Category: Film Review

Hunting for a different take on Civil War history, writer/director Gary Ross (“Seabiscuit,” “The Hunger Games”) comes across the tale of Newton Knight, a Mississippi man who fought against Confederate soldiers, battling to retain basic freedoms lost during the prolonged conflict. There’s potential in the man’s unrest, but “Free State of Jones” doesn’t have much fire in its belly, dryly and predictably examining toxic racial attitudes, combat shock, and bruised nobility. Ross hopes to impart ideas on inequality and honor, but he’s found the least interesting way to do it, keeping “Free State of Jones” obvious and glacial, lacking a passionate screen presence as melodrama and monologuing tend to overwhelm the effort. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

From the outside, “The Phenom” looks like your average baseball film about a troubled pitcher coming to terms with a losing streak, with the effort heading out to the mound to explore the headspace of a pro struggling to win games. The feature actually offers very little baseball, more interested in the psychological wreckage of a player fighting learned behavior, remaining in low-lit rooms with characters instead of hustling around the diamond. Writer/director Noah Buschel has a specific mood in mind for “The Phenom,” and it doesn’t involving baseball as a game, but more of a prison, inspecting the drive required to join the big leagues and the price paid for such steely focus, especially when rubbed furiously against toxic fatherly influence. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The marketplace is filled with movies like “Vigilante Diaries.” Horror used to be the primary tool for young filmmakers to enter the industry without spending any money, but now actioners have joined the party, offering helmers a chance to organize brutality with the help of known actors not above claiming an easy paycheck. “Vigilante Diaries” isn’t the worst of the bunch, but it certainly tries to be, emerging as a semi-coherent take on worldwide menace and one-man-army attitude, with co-writer/director Christian Sesma trying to fill up on guns and chases when he should really concentrate on writing, with the effort regurgitating as much B-movie formula as it can get away with. It’s not really a film, but a collection of clichés without a strong narrative spine. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In the world of art, success rarely equals interesting. It’s an idea of worth that drives the documentary “Art Bastard,” which takes a look at the life and times of painter Robert Cenedella, who’s spent most of his career on his feet, refusing to submit to a system of acknowledgement and financial evaluation that generally defines the big names in professional creativity. Directed by Victor Kanefsky, “Art Bastard” is an informative picture, bringing Cenedella’s distorted vision of humanity to the screen, helping to identify a body of work that’s extraordinarily detailed and imaginative, and perhaps completely unknown to the average art-world participant. It’s basic in design, but the production is merely out to identify inspiration, doing so with a sense of humor and trust in the subject’s natural charisma. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

I’m not exactly sure what screenwriter Steve Adams (“Envy,” “Donnie and Marie”) was aiming to express with the oddity of “No Stranger Than Love,” but it’s safe to report that whatever the original intent of the material was, it hasn’t ended up onscreen. Quirky with a capital Q, the feature is an unyielding rush of cutesy business anchored by a plot twist that touches on the existential, trying to use weirdness as a way to disrupt expectations. It’s too bad director Nick Wherham doesn’t have a clue what to do with all this sticky stuff, struggling to make scenes work that don’t piece together properly, while casting is largely a letdown, making whimsy feels uncomfortably labored. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With marketing that celebrates Eli Roth as a producer, there’s some expectation of tastelessness with “Clown,” which takes a darkly comic route to understanding the unease that generally accompanies painted men with rainbow hair. The sickness of the movie isn’t surprising, but its leaden sense of humor is, failing to strike a balance between grim events and the inherent silliness of the plot. “Clown” attempts to be subtle for a good 30 minutes, but co-writer/director Jon Watts doesn’t maintain patience, soon amplifying violence against children and assort demonic awakenings to give the effort some shock value when basic suspense fails him. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

For the next round of sequelization at Pixar Animation Studios, the company returns to one of their most beloved pictures a whopping 13 years after the release of the original film. 2003’s “Finding Nemo” represented Pixar’s first real taste of megablockbusterdom after building a reputation on the backs of toys, monster, and bugs. It was a smash hit, charming audiences around the globe with its depiction of ocean life and its careful handling of characterization, with the forgetful Pacific regal blue tang Dory emerging as a fan favorite. Returning to the undersea kingdom, writer/director Andrew Stanton offers the fish her own adventure in “Finding Dory,” which is a perfectly serviceable continuation that doesn’t truly widen the oceanic realm, but it does make time for old friends and familiar conflicts, playing it safe to make sure the faithful walk away satisfied. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s difficult to classify “Central Intelligence” as a good movie, but it makes a valiant effort to disrupt expectations, especially when it comes to leads Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson. An action-comedy from director Rawson Marshall Thurber (“We’re the Millers”), the picture is open to switching traditional roles for the talent, allowing Johnson to be the semi-loud weird guy while Hart does the straight-man routine. It may seem like a simple change in tone, but the idea keeps “Central Intelligence” involving and amusing, especially when it offers a sedate, reactionary Hart. Thurber isn’t built for big, violent set pieces, but the jokes keep coming in the film, showing a little more interest in entertaining ticket-buyers than expected. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

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

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