Category: Film Review

Eli Roth doesn’t direct very often, but when he does he makes the same movie over and over again. The man loves his horror with a side of humor, playing up darkly comic adventures with hapless characters, trying to diffuse unspeakable acts of violence with jokes. It’s difficult to understand why Roth feels the need to undermine himself at every turn, but it’s his method, and he doesn’t apply it with any regularity. Last month saw the release of his long-delayed cannibal picture “The Green Inferno,” and now Roth takes on the home invasion thriller with “Knock Knock,” blending scenes of steamy seduction with torture-minded aggressions. What should be nail-chewing entertainment is rendered flaccid in Roth’s hands, who once again goes goofball with a sobering plot. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Joe Wright dented an otherwise inspiring filmmaking career with 2012’s “Anna Karenina,” a visually stunning but DOA adaption of Leo Tolstoy’s celebrated novel. Remaining in a literary mood, Wright (along with screenwriter Jason Fuchs) goes after J.M. Barrie’s world of fairies, lost boys, and pirates with “Pan,” which acts as prequel to “Peter Pan,” providing an origin story because there’s really nothing left to say about Neverland. Gifted an enormous budget, Wright suits up for the biggest feature of his career, and “Pan” certainly looks like a production that spent every penny on spectacle. Big, noisy, and luridly campy, the picture offers no boundaries for Wright’s vision, but the wide open space confuses the talented helmer. This isn’t a bad movie, it’s merely a punishingly permissive one. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Goodnight Mommy” arrives in the tradition of punishing Euro horror, where discomfort is king and torment is the battery that powers the production. Although it’s not as raw as pictures such as “Dogtooth” or “Nothing Bad Can Happen,” “Goodnight Mommy” has more than its share of skin-crawling moments, even while it mostly avoids overt terror scenarios. Writer/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have pieced together a riveting nightmare, using charmingly unraveled performances and sharp cinematographic style to construct a downward slide into madness. The feature is tricky and requires some patience, but the effort eventually settles into a hypnotic rhythm of behavioral disease. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Today, the National Lampoon is a brand name, and a tattered one at best. Tarnished over the years by dreadful movies (including “Dorm Daze,” “Transylmania,” and “RoboDoc”) and creative stagnancy, the label is largely responsible for padding Redbox line-ups, but there was once a time when National Lampoon ruled the comedy universe, using their subversive, take-no-prisoners wit to rock young minds and change the face of satire during an era when such dark humor was a necessity. “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon” is a slick documentary, and a vital reminder of the power the magazine once held as it welcomed comedic geniuses and lovable miscreants to help create monthly doses of lethal mischief. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s difficult to avoid making comparisons between “Trash” and Fernando Meirelles’s 2002 breakthrough feature, “City of God.” They both examine the hardscrabble life for young people existing inside Rio’s impoverished areas, but “Trash” doesn’t share the same grit and awareness of the landscape. It’s the latest from director Stephen Daldry, who stepped on a career landmine with 2011’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” His new effort isn’t a return to form for the helmer of “The Hours” and “Billy Elliot,” but it certainly revives his interest in more natural human behavior. Filled with chases and characters, the picture creates a whirlwind of events, but it only rarely achieves authority, as Daldry has trouble balancing the endeavor’s restless cinematic interests and its sticky cultural pleas. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Big Stone Gap” is an offering of Southern comfort, infused with a community spirit vibe that’s pleasant enough to carry the effort until the plot gets in the way. The feature marks the directorial debut of Adriana Trigiani, who adapts her own novel for the screen, shooting on location in the actual Big Stone Gap, Virginia to capture small-town flavors and familiarity. There’s nothing particularly challenging about the picture, which invests in prickly, oddball behavior and a series of mild shocks. Trigiani doesn’t push the material into any energetic directions, but she does capture the sway of the town, better with atmosphere than dramatics. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Denis Villeneuve generally makes one type of movie. With “Prisoners,” “Enemy,” and “Incendies,” the helmer has displayed a fascination with the darkness of human behavior, exploring cruelties and lies with surgical precision, but also maintaining his distance from drama, which doesn’t always result in the most engrossing storytelling. “Sicario” doesn’t alter his modus operandi, with the director once again reaching into the void to observe the death of spirit. What “Sicario” has that separates it from the rest of Villeneuve’s work is a merciless script by Taylor Sheridan, which clears away most of the director’s interest in stasis, paying attention to thriller cinema basics before returning to long takes of silent contemplation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Space movies appear to be all the rage these days, with the one-two punch of “Gravity” and “Interstellar” making it safe for features about exploration and survival to compete with superhero adventures. “The Martian” is a fine addition to the trend, forging its own path of suspense, science, and humor to grasp the extremes of isolation and the fever of NASA brainstorming. A kissing cousin to “Apollo 13,” “The Martian” comes alive thanks to director Ridley Scott, who wisely steps out of the picture’s way and allows the pressurized environment of Andy Weir’s best-selling novel to take command, assembling a technically marvelous and emotionally gripping tale of a special rescue mission that demands years of planning and execution. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Any active moviegoer in recent years may have already heard of “Man on Wire,” a documentary dedicated to Philippe Petit’s 1974’s high-wire walk across the tops of the Twin Towers in New York City. Such a specialized but high-profile release (winning an Oscar for Best Documentary) easily threatens the elements of surprise in “The Walk,” director Robert Zemeckis’s dramatization of the daredevil event. However, leave it to the man behind “Back to the Future,” “Forrest Gump,” and “The Polar Express” to sustain suspense, taking a known experience and making it feel like front page news again, helped in great part by stunning visual effects that put the viewer on the wire with Petit, taking in the expanse of the city. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Horror and heavy metal are natural companions, with their shared interest in demonic events lending itself to perverse genre interests. The New Zealand production “Deathgasm” takes a more comedic route to blood-soaked events, but it manages to stay respectful of the wilds of extreme music and the wonders of cinematic hellraising. A Cannibal Corpse album cover come to life, “Deathgasm” is a wily creation from writer/director Jason Lei Howden (a visual effects artist making his helming debut) that’s teeming with humor and gore, generating a sufficient ordeal of Satanic bedlam while tending to the nuances of life as a metalhead. It’s extreme, but the movie is undeniably fun — absolute cat nip for those who demand their dark adventures cover the limb-tearing basics. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“This Is Happening” takes on a substantial amount of confused emotions while it maintains life as a stoner comedy. It’s an odd bouillabaisse of feelings and tonal shifts, overseen by writer/director Ryan Jaffe, who makes his helming debut with the effort. “This Is Happening” takes some bizarre detours, and perhaps the overall psychological thickness proves a bit too difficult for the script to manage, but the feature finds clarity more often than not. It’s bright work from Jaffe, who oversees a lively cast and an authentic rendering of a combative sibling relationship, while dumping in dollops of pathos and slapstick to keep the road trip offered here as unexpected as possible. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

 Joining the big screen celebration of Halloween is “Gravy,” a bizarre picture that doesn’t exactly top off the tank with nightmare fuel. A horror-comedy that plays unsettlingly broad, the film marks the feature-length directorial debut for actor James Roday, who also co-scripts this attempt to outdo recent cannibal movies, submitting a grotesque effort that’s slathered in gore and mindful of one-liners, while keeping a low-budget aesthetic that contains the brutality to a single location. Much too self-consciously zany to be funny, “Gravy” is best approached as a celebration of make-up achievements, with gushy guts and mutilated bodies emerging as the highlights of this wheezy Looney Tunes-style take on savagery and foodie culture. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Just in time for Halloween comes an anthology film about Christmas? “A Christmas Horror Story” combines the two best holidays to dig up nightmarish qualities about the season of joy, working with four different narratives to explore the wrath of demons, the terror of changelings, the mystery of ghosts, and a viral plague. Directors Grant Harvey, Steven Hoban, and Brett Sullivan put in an impressive low-budget effort with “A Christmas Horror Story,” and while not all the tales come alive, more hit than miss, bringing gore and menace in October, but reveling in the iconography of December. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Jamie Babbit made her debut with 1999’s “But I’m a Cheerleader,” a sharp, funny exploration of sexual oppression that launched a promising career. Subsequent efforts failed to match the invention of her first film, with Babbit turning to television to hone her chops. She returns to screens with “Addicted to Fresno,” though the true intent of this painful misfire isn’t exactly clear, with much of the movie playing like Babbit’s impression of a Farrelly Brothers production. Crude and poorly written by Karey Dornetto, “Addicted to Fresno” flails wildly to set a subversive tone, only to end up about as dangerous as a Fox sitcom. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Endeavoring to bring a world of monsters to the CGI-animated realm, 2012’s “Hotel Transylvania” conjured a horror-comedy atmosphere of slapstick, scares, and overall tomfoolery. And there was plenty of bathroom humor to keep younger audiences engaged. Instead of trusting the inherent madness of the plot, director Genndy Tartakovsky elected to keep things crude, souring an otherwise promising Halloween-season adventure with classic ghouls. “Hotel Transylvania 2” is the inevitable sequel, and while it suffers from major structural problems, the effort has dialed down the poo-poo, pee-pee gags, trying to engage audiences with a tale of grandfatherly love, trading fart jokes for cute kids and more manic monster shenanigans. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Nancy Meyers makes comfort food cinema. It’s a particular skill few share in the industry, but she’s forged a career blending domestic fantasy with tender emotions, guiding efforts such as “It’s Complicated,” “The Holiday,” and “Something’s Gotta Give.” She does one thing and she does it relatively well, always at her best when character comes before contrivance. “The Intern” enjoys a rough tonality of high comedy and grim drama, but Meyers steadies the picture with an enjoyable script that’s most interesting when playful, while lead performances from Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway are lively and open for inspection. “The Intern” gets a little strange at times, but it’s a sturdy creation that carries a little more personality than many might be expecting. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Mississippi Grind” is a story about gambling, but it’s careful not to glamorize the potentially destructive pastime. Instead of taking in the thrill of horse racing and casino action, the feature carries an ominous tone of self-destruction, essentially updating James Toback’s 1974 screenplay for “The Gambler.” Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck keep their effort low to the ground, picking up on behaviors and “tells” as they explore the corrosive nature of addiction, taking a long journey with two wayward characters as they experience the thrilling highs and desperate lows of gambling. Whatever “Mississippi Grind” lacks in efficiency, it makes up for it in pure observation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The director of “Independence Day,” “2012,” and “White House Down” is trying to grow up. Roland Emmerich made an attempt for art-house legitimacy with 2011’s “Anonymous,” hoping some intrigue surrounding Shakespeare’s creative origins might stimulate a career detour into more respectable projects featuring real characters, not just cartoon creations battling heavy CGI. It failed to attract much attention, inspiring Emmerich to capture the zeitgeist with “Stonewall,” a tale of gay rights wrapped up in an historical event that triggered a revolution of pride. Well-intentioned but frighteningly tone deaf, “Stonewall” (already the subject of numerous documentaries and books) doesn’t inspire hope and awareness, it simply pushes dreary formula and torturous melodrama, with Emmerich failing to create a single moment of humanity as cliché and stereotype run rampant. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After restoring his professional reputation with 2008’s “The Wrestler,” star Mickey Rourke encountered difficulty maintaining the momentum, following up his award-winning work with forgettable B-movies such as “The Courier,” “Java Heat,” and “Black November.” “Ashby” brings Rourke back to the realm of thespian possibility, once again playing a vulnerable old soul in a leathered profession, required to display intricate feelings as the screenplay mixes in some tough guy antics as well. He’s low-key but effective in the picture, which periodically struggles to make sense of itself, showing more skill with comedy than penetrating drama as it attempts to manage a quirky plot with a degree of emotional authenticity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

To flavor his unpredictable filmography, Nicolas Cage heads toward horror with “Pay the Ghost.” While initial moments suggest a kidnapping drama featuring a determined dad, the movie eventually reveals a supernatural side, trying for frights instead of thrills. A mix of “The Wicker Man” (not the Cage version) and “Mama,” “Pay the Ghost” only connects through its star, who gives a passably haunted performance to help boost the lackluster screenplay. The picture is absurd and low-budget, but Cage holds up his end of the bargain, making sure turns of plot find their intended emotion, while helping to sell the urgency of the unfolding ghost story. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com