpredictable ways to explore familiar material. “Hard Sell” isn’t as exhaustively meaningful as it would like to be, but Nalaboff has the right idea, avoiding traditional adolescent high jinks to identify vulnerabilities, prizing matters of the heart more than laughs. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com