A Nightmare on Elm Street (Warner Bros., 2010) A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the most enduring (and profitable, natch) horror franchises in history — and Michael Bay’s…
Blu-ray review
140 Articles
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Splice (Warner Bros., 2010) Remember that old Chiffon margarine ad campaign about what happens when you try to fool Mother Nature? It gets a creepy, CGI-enhanced spin in this thriller…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
The Hangover: Extreme Edition (Warner Bros., 2010) No, you didn’t fall asleep for ten years — Warner Bros. really is double-dipping with The Hangover, a movie that only came out…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
It seems awfully quaint today, but it really wasn’t that long ago that King Kong was close to the pinnacle of gee-whiz special effects entertainment. I was born in the…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
The Blu-ray market was made for reissues, but not all reissues are created equal. With that in mind, here are four recent Blu-ray sets that bring some hit films of…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Kevin Smith is a writer first, director second. Even his most passionate fan would have a hard time arguing the merits of Smith’s directing technique, which mostly consists of filming…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Its Blu-ray debut is timed to take advantage of the hubbub surrounding director Christopher Nolan’s latest film, but 2002’s Insomnia would make for a fine summer reissue even if Warner…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Like wrinkles on a middle-aged man, time has a way of making even the most mundane movie appear distinguished. Maybe you were a kid when you first saw that middlebrow…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Hollywood has had a bigger-than-average hard-on for the post-apocalypse lately, what with John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (finally) arriving in theaters just a couple of months before…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Proving Blu-ray isn’t just for videophiles, Caddyshack makes the hi-def leap this week — a low-budget comedy made by an inexperienced director, and a movie that looked like shit 30…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Wax on, wax off, bitches! You’d have to try pretty hard to make a case for either of them as truly great films, but 1984’s The Karate Kid and its…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Mel Gibson has always had a fetish for cinematic struggle — from his acting career, dotted with heartbroken and often bloodied law enforcement officers, to his directorial efforts, notably fixated…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
“That is not a fish. PLEASE tell me that is not a fish.” Not counting the gasp she let out when she saw the box, those were the first words…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
If you’ve ever wanted to see a bunch of nerds get worked into a righteous fury over the release of a six-disc collection that brings one of film’s greatest trilogies…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
I know this is absolute heresy for a guy in my line of work, but I’ve never been a big fan of Wes Anderson’s filmmaking. There’s a difference between developing…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Hollywood is forever trying to update stuff, and the results are almost always painful, either because the source material isn’t worth revisiting (hello, Karate Kid remake and CG-coated Alvin and…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story is a wonderful book, and one of a few novels that I read three or four times as a kid. It was something of a…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
On the surface, Meredith Willson’s The Music Man looks so soft and pale that it might as well have been created out of fresh Wonder Bread. The musical tale of…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
The screen is still dark when James Brown’s disembodied voice comes barreling out of the speakers, letting you know he’s ready to get up and do his thing. It’s startling…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Released during the late ’90s wave of teen comedies, 10 Things I Hate About You wasn’t really seen as anything special at the time (Greg Muskewitz of eFilmCritic asked, “How…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Spend any amount of time on film-buff sites, and you’re liable to hear the words “Sam Rockwell” and “underrated” come up fairly often. Though our own Bob Cashill has pegged…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
If you play fantasy sports, you know the sports world is filled with talented players who, for whatever reason, never live up to their immense potential — they have so…
Bob Cashill
1 Min Read
The received wisdom was that the even-numbered entries in the pre-reboot Star Trek series were better than the odd-numbered ones. That held up, too, until the 10th and final one…
Bob Cashill
1 Min Read
I reviewed The Hangover when it was a big hit in June, then watched as it snowballed into a phenomenon. It’s the fourth top-grossing movie of 2009 to date and…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Half a good movie is better than no good movie at all, and Meryl Streep is great in just about anything — even Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, which presents…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Poor McG. He thought he was hired to direct a badass, rock ’em-sock ’em movie about evil death robots from the future (not Michael BublÁ©), and that’s what he delivered…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
I went into Four Christmases with some of the lowest expectations I’ve had for a movie all year. It exceeded them, but not by a mile, and I’m not sure…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
You’ve never seen cheap sentiment look prettier than it does in My Sister’s Keeper, the soft-focused weepie adapted from the bestselling novel from Jodi Picoult. Picoult never met a three-hankie…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Anyone who’s ever seen a Kevin Smith movie knows he isn’t a filmmaker whose work screams out for hi-def. From the beginning, with 1994’s Clerks, Smith’s been at his best…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
You wouldn’t think a movie featuring a talking penis could be boring, but you’d be wrong. I have proof, and that proof is Sacha Baron Cohen’s BrÁ¼no. Cohen proved himself…