This week at the video store we look at the winning animated adventure ParaNorman, the action blockbuster The Expendables 2, the dance-stravaganza Step Up Revolution, the crap-stravaganza The Apparition, and a pair of films that missed theatrical releases despite being directed by Joe Dante and Amy Heckerling.
While it was inevitable that someone would make a big screen biopic about one of the world's most prominent directors, Hichcock is only a mildly entertaining and watchable film with a complete and utter disregard for the history of the man at the centre of it so the filmmakers can create drama that wasn't there originally.
Just in time for your Black Friday holiday shopping sprees, Phil Brown takes a look at some of the biggest classics for film buffs and genre buffs that are currently on Blu-ray retailer shelves: Lawrence of Arabia, E.T., They Live, Dark Star, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Sunset Boulevard, and Rosemary's Baby,
Former documentary filmmaker Anais Barbeau-Lavalette's fictional feature Inch'Allah might refuse to take a side in the Israeli-Palestine conflict, but its a lot stronger for doing so. It's even handed, fair, tragic, and ultimately extremely effective.
An admirable. low-budget labour of love, the Canadian produced adaptation of Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy trots out every single last cliche from the late 90s drug parable playbook for a thoroughly unsurprising, but decently acted experience.
In Canadian documentarian Yung Chang's latest excellent film The Fruit Hunters, the audience is asked to give fruit - especially the kind you can find in your own backyard - a second chance.
Life Of Pi is an undeniably impressive film-going experience that delivers both the visceral thrills and subtler joys to be found in any great movie. To pretend it’s perfect would be unfair though. As grounded as diretctor Ang Lee and his cast try make the story, there’s no denying that this is a stylized allegorical fantasy with all of the potential audience alienation that implies.
While he continues to court the mainstream following the success of The Fighter, director David O. Russell and Bradley Cooper in the best performance of his career help make Silver Linings Playbook one of the best Hollywood portrayals of mental illness to date, even if the film's final third is a really standard sort of romantic comedy.
By the already low standards that a Red Dawn remake would have, it's not very good, but not as flat out awful as one would secretly suspect. It's stupid, has a small handful of good action scenes, is unevenly acted, and is still pretty xenophobic despite it being more ridiculous this time out.
We take a look back on the career of Quentin Tarantino as Reservoir Dogs celebrates it's 20th anniversary with a blu-ray box set including almost all of the feature films he's been a part of.
While it looks great, Rise of the Guardians teams up some of your favourite childhood hits in a film that's annoying, chaotic, and terribly written. It's as if Michael Bay decided to up and make a film for the under 10 crowd.
Writer/director Leos Carax’s deeply, satisfyingly bizarre Holy Motors is a film that almost seems to go out of its way to defy classification. Put a gun to my head and I guess I’d describe it as an art house romp, but even that doesn’t quite seem right.
Assassin’s Creed III is an excellent game. It might even be a great game, depending on how you define that amorphous notion of ‘greatness.’ Explaining why, however, is a trickier proposition that may depend entirely on your own idiosyncratic interpretation of Americana.
For all the bluster and gossip that surrounds the release of the final instalment of The Twilight Saga, only two things can be said about it for sure: it’s all over and it ends on a pretty decent high note by series standards.
Despite peaking after a terrifying opening sequence, the Irish horror thriller Citadel is a solid genre effort that will thrill audiences effectively.
