Blu-ray Review: Jack the Giant Slayer
Another in a growing number of films that seek to offer alternate versions of popular fairy tales, Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer reworks Jack the Giant Killer. As is often the case with these films, our hero has a surprising taste for destruction. While the Jack the Giant Killer narrative never truly soars, director […]
Blu-ray Review: Perfect Sense
Part love story, part science fiction, director David Mackenzie’s Perfect Sense is a tale of love, loss and fear. As people around the world are experiencing the loss of sensory perception, a pair of lovers appreciates each other as best they can, as the world erodes around them. Michael (Ewan McGregor) is a run-of-the-mill playboy […]
Blu-ray Review: Trainspotting
“I chose not to choose life. I chose to choose something else,” says the film’s narrator and main character, a twenty-something Edinburgh man named Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), near the beginning of Trainspotting. From the start, it’s clear that this Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) directed film is a dark and gritty struggle. In […]
Blu-ray Review: Naked
Like other films by British writer-director Mike Leigh—Life is Sweet (1990), Secrets & Lies (1996), Vera Drake (2004)—Naked is a tough, unflinching look at class conflict, sexual insecurity, and identity crisis in working class England. Naked is by no means an easy thing to watch. At the center of it all, is a young man […]
Blu-ray Review: Death at a Funeral (2007)
Frank Oz, better known as the voice of Yoda, Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy, has taken over the director’s chair regularly in his career. Understandably, his first experience as a director was with Jim Henson on The Dark Crystal. Usually helming comedies, Oz went on to direct Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1986), and What About Bob? […]