Australian director Patrick Hughes has recently made a career out of movies where action is wildly exaggerated and the cast often screams their way through their performances. He’s the helmer behind “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” and “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” two exceedingly ear-splitting endeavors, and he’s trying to recreate the same atmosphere with “The Man from Toronto,” which stars Kevin Hart, and he’s no stranger to the ways of sustained on-screen panic attacks. “The Man from Toronto” hopes to use Hart for comedic purposes while Hughes gets to manage many set pieces involving chases and violent stand-offs. Bullets fly, cars explode, and near-misses are plentiful, but laughs are non-existent in the picture, which doesn’t ask Hart to do anything different than what he normally brings to the screen, while co-star Woody Harrelson is tasked with playing a dark figure of doom, allowing him few opportunities to be funny in a feature that needs a significant boost in the banter department. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After a successful run on MTV (with 222 episodes), “Beavis and Butt-Head” was ready for the big screen, and creator Mike Judge accepted the challenge, producing “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America” in 1996. While not a blockbuster, the animated film did decent business, making enough money to guarantee a sequel. And then a follow-up never happened, with Judge moving on to other projects, while Beavis and Butt-Head were placed on the list of pop culture treasures from the 1990s. 26 years later, Judge is finally ready to deal with a long-form offering of Beavis and Butt-Head shenanigans again, bringing the destructive dimwits into their own future with “Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe.” The hand-drawn animation is gone, and this endeavor isn’t meant for multiplexes, but Judge (joined by directors John Rice and Albert Calleros) still has a firm grasp on his breakthrough creation, finding ways to freshen old jokes and give the eponymous characters more confusion to deal with in their distinctly primitive ways. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s always a moment before watching a Baz Luhrmann film where one forgets one is about to watch a Baz Luhrmann film. And then it begins, and some sort of insanity is immediately established, promising a cinematic ride for viewers that’s engineered to leave them breathless. This feeling of being overwhelmed struggled to survive in the helmer’s last endeavor, 2013’s “The Great Gatsby,” but Lurhmann is back to his old mischievous ways with operatic excess in “Elvis,” which isn’t a bio-pic of the legendary singer, but more of a comic book-style extravaganza about the icon and his extended struggle with his manager, Col. Tom Parker. “Elvis” is a lot, which is just the way Lurhmann likes it, blasting the screen with extraordinary visuals, acting, and pure energy, trying to replicate Elvis’s whirlwind life and his confusion when dealing with the business elements of his extraordinary career. It’s a 159-minute-long picture, and Lurhmann uses his run time to generate a hurricane of emotion and information, attempting to treat the story of Elvis Presley as a pop tragedy with a side of sensorial assault. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s difficult to make a movie about the end of the world when there’s very little budget to power the production. “Revealer” is the latest attempt to highlight an apocalyptic event without actually showing much of anything, with director Luke Boyce basically sticking to two sets while the screenplay (by Michael Moreci and Tim Seely) suggests a major event is happening around the globe, forcing viewers to use their imagination as a much smaller dramatic event unfolds indoors. The chance to go big with the endeavor isn’t possible, but Boyce looks to do something with a very little he has to work with, investing in cinematographic ideas and terrific casting to bring this strange take on the chaos of the Rapture to life. “Revealer” doesn’t add up to much, but it retains effective moments of conflict and mystery to get the feature through some slower patches of limp exposition. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Careers can be a strange thing. Director Scott Derrickson was last seen on screen with 2016’s “Doctor Strange,” offered a chance to do something different with the MCU, tasked with introducing one of their most challenging characters. And he did an excellent job doing so, bringing the Master of the Mystic Arts to life with a wonderfully cinematic and mercifully approachable origin tale that also represented his biggest box office success to date. Derrickson didn’t capitalize on the moment and now, six years later, there’s “The Black Phone,” which doesn’t find the helmer building on his “Doctor Strange” triumph, but returning to horror itches last scratched in 2012’s “Sinister” and 2014’s “Deliver Us from Evil.” It’s a small-scale creeper, an adaptation of a Joe Hill short story, which puts pressure on the production to develop enough material to fill a feature-length run time. “The Black Phone” has a few sharper points of potential, but Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill don’t have enough here to bring this supernatural story to a full boil. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Gatlopp” is very clearly modeled after “Jumanji,” with both pictures focusing on the hellraising unleashed when a mysterious board game is discovered, and eager players are ready to spend some time in heavy competition. “Jumanji” offered animal stampedes, life or death situations of survival, and constant pressure from the unknown force driving the dark magic. “Gatlopp” has heavy drinking, an enormous amount of improvisation, and pace-killing dramatics. Screenwriter/co-star Jim Mahoney (“Klaus,” “The Main Event”) tries to make something meaningful about friendship with the material, laboring to blend gameplay horrors with a serious examination of relationships. The blend doesn’t gel, leaving the feature frustratingly uneven and wildly overacted. It’s a movie about a malevolent board game, but the fun factor is severely limited by material that refuses to snowball into a madcap, constantly surprisingly good time. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

As everyone knows, Buzz Lightyear is a character from the “Toy Story” franchise, with his stern, slightly clueless militaristic style acting as a perfect foil for his cowboy pal, Woody. “Lightyear” isn’t a solo picture for the Space Ranger, and it’s not a prequel to “Toy Story.” Opening information positions this endeavor as the film Andy saw in 1995 that made him go crazy for the toy, giving him a movie adventure to trigger his imagination and tax his mother’s bank account. It’s an incredibly odd way to set-up a semi-origin story for the character, but this weirdness is just the taste of the bizarre happenings in the effort, which turns to time travel as a way to complicate Buzz’s experience with exploration and rescue. “Lightyear” remains in step with Pixar Animation storytelling formula, but they make some unexpectedly knotted choices with the screenplay, potentially keeping it just out of reach for younger audiences. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Two titans of the Spanish film industry, Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas haven’t spent much time together in front of a camera. In fact, in 2019’s “Pain and Glory,” writer/director Pedro Almodovar used time to keep them apart, creating a divide as generations worked out the troubles in their lives. For “Official Competition,” Banderas and Cruz are face-to-face, joined by co-star Oscar Martinez in this comedy about the insanity of movie actors and directors and their ludicrous requirements when it comes to preparing a feature for production. It’s a send-up of egos and irritation, but writer/directors Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat don’t go broad with the material, trying to be sneaky with their sense of humor, going sly when it comes to making fun of the process. “Official Competition” is hilarious and refreshingly simple, giving the cast room to play as they inhabit insufferable people trying to make magic for the camera, learning to loathe one another during the ramp-up to the first day of shooting. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Joseph Kosinski has exclusively made large-scale movies during his career. He’s taken on the Grid (“Tron: Legacy”), dealt with the future (“Oblivion”), celebrated firefighting heroism (“Only The Brave”), and recently restored the world’s need for speed (“Top Gun: Maverick”). He has an eye for spectacle, but his latest, “Spiderhead,” doesn’t carry the potential for explosive visuals. It’s a chiller and character study that largely takes place inside a single building, with writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese adapting a short story about the pressures of manipulation and submission inside a prison engaging in chemical modifications of human behaviors. The feature is mostly about disturbing mind games and quieter moments of connection, and Kosinski handles it exceptionally well, carefully constructing a suspenseful and fascinating examination of control, putting his faith into casting to summon a heavy level of unease. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Father of the Bride” was originally a 1949 novel by Edward Streeter, but it’s much better known as a 1950 film adaptation starring Spencer Tracy. There was a 1991 version of the original story as well, with Steve Martin hired to play a dad trapped between duties tied to his daughter nuptials and his true feelings about the whole affair, caught up in the whirlwind of spending and planning. Both features did quite well with the central concept, finding humor in different ways as they dealt with separate eras of parenthood. It worked twice, so why not again, with the new “Father of the Bride” stripping away everything but the basic concept of paternal panic, with Andy Garcia tasked to portray the eponymous character, who faces slightly different challenges of stability in this cozy, amusing third at-bat for the brand name. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Phantom of the Open” explores the true story of Maurice Flitcroft, who experienced a vocational epiphany in 1975, looking to become a professional golfer in his mid-40s, despite never having played the game before. It was an obsession that brought him to the qualifying round of the 1976 British Open, where he shot a score of 121, with many labeling him the worst golfer in the history of the sport. The material (an adaptation of a 2010 biography by Scott Murray and Simon Farnaby, who also provides the screenplay) is ripe for a mockumentary-type of approach, but director Craig Roberts (“Just Jim,” “Eternal Beauty”) doesn’t take the bait, preferring to be sincere with this study of tattered dreams, blending inherent comedy concerning Maurice’s lack of natural talent with a more heartwarming understanding of his family life, ultimately working towards sweetness, which is unexpected and not always welcome in this entertaining study of determination and delusion. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Two years ago, Cooper Raiff made his feature-length directing debut with “Shithouse.” It was an awful title slapped on a sensitive story of loneliness and human connection, identifying the young filmmaker as someone to watch. Raiff has returned with “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” which continues his career interest in bad titles for decent movies, providing a puzzling label for an intimate tale of a twentysomething man trying to figure out the world at a most emotionally complex time in his life. Raiff has a way with the softer side of characterization and interactions, endeavoring to create a study of confusion and defense mechanisms slowly lowered by the sheer power of attraction. “Cha Cha Real Smooth” isn’t anything too distinct, but it carries itself with confidence and Raiff has a troubling-yet-wonderful way of steering his writing right into cliché, only to dodge disaster at the last second, adding a few surprises along the way. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com