Category: DVD & Blu-Ray
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Universal’s classic family film, directed by Steven Spielberg, has just been given a dazzling new high definition blu-ray release to coincide with Universal Pictures’ 100th Anniversary Celebrations. This gorgeous steelbook edition will be hungrily hunted down by all BD obsessives and E.T. lovers everywhere. The story, about a harmless alien who befriends a young boy,…
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Adapted from Colin Clark’s memoir The Prince, the Showgirl and Me, the film tells the true story of Colin’s brief relationship with Marilyn Monroe while she was in England shooting at Pinewood. The production of the film, The Prince and the Showgirl, was not smooth, and saw clashes between director Lawrence Olivier and Ms Monroe.…
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After seven books, eight films, a theme park and loads of plastic toys, the Harry Potter franchise has made billions for Warner Brothers and a certain Ms Joanne Rowling. But to look at the pound signs and the immense amount of zeros on its creator’s bank balance is to miss the point. Harry Potter is…
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Sylvester Stallone and his band of ageing, jacked-up super-soldiers incoherently grunt, punch and shoot their way through Eastern Europe here in the sequel to 2010’s The Expendables. Although an obvious improvement, this offering still fails to be anything other than cannon fodder on an entertainment level. The team are out for blood, and lots of…
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Although it has a touch of Groundhog Day about it, with maybe a whisper of Tony Scott’s thriller Déjà Vu, Duncan Jones’s latest mind-bending sci-fi actioner still comes across as a highly original and inventive blockbuster. Plus, it doesn’t assume its audience is stupid. US Air Force pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is made to relive…
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Brad Bird, the guy who made Ratatouille and The Incredibles, directed this little beauty for his feature debut. The Iron Giant is the hilarious and touching tale of a small boy and his giant robot. It’s a bit like My Dog Skip, only with a robot. To cut a long story short, problems ensue, and…
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The Colditz Story was never a particularly great film, but this new release makes it worth a watch thanks to a strong new high definition transfer courtesy of distributors StudioCanal. Old black and white films have the potential to look extraordinary in HD, and this new blu-ray edition doesn’t disappoint on this level. The movie,…
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Without its star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass, the decision to continue the Bourne series was met with much scepticism. This would seem to be entirely justified when viewing the finished project as The Bourne Legacy fails to live up to the lofty standards set by the original trilogy. Perhaps at least some of…
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It’s a Wonderful Life is a wonderful film that is not only Frank Capra’s best film, but also Jimmy Stewart’s, which is pretty amazing seeing as he was in some of the greatest films ever made. It’s a Wonderful Life is one of those rare films so perfectly constructed, so perfectly weighted to make you…
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The Muppets, written by and Starring Jason Segel, is a lovingly nostalgic continuation of the legendary puppet (sorry, muppet) based franchise. The Muppets haven’t been on our screens since…. well, some time not long after Treasure Island, which was in the 90s, so it was high time they came roaring back with a triumphant comeback.…
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Mother is a fantastically acted and riveting thriller that explores the extent to which a mother will fight to protect her son. Kim Hye-ja is phenomenal as the unnamed mother whose life is turned upside down when her mentally challenged son Do-joon, played by Won Bin, is arrested on suspicion of murder. She sets out…
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City of God, or Cidade de Deus, is the best film that Martin Scorsese never made. It’s a multi-stranded, hyper-kinetic, visually vibrant crime extravanganza that charts the undulating fortunes of the various inhabitants of the City of God, a Brazilian favela on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Operating on a higher level than even…
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Women Without Men is the debut feature of Shirin Neshat, a brave and talented Iranian artist who is daring to talk about a topic many stay away from: women in a conservative Islamic society. Her film is a beautiful, poetic adaptation of a 1990 novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, a work which is banned in Iran. The film…
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Lovely Molly is an outstanding new horror film from Eduardo Sánchez, the co-director of The Blair Witch Project. He is widely regarded as the man who invented, or at least helped champion, the found-footage horror movie, and his latest chiller is an exceptional marriage of third-person and first-person narrative filmmaking. The performances from the leading…