Category: Film Review

Actor Stephen Dorff hasn’t found his groove in recent features, but he’s making an effort to shake up his filmography with oddball choices that attempt to show off some range. In “American Hero,” Dorff portrays a member of the X-Men in a way, playing a man with telekinetic powers facing a troubling existence in a forgotten land. It’s an aggressive performance, but it ends up the only element of the picture that makes sense. Writer/director Nick Love (“The Sweeney”) submits a crude, confused tale of soulful awakening with “American Hero,” habitually unsure what to do with the characters or even how to tell the story, leaving Dorff to do all the heavy lifting as the endeavor spins out of control. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s probably best to pay attention to the Martin Scorsese executive producer credit on “The Wannabe.” Why Scorsese is supporting the picture isn’t known, but few of the ideas contained in Nick Sandow’s screenplay are familiar, including hero worship involving members of organized crime and obsessive drug consumption leading to manic episodes of destructive behavior. Indeed, “The Wannabe” plays like second cousin to “Goodfellas” at times, but even a little homage can’t salvage a wholly unpleasant and meandering viewing experience. Sandow’s intent is to explore a confused mind, but he emerges with 90 minutes of pointless confrontations and softball acting, leaving little story to chew on. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 2007, writer/director Michael Dougherty set out to redefine Halloween horror with “Trick ‘r Treat,” a clever anthology effort that emphasized eeriness over pounding terror. For his follow-up, the helmer aims to shake up another holiday with “Krampus,” a Christmas-set chiller that’s trying to scare during the season of giving. Again avoiding cheap thrills, Dougherty creates an entertaining monster mash with the picture, which blends yuletide sensitivities involving dysfunctional families and the wrath of ghoulish creatures. Strangely, the production doesn’t aim to create a roller coaster ride of oddity, preferring to step carefully with its genre offerings, leaving the endeavor feeling slack at crucial moments, but it’s still satisfying overall. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Comparisons to “Bad Santa” will undoubtedly be made repeatedly, but “Uncle Nick” isn’t as conventional as the inexplicably enduring Billy Bob Thornton comedy. Arriving at the holiday season with plans to dissect a dysfunctional family at their very worst, director Chris Kasick and writer Mike Demski (both veterans of “Attack of the Show”) cook up a sharp, sarcastic effort that celebrates the wonderfully deadpan delivery of star Brian Posehn, using the comedian’s elongated way with an uncomfortable moment to give “Uncle Nick” the proper amount of bitterness to help support this domestic unraveling. Hilarious and profoundly dark, the feature is an interesting counterpoint to holiday cheer, offering an engaging lump of coal for those who prefer their Christmas thoroughly soiled by bad behavior. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The director of “The Great Beauty” and “This Must Be the Place,” Paolo Sorrentino returns to screens with “Youth.” Stepping further into English-language filmmaking, the helmer arrives with a star-studded cast to realize this meditation on aging and experience, with Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Jane Fonda, and Rachel Weisz turning in capable work to best bring out the flavors of Sorrentino’s screenplay. Idiosyncrasies do remain in “Youth,” and the picture tends to value atmosphere over dramatics. It can be a struggle to figure out what Sorrentino wants from his feature, but when all else fails the effort, the ensemble is there to provide a passable sense of focus, creating memorable scenes of introspection. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“MI-5” isn’t just a run-of-the-mill spy thriller, but a big screen spinoff of “Spooks,” a British television series that found a home in America on deep cable. While the title is generic and the plot promises the basics in paranoia cinema, “MI-5” (titled “Spooks: The Greater Good” around the world) actually comes through with surprising clarity, finding pockets of suspense even while it samples material found in dozens of small screen productions. Credit director Bharat Nalluri (“Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day”), who keeps the picture alert and on the move, confronting the familiarity of it all with commitment to speed and a general awareness that while his effort isn’t going to look like a blockbuster, it can periodically play like one. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Wonders” is a special creation that demands a certain level of patience with its winding, almost directionless storytelling. There are many subplots and feelings to explore, but its primary focus remains on a coming-of-age tale concerning a teen girl in the midst of an adolescent awakening while living in a painfully remote part of the world. “The Wonders” is shapeless, but it has meaning and sensitivity, better with moments of contemplation and familial interaction than it is with a larger depiction of dysfunction. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Laurie Anderson is a performance artist and a musician, nurturing an impressive four-decade-long career of artistic endeavors. She’s a spiky-haired avant-garde original who lives to disrupt expectations, with her latest work, “Heart of a Dog,” one of her most baffling. While it appears on the outside to be an appreciation of animal companionship, finding Anderson in a sentimental mood, “Heart of a Dog” immediately sheds expectations to become something more in step with the performer’s appetite for the surreal. It’s certainly emotional at times, but the feature is primarily a sensorial immersion into life, death, and all the strangeness the makes up the post-9/11 human experience, with Anderson deploying animation, home movies, and abstract footage to carry viewers into the warm waters of the unknown. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 1990, the story of Reggie and Ronnie Kray, the twin gangsters of 1960s London, was explored in “The Krays,” which starred Gary and Martin Kemp, from the band Spandau Ballet. Acting efforts are substantially accelerated in “Legend,” which does away with twinning to focus on star Tom Hardy, who portrays both Reggie and Ronnie in a bruisingly seductive manner only he can pull off. Casting works wonderfully, but “Legend” is an extremely difficult movie. Imagining the Krays as a bottomless pool of interesting behaviors and impulses, the feature doesn’t make much sense of their criminal reign, cherry picking the highlights of their madness without establish context, making the picture feel frustratingly incomplete. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 2006, Sylvester Stallone pulled off the impossible. With “Rocky Balboa,” the screen icon revived a dying franchise with a sincere final chapter, aging his most famous character gracefully, adding some necessary lumps to the boxing champion with a picture that returned Rocky to his roots. Of course, there’s trepidation with “Creed,” which arrives nearly a decade after Rocky enjoyed a respectful send-off. And yet, under the care of co-writer/director Ryan Coogler (“Fruitvale Station”), the brand name returns to glory, albeit under a different boxer’s name. Against all odds, “Creed” emerges as a powerhouse continuation of Stallone’s creation, carrying all the fire and emotion of the original 1976 movie while reworking irresistible formula for a new generation of underdog cinema. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

For the first time in their history, Pixar Animation is releasing two films during a single calendar year. “Inside Out” was the first one out of the gate, unleashed last June to universal critical acclaim and blockbuster box office, making it third highest grossing effort from the company, reestablishing its creative and financial dominance after taking 2014 off. “The Good Dinosaur” is the quick follow-up, and it’s a simpler, more traditional tale of adventure and maturation, moving away from the sophisticated emotionality and world-building of “Inside Out.” While it plays on a more recognizable level of engagement, “The Good Dinosaur” still manages to showcase Pixar pride, sustaining their reputation for quality entertainment as it careens from sensitivity to surprisingly dark elements of antagonism, displaying a little more menace than the title suggests. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Sensing a good thing with the reimagining of “Sherlock Holmes,” screenwriter Max Landis gives the same treatment to the legacy of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, “Frankenstein.” Adding adventure and scientific smarts to his reworking of the original story and its many cinematic adaptations and perversions, Landis gets lost early, attempting to pack in a myriad of ideas to help sympathies and surprises, laboring to deliver a fresh take on old material. “Victor Frankenstein” doesn’t work, but its ambition is encouraging, along with an interest in practical effects to bring the goopy particulars of mad science to the screen. However, tedium soon topples the effort, which fights to make a viable movie out of a grab bag of ideas. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The great journalism films make the audience feel like they’ve joined the hunt for truth, embedded alongside bleary-eyed, rumpled writers as they pore through tips and research, trying to shape a viable story out of bits and pieces of evidence. “Spotlight” is such a movie, carrying itself with confidence as it explores the delicate subject of molestation and the Catholic Church. Co-writer/director Tom McCarthy doesn’t lunge for incendiary material, instead building an atmosphere of unease, developing the case along with the reporters. “Spotlight” is sharp and flawlessly performed, joining the ranks of exceptional journalism pictures with its commitment to procedure and willingness to investigate both the guilty and those looking to expose them. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Billy Ray (“Breach,” “Shattered Glass”) is asking for trouble with “Secret in Their Eyes.” A remake of a terrific 2009 Argentinean film, the update has the impossible task of domesticating material that was best served in its native country, which offered twists, turns, and memorable locations. The new “Secret in Their Eyes” is a flatter, blunter object, laboring to recreate the same Double Dutch routine of mixed timelines and pained lives, brightened considerably by periodic surges of suspense. Ray doesn’t completely wipe out, but inertia is the feature’s greatest enemy, somehow conjuring monotony when handling a fairly eventful story. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Brooklyn” shares an old-fashioned story of love and personal awakening. It’s a simple tale with complex but relatable emotions, sold expertly by director John Crowley (“Intermission”) and screenwriter Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity,” “Wild”), who respect the classic cinema tempo of the material, laboring to realize a level of innocence that’s rarely attempted anymore. “Brooklyn” is lovely work, sensitive and evocative, always downplaying the potential for melodrama to find the truth of the moment. Moviegoers often caught complaining that “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” should make attendance a priority, as failure to support such endearing, achingly human filmmaking only hastens its obsolescence. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Hunger Games” pulled a “Harry Potter” last year when it decided to maximize profits and split the final book in the Suzanne Collins series, “Mockingjay,” into two pictures. When “Part 1” was released last year, there was a noticeable dip in screen enthusiasm, finding momentum that was established in 2013’s “Catching Fire” erased due to heavy amounts of exposition and a general throttling of urgency to help fill two sequels. “Part 1” was a disappointment, one-note and dull, but it did promise a war zone grand finale to send the franchise off on a high note. “Mockingjay – Part 2” is finally here, and, bizarrely, it’s nearly as inert as its predecessor, once again straining futilely to transform a wafer-thin story into a nearly five hour viewing experience when paired with “Part 1.” Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With “Unbroken” and “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” Angelina Jolie Pitt has shared a fascination with human endurance. Depicting wars, horrors, and cruelties, she’s never been one to detail the joy of life, only coming across such an epiphany by accident. With “By the Sea,” Jolie Pitt returns to direct herself and real-world husband Brad Pitt in a tale of complete and utter anguish, staying within her comfort zone with this throwback effort to intimate tales of self-destruction from the 1970s. “By the Sea” is a vanity film, but not completely without merit. When it isn’t permissive with performances and indulgent with its run time, the picture has a few insightful ideas to share about loss and marital strife, but it takes considerable work to find such wisdom. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Coming down from their world-rattling attempt to make fun of North Korea with “The Interview,” co-writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg set their sights on the holiday season with “The Night Before.” Obviously, with this duo guiding the mischief (along with Ariel Shaffir and Jonathan Levine, who also directs), warm, cuddly feelings of Christmas cheer aren’t on the menu, but this rowdy, drug-laden comedy certainly tries to remain meaningful as it attempts to make a worthy big screen mess. Funny in fits and perhaps too obsessed with maintaining character, “The Night Before” isn’t quite the guns blazing comedy it could’ve been, but there are more hit than misses as Rogen and Goldberg return to their happy place of cursing, bodily fluids, and celebrity cameos. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While Quentin Tarantino continues his exploration of the western in this holiday’s “The Hateful Eight,” director Jackie Earle Haley and screenwriter Robert Lowell keep the old Tarantino spirit alive in “Criminal Activities.” A mixture of violence, comedy, and loquaciousness, the picture is reminiscent of the many knockoffs that found release after “Pulp Fiction” became a phenomenon, handled with a buzzing energy by Haley, who makes his helming debut with the feature after managing an acting career for the last four decades. While it all plays very familiar, “Criminal Activities” has a few creative moves of its own, finding the production trying to nail down a special rhythm to all the conventional intimidation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The last time actor Simon Pegg decided he wanted to warm up his image, it resulted in 2014’s particularly unpleasant “Hector and the Search for Happiness,” which actually made the jovial performer come across unappealing, suggesting that perhaps tales of love were not his forte. “Man Up” is a decent enough rebound for Pegg, who teams with Lake Bell for a lively adventure through misunderstanding and silliness. It’s definitely not Pegg’s finest professional hour, but as fizzy romantic comedies go, “Man Up” has its share of surprises and enthusiasm for the material, maintaining an effort to disrupt the subgenre routine with speed and a great deal of mischief. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com