While primarily known for his screenwriting credits (including “Jurassic Park” and “Panic Room”), David Koepp has been quietly building a filmography as a director. Of course, his last effort was the maligned “Mortdecai” (silly fluff, nothing to get upset over), but his early years were devoted to genre efforts, taking great interest in the vastness of human paranoia and delusion. There was “Stir of Echoes” and “Secret Window,” and Koepp returns to his first love with “You Should Have Left.” It’s meant to be a spooky tale, adapting a novella by Daniel Kehlmann, but Koepp isn’t 100% committed to delivering scares, endeavoring to make a movie about the strangeness of relationships and the weight of guilt. “You Should Have Left” needs to be approached with lowered expectations, as it’s not much of a fright film, doing much better with troubled characters and the secrets they keep. Read the rest at Bu-ray.com

“7500” offers an unusual blend of procedural drama and hijack chiller, and it manages to take on such a challenge with almost complete authority. It’s the feature-length directorial debut for Patrick Vollrath (who also co-scripts with Senad Halilbasic), who goes close-quarters while depicting a horrific terrorism event, only remaining inside the cockpit of a plane flying from Germany to France. The camera doesn’t leave the claustrophobic space for most of the run time, staying tight on the main character as he makes brutal choices concerning life and death, left with only training and remnants of compassion to see him through a situation that changes his life forever. “7500” is as nail-biting as a top-tier thriller gets, managing to shred viewer nerves with filmmaking precision before evolving into something else to defy expectations. It’s one heck of a breakout movie from Vollrath. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Mr. Jones” presents the story of journalist Gareth Jones, who not only managed to make his way into the Soviet Union during the early years of conflict before World War II, he witnessed the ravages of the Holodomor in Ukraine, exposed to the horrors of a man-made famine utilized by Joseph Stalin to destroy the country, using its riches to as “gold” to demonstrate power to the rest of the world. For 2020, such a dire tale of political exposure isn’t an easy sell, but in director Agnieszka Holland’s hands, the feature becomes a riveting study of reporting and corruption that greatly mirrors the world’s struggles of today. “Mr. Jones” maintains a steady pace and sense of dramatic urgency throughout, giving Holland one of her most effective movies in years, and one smartly designed by screenwriter Andrea Chalupa (making a fine debut), who encourages suspense while delivering a powerful message on the value of the press. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With 2018’s “BlacKkKlansman,” director Spike Lee achieved something that’s actually been quite rare during his lengthy career: a big hit. The picture managed to wow critics, inspire the awards circuit, and lure audiences into theaters to see one of the helmer’s better features, which bristled with angry energy and indulged cop movie theatrics. Coming off the powerful “Chi-Raq,” Lee was suddenly on a roll again, ready to cash in some of his clout to make an epic for Netflix, the company eager to spend anything on anyone. “Da 5 Bloods” isn’t Lee’s most ambitious effort (1992’s “Malcolm X” wins that prize), but he’s swinging for the fences with this examination of the black experience in Vietnam, which is intertwined with more defined elements of wartime action and guilt-ridden madness. It’s a messy endeavor, overlong and yet somewhat ill-defined, but Lee’s mojo carries the project most of the way, offering a periodically vivid understanding of pure racial and political frustration. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Cult movies aren’t born, they’re made by audiences willing to put in the time and money to celebrate features that either died while trying to be mainstream, or never stood a chance when offered for universal acceptance. Cult entertainment is a topic that’s been explored repeatedly in all forms of media (it’s bread-and-butter content for podcasts), but director Danny Wolf hopes to provide expanse and access with “Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All-Time,” which is a three-part examination of cinematic offerings that’ve become a secret language for some, creating legacies few could predict but millions adore. Next up is “Volume 3: Comedy and Camp,” examining the efforts that, for the most part, died during their initial theatrical runs trying to delight audiences with strangeness and satire the general public wasn’t ready to accept at the time. With the box office bloodshed over, Wolf is now taking on the endeavors that managed to hold on due to unique perspectives and low-budget ingenuity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 1973, Peter Medak directed “Ghost in the Noonday Sun,” a pirate adventure starring Peter Sellers. In truth, he didn’t really direct the feature, he survived it, and barely that, going into the project with slight hesitation, coming out a changed man with a profound fear that his career was killed by the experience. Over four decades later, Medak’s blood still boils at the thought of the endeavor, wrestling with unresolved issues pertaining to Sellers and his atrocious behavior on-set, showing little care for anything but himself. With hopes to reconcile with the past and see if there’s a way back into the time lost while making “Ghost in the Noonday Sun,” Medak turns to documentary therapy for “The Ghost of Peter Sellers,” where he recounts his days spent on the doomed project, managing a star who hired him but ultimately didn’t want to participate, methodically destroying the movie in the process. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Screenwriter Rita Kalnejais has her heart in the right place with “Babyteeth,” constructing a lived-in ode to adolescent heartbreak and parental anxiety. It’s an Australian production that aims to explore painful relationships exploding under one roof, delving into all sorts of uncomfortable realities and stunted interactions, with the story basically out to understand the mindset of frustrated people who can’t communicate with the precision they hope for. It’s about messiness, and director Shannon Murphy tries to respect the free spirit nature of the material, securing a loose feel for characters experiencing the highs and lows of life. Murphy also spreads the roaming narrative over two hours, which tends to strangle elements of intimacy that work so well for the effort. “Babyteeth” has moments of emotional clarity that are exquisite, but there’s also a large portion of the overlong feature that resembles a filmed acting class. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s a bit of nostalgia tied to the release of “Artemis Fowl,” which returns viewers back to a time when “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” managed to become a bigger hit than anyone was expecting, triggering a gold rush from studios trying to get their hands on similar properties. It’s hard to remember the specifics of “Eragon,” “The Seeker,” and “The Mortal Instruments,” but they all wanted in on the YA fantasy lottery. “Artemis Fowl” is cut from the same cloth, presenting a complicated universe of humans, fairies, trolls, and dwarves, all on the hunt for a special weapon of power while a shadowy figure plans multiverse domination. The mixture seemed to work for author Eoin Colfer, who turned his 2001 book into a popular literary series, but the film adaptation from director Kenneth Branagh is baffling for much of its run time, burdened with way too much story to tell and only 88 minutes to work with. It’s “Exposition: The Movie,” and while visual might is there, this picture is a chore to sit through. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s no secret that writer/director Judd Apatow has a filmmaking formula. He takes biographical scraps from the lives of his stars and uses comedy to press a story into place, going for emotional authenticity while trying to score laughs with improvisational humor. He did it with Adam Sandler in “Funny People,” himself in “This Is 40,” and, most recently, with Amy Schumer in the 2015 hit, “Trainwreck.” He’s been away from the screen for five years, but Apatow returns with “The King of Staten Island,” which pairs his helming habits with “Saturday Night Live” player, Pete Davidson. The combo is more effective than it initially appears, finding Apatow not only able to make Davidson likeable, but understood in many ways, creating a seriocomic journey into the man’s personal history and professional charms, which were previously a source of heated debate. “The King of Staten Island” isn’t fresh, but it’s lived-in and amusing, with Apatow coloring inside the lines with a cozy vision for childhood trauma and maturation blues. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

How director Olivier Megaton still finds work as a filmmaker is an industry mystery that might never be solved. He’s a franchise killer, ruining “The Transporter” and “Taken” brand names with awful sequels, and he’s done dreadfully on his own, guiding “Columbiana.” Now fully departed from the ruins of Luc Besson’s company, EuropaCorp, Megaton is back with “The Last Days of American Crime,” and, no shock here, it’s an abysmal picture. Actually, it’s the worst movie he’s ever made, put in charge of visualizing a graphic novel adaptation that perhaps didn’t need cinematic representation, dealing with blank characters and a non-starter of a plot. It’s all coated in grungy style and ultraviolence, while casting is atrocious, unleashing bad actors on worse material. I’m sure the production is aiming to shine a light on the failings of American society (the effort was shot in South Africa), but the first mistake was hiring the graceless Megaton, who has no idea how to put together a scene, much less a punishing 150-minute-long viewing experience that can’t successfully put one foot in front of the other. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Darkness Falls” runs a hair over 80 minutes. It’s a lean run time for a serial killer drama, and what’s so odd about the movie is how it portions out the horrors it wants to share. Director Julien Seri spends the first ten minutes of the endeavor highlighting a slow, agonizing murder involving the forced digestion of sleeping pills and a staged suicide, never introducing the characters beyond their crude depiction as predator and prey. It’s just ugliness without context, which does nothing for tension or storytelling. However, what initially seems like a single offering of editorial mismanagement becomes a feature-long problem for the helmer, who merely supplies select scenes of rage and reflection, not a nail-biting viewing experience involving a haunted cop and two deranged individuals causing problems for the women of Los Angeles. It’s an 80-minute-long time commitment, and nothing really happens in “Darkness Falls.” Read the rest at Blu-ray.com