2015’s “Goosebumps” didn’t exactly light up the box office, but it did the right kind of business for the spooky season, managing to entice families into the multiplex during October, which is a month normally reserved for more adult escapism. The film brought the world of author R.L. Stine to the screen, cheekily inserting the writer into his own adventure, delivering a self-referential romp with horror elements that took its time to get going, but once it did, highlights arrived, primarily due to the acting effort from Jack Black, who played Stine. Black is absent (at least in physical form) for much of “Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween,” which remains in the YA chiller universe, but moves on to new characters and a challenge of monster-busting that isn’t anything special, but it’s not difficult to digest either. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s a credit to director Damien Chazelle’s creative drive that he decided to tackle “First Man” as his follow-up to 2016’s “La La Land,” which not only did excellent business, it brought him Oscar gold, reaching career heights with only his third movie. Instead of trying to milk the success with a knock-off, Chazelle heads the moon and back with this Neil Armstrong bio-pic, forcing the helmer to turn away from syrupy sentimentality and cinematic wonders and focus on the steely procedure that sent Neil into space. It’s an epic story told with as much breath-on-glass intimacy as possible, with Chazelle and star Ryan Gosling striving to respect the accomplishment, but also detail the ferocious inner drive of the astronaut. “First Man” is intense, with visceral highs and emotional lows, and it pushes the helmer out of his comfort zone, resulting the best feature he’s made to date. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

As it has been often reported over the last year, “The Old Man & the Gun” has been marked as the final acting gig for star Robert Redford, who’s trying to find an elegant way out of his incredible career, at least for now. There’s really not a better role to retire on than this, with Redford required to use most of his charm to bring the picture to life, doing so with remarkable effortlessness. It helps that Redford has a fan in writer/director David Lowery, who does his best to make sure the actor is backed up with a quality feature, and one that shows off a lighter side to the helmer, who was last seen plumbing the depths of ennui with 2017’s “A Ghost Story.” “The Old Man & the Gun” stays with a slower rhythm of mischief, but it handles well, with Lowery paying homage to the cinema of his youth with the star of many of those movies. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Tamara Jenkins is a filmmaker, but she doesn’t work with any sort of regularity. I’m sure there’s a story there that either details industry ugliness or personal detachment, but when she finally does manage to put a project together, it’s usually quality work. In the last two decades, she’s made three movies, including 1998’s “The Slums of Beverly Hills” and 2007’s “Savages,” and now she returns with “Private Life,” providing another reminder that she’s a thoughtful helmer who should really be out there more often. Embarking on another story of startling intimacy, Jenkins turns her attention to the trials of conception, examining the process of fertilization as its endured by an older couple struggling to have a baby of their own. It feels autobiographical but it plays solidly dramatic, with Jenkins keeping her sense of humor and honesty when taking on a medical journey that has the capacity to decimate the human spirit.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

12 years ago, director Paul Greengrass made a potentially disastrous creative decision by trying to dramatize the events of United Airlines Flight 93, only five years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Dealing with wounds that will never heal, Greengrass put his faith in the power of cinema, using evidence and interviews to deliver a searing understanding of fear and courage, remaining very careful with the experience of lives lost. “United 93” was one of the best films of 2006, and its creative concentration supports the very existence of “22 July,” which recreates the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks that took 77 lives. It’s not that this story needed to be brought to the screen, but Greengrass is the right helmer for the job, showing caution with the thin-ice viewing event, hoping to shed light on issues in Europe by transforming headline news into an achingly personal story of grief and survival.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Megan Griffiths has made a handful of movies during her career, with a few of them failing to inspire much confidence in her helming abilities. Stumbling through “Eden” and “Lucky Them,” Griffiths tried to make intimate films about personal issues, but phoniness was difficult to shake, coupled with a few troubling casting choices. The planets align for Griffith in “Sadie,” which has the benefit of a disturbing premise sold without much distracting exploitation, keeping to a low rumble of dysfunction and manipulation, permitting some behavioral authenticity to come through as intended. There’s a “Bad Seed” element to the tale that’s enticing, but Griffiths doesn’t go wild with thriller interests, electing to preserve a natural development of disillusionment to entice emotional involvement before strangeness starts to creep in.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

From marketing efforts to screenplay nods, there’s a lot in “All Square” that’s meant to evoke the vibe of the 1976 classic, “The Bad News Bears.” Screenwriter Timothy Brady isn’t shy about his fandom, working to update the concept for a modern age, merging the innocence of Little League and the corruption of the adults in charge of raising the players. Despite some similarities, Brady generally pushes to do his own thing with the material, going darker with guardian motivations, while the kids are mostly pawns in a dangerous game of sports betting. “All Square” doesn’t succeed on the humor front, it’s a bit too oppressive to trigger laughs, but Brady offers a character study that’s textured, giving viewers a feel for life lived beneath a hardened exterior.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The big draw of “Stella’s Last Weekend” is the reunion of siblings Nat and Alex Wolff, who’ve come together to act for their mother, Polly Draper, who wrote the picture for her children. Eleven years ago, they were a family on the uncomfortably titled Nickelodeon program, “The Naked Brothers Band,” and now the Wolff boys have gone their separate ways, with Nat making his way through independent productions, while Alex scored a hit with last summer’s “Hereditary.” Draper doesn’t have much for her stars to do in “Stella’s Last Weekend,” which provides only a loose narrative to keep itself on course, while most of the feature is filled with brotherly riffing and wishy-washy behavior. It’s not a sharpened drama, though it may appeal to those simply here to enjoy the view, watching Nat and Alex manage a meandering story as Draper tries to conjure a reflective mood, putting her faith in the moment, not an entire story.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Better Start Running” is trying to be a road movie, and one that’s populated with damaged people hoping to escape their lives for various reasons. It carries the illusion of a mild ride of shenanigans, with characters on a mission to cross the country, stopping at roadside attractions and getting to know one another. The screenplay by Chad Faust and Annie Burgstede gives off the impression that it was really supposed to be about something, with bits and pieces of real-world trauma detected in the fog of formula that blocks out the sun in this surprisingly joyless dramedy. Director Brett Simon visibly struggles throughout “Better Start Running,” always hesitant to give the feature a defined arc of emotional enlightenment, preferring to make a meandering, almost incomplete picture instead.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Just over a decade ago, Sony attempted to do something with the character of Venom, adding the wily symbiote to an already overstuffed “Spider-Man 3,” assigning Topher Grace the challenge of bringing a vicious alien organism to life. It didn’t work, but there’s a distinct never say die attitude in the world of comic book movies, and Venom is much too bizarre a creation to pass up for good. The hulking black beast with Cadbury Creme Egg eyes and a Gene Simmons tongue has returned in “Venom,” finding a much more committed actor in Tom Hardy to portray the duality of man and symbiote. The picture is not without its problems, offering one of the weaker third acts in recent memory, but director Reuben Fleischer captures a particular spirit with “Venom,” which is violent and silly, juvenile and demented, summoning a compelling mess of personalities and property destruction. It doesn’t have the epic stance of its superhero competition, but the feature does just fine existing in its own world of impish behavior and premiere Hardy freak-outs. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

The guys in the Scandinavian comedy “Heavy Trip” aren’t just a heavy metal band, they play “symphonic, post-apocalyptic, reindeer-grinding, Christ-abusing, extreme war pagan, Fennoscandian metal.” It’s the level of specificity that that makes the feature a complete blast, with screenwriters Jukka Vidgren, Jari Olavi Rantala, Aleksi Puranen, and Juuso Laatio (who co-directs with Vidgren) making it a point to pick up on idiosyncrasy whenever they can, braiding oddity and cartoony antics effortlessly. “Heavy Trip” is hilarious and a valentine to the primal release of black metal, but the filmmaking presented here takes special care of character and situation, keeping to classic comedy rhythms while going very particular with musical interests and cultural immersion, ending up with a wonderfully unique endeavor.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

When one considers the kings of cinema from the 1970s, there’s plenty of information out there to explore their creative viewpoints, personality disorders, and career ups and downs. We’re talking Scorsese, Friedkin, Coppola, and Altman, and even more mainstream masters like Lucas and Spielberg. But Hal Ashby? The man’s an enigma, even with books about his life on store shelves. He’s the one with perhaps the greatest run of iconic features, and there’s really no sense of the man who pushed those pictures through production. Director Amy Scott is hoping to change that perception with “Hal,” her cinematic journey through the life and times of Ashby. Scott comes armed with interview audio and correspondences, ready to deliver a portrait of the helmer that’s never really been seen, especially in recent years. With “Hal,” Scott captures the essence of the artist, creating an active, enlightening documentary in the process.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Drew Goddard made a big splash with 2012’s “The Cabin in the Woods,” his helming debut. It was a production plagued with problems and missed released dates, yet, when it finally hit screens, it offered a knockout mixture of frights and funny, with Goddard one of the few able to balance the tricky tonality of a horror comedy, especially one that’s glazed up with self-referential humor. Weirdly, it took Goddard six years to get another project up and running, with “Bad Times at the El Royale” his long-awaited follow-up to the genre hit, which takes his career in a slightly different direction, trading mischief for pulp, assembling a crime thriller that returns him to the concept of hellacious doings within a single setting. Unfortunately, Goddard appears less interested in economical, ferocious filmmaking this time around, keeping “Bad Times at the El Royale” long-winded and intermittently exciting, often favoring production polish over storytelling urgency.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With his last efforts, “Blue Ruin” and “Green Room,” director Jeremy Saulnier has managed to become one of the more compelling helmers working today. He’s interested in violence, the ugly, gruesome kind so many movies avoid depicting, and he’s committed to character, always pushing for deeper psychological inspections with his frequent collaborator, screenwriter Macon Blair. He’s made masterful, low-budget pictures, and now he’s moving into more permissive areas of production, with his latest, “Hold the Dark,” a more epic undertaking that submits a manhunt scenario, but show more interest in primal behaviors and dark awakenings. Previous creative successes highlighted Saulnier’s skill with monetary and dramatic boundaries. “Hold the Dark” doesn’t offer the same discipline, and the farther it reaches into the unknown, the less essential the film becomes.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Nearly a decade ago, Robert D. Siegel was in an incredible creative position. He wrote the screenplay for Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” crafting an outstanding character study of a broken man from a pain-filled world trying to make things right for himself and what remains of his family. Siegel also directed “Big Fan,” his look at the ways of mental illness filtered through the world of sports star worship. Both pictures delivered original visions in well-worn genres, cementing Siegel’s position as a creative force to pay attention to. Siegel finally returned to screens with the screenplay for 2016’s “The Founder,” and now directs again with “Cruise,” his ode to the masculine pleasures of the cruising scene in Queens, circa 1987. It’s a feature that tries to get by on period atmosphere and thespian heat, but, coming after “Big Fan,” it’s a disappointment, finding the helmer getting caught in cliché he managed to avoid before.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com