One great thing about the release of older movies on Blu-ray is rediscovering movies you enjoyed when they came out, but now rarely get a chance to see them unedited and without commercial interruptions.  One, or rather, two such movies now available on Blu-ray are Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights, brought to you together in this two-movie collection.  It’s been at least ten years since either of these films were released, so it was a genuine pleasure to review them and relive the zany buddy comedies starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson.  Hit the jump for my review.

David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, may be respected for giving the world one of the greatest television shows of all time, but when he jumped into feature films with Not Fade Away, he seems to have been allowed to do whatever he wanted, but the finished product was abandoned by its studio (Paramount), who must not have thought it was Oscar material.  That’s too bad as Not Fade Away is a film that feels alive with the possibilities of cinema, but also is aware of the past.  The story of a band that never made it, Chase’s semi-autobiographical tale paints a great portrait of teenagers going through the 1960’s and are swept up in the cultural changes reflected in the music of the era.  My review of the Blu-ray of Not Fade Away follows after the jump. 

Of all the tidbits on the new Blu-ray of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season Three, the tastiest comes from writer Michael Piller. He planned to leave the show at the end of the season until Gene Roddenberry himself appealed for him to stay. Before that happened, he conceived of one hell of a final act: a dilemma for the crew of the Enterprise so insurmountable that even he didn’t have the slightest idea how they were going to get out of it. Of course, he came back and subsequently came up with a corker of a solution. But without that go-for-broke fearlessness – without the desire to write a beginning that no ending could possibly match – we wouldn’t have had The Best of Both Worlds. And not only TNG, but television in general would have lost one of its unquestioned high points. Hit the jump for the full review.

Christopher Guest is one of a kind.  The writer/director/producer/actor carved out a niche of his own in the filmmaking community with the brilliant 1984 comedy This Is Spinal Tap, directed by Rob Reiner, and went on to helm a string of comedy hits himself in his distinctive “mockumentary” vein.  Though all of his films have something great and unique to offer, there’s something particularly special about 2000’s Best in Show.  The film’s characters are ridiculous and at times loathesome, but there’s a sincerity to the picture that prevents things from ever becoming too cynical.  The result is a delightfully hilarious comedy classic.  Hit the jump for my review of Best in Show on Blu-ray.

While I’m a fan of the wackier side of sci-fi shows airing on the SyFy network (Eureka, Warehouse 13), the more dramatic actioner Continuum came as a welcome surprise.  Focusing on a futuristic cop – Protector Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols) – who finds herself thrown back in time 65 years to our present day, Continuum explores what happens to the future when events are changed in the past.  The series, created by Simon Barry, could easily have fallen victim to anachronistic gags and time-travel tropes.  Instead, smart writing, fast-paced action and an increasingly complicated plot make Continuum a show worthy of binge watching in a weekend.

Hit the jump for my review of season one of Continuum on Blu-ray.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were a cinematic match made in heaven.  The duo began collaborating on movies in 1939, and worked together off and on for over three decades.  Though their films were credited to both as the writers, directors and producers, Powell was more of the director of the two, while Pressburger was the writer.  Though their works have been spotlighted by the Criterion collection since they started making laserdiscs, they are the sort of filmmakers that will never be as well known as David Lean or Danny Boyle, but are arguably among the best – if not the best – filmmakers that England ever produced.  1943’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a strong contender for their greatest film.  Criterion has just released it on Blu-ray and our review follows after the jump.

Reading the description of a film–and I’m not just talking the marketing spin, but even an honest informative blurb–oftentimes results in false preconceptions about a movie.  That Obscure Object of Desire is just such a film.  “Consumed by his obsessive desire to possess her, his feelings progressively change from overflowing passion to a self-destructive hatred,” inspires visions in tone (if not in content) along the lines of Fatal Attraction.  Not so.

That having been said, such preconceptions did not destroy my enjoyment of the film at all.

The line between opinion and truth on news outlets has been getting awfully blurry lately.  As corporations dictate the commentaries and presumptions delivered by major media outlets, journalistic integrity seems like a thing of the past.  It’s amidst this cloudy backdrop of subjective news sources that Touchstone releases the Blu-ray of Michael Mann’s critically-acclaimed 1999 drama The Insider – a film that examines the perils of allowing corporations to control the news.  The film, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards, resonates today more than ever as it pulls back the curtain on contemporary journalism and the sleaziness of the tobacco industry.  More on Touchstone’s Blu-ray of The Insider after the jump.

In 1973, Michael Crichton wrote and directed Westworld, a sci-fi classic that went on to influence The Terminator, Crichton’s own Jurassic Park and one of the best episodes of The Simpsons.  A few years later TV creators Richard T. Heffron, Mayo Simon, and George Schenck made a sequel that remains mostly forgotten.

Futureworld does attempt to take the Westworld concept in an interesting direction.  Had it worked, it’s not hard to envision a world in which the Westworld saga became a series of increasingly bizarre chapters ala Planet of the Apes.  The ingredients are there.  Cool robots, counter culture undertones and the awesome camp inherent in 1970s theme park design.  Unfortunately, despite some lofty goals, Futureworld is kind of a slog.  Hit the jump for our review of Futureworld on Blu-ray.

It’s hard not to see Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln as the Oscar film that didn’t.  The movie was nominated for twelve academy awards, but it only went home with two (though one was for Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance in the titular role).  It was trumped by Argo, and though comparing the two is sort of like equating apples and turnips, Lincoln is the better film, and perhaps was underrated for being another in a long line of great Spielberg film.  Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and a ton of great character actors co-star in this story of the passage of the 13^th amendment.  Our review of the Blu-ray follows after the jump.

I’m still surprised by how deeply Les Miserables touched me.  I’m not a huge fan of musical theater and while I’d been mildly impressed by the 10^th anniversary concert, I never grasped what all the fuss was about.  I went into Tom Hooper’s 2012 movie adaptation with high hopes, but no expectations.  I left a blubbering wreck, reduced to tears a good half-dozen times in the course of its 150-minute running time.  Plenty of folks feel the same way… and plenty of other folks still see nothing but bombastic sentiment.  The new Blu-ray isn’t likely to change anyone’s minds.  Or is it?  Hit the jump for my full review.

In films, alcoholism is rarely treated as the crippling, devastating disease that it is.  It’s oftentimes romanticized or portrayed as some quirk for comedic aspects.  A lot of diseases and mental illnesses are treated this way on screen.  There are some great films about alcoholism that take it seriously, like Lost Weekend and Under the Volcano.  But for the most part films tend to leave out the lies, shame, and heaps of ruin laid on the alcoholic and their family.  James Ponsoldt‘s Smashed manages to find the perfect balance between a romantic comedy and a compelling study of a relationship fueled by booze.  More on Sony Pictures Classics’ Smashed Blu-ray after the jump.

Enterprise had the misfortune of arriving at a low point in Star Trek’s history, as the TNG movies staggered to an ignominious conclusion and franchise burnout seemed insurmountable. Competing sci-fi series like Farscape arrived with a freshness that Trek couldn’t hope to match, and for a time it looked as if the iconic sci-fi property would fade into oblivion. Enterprise arrived with the mandate of reversing that trend, a task it simply wasn’t equipped to manage. It vanished four years after it arrived, the shortest-running series since the original. Ten years on, however, the dust has settled and the show has aged better than its detractors might think. It’s not perfect, but its attempts to find a different vibe for Star Trek produce some surprisingly good stuff. Hit the jump for the full review.

The events of September 11, 2001 had a profound effect on the United States of America that forever changed us as a nation.  We live in a post-9/11 world, and it is impossible to go back to “the way things were before.”  Though it’s been a decade since the event, in the scope of things we’re still living in the immediate aftermath of the most devastating domestic terror attack in history.  Filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow has now dealt with these effects in two films, as she previously focused on the events of the Iraq War with her 2008 Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker, and her brilliant 2012 drama Zero Dark Thirty masterfully chronicles the decade-long hunt for the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks: Osama Bin Laden.  The result of the latter is a taut procedural thriller that not only entertains, but also provides a difficult and introspective look at America’s place in the post-9/11 world.  Hit the jump for my review of Zero Dark Thirty on Blu-ray.

It’s weird to think we’re only four movies in to Judd Apatow’s directing career, because for the last ten years he’s become a brand.  Between working with Adam McKay and Will Ferrell on their comedies, to launching Seth Rogen and Kristen Wiig (and more), he established that he was one of the biggest forces in comedy.  But his most recent film, This is 40, came out and it didn’t feel like event.  It’s a modest film that’s enjoyable enough, but feels like a B side.  Our review of This is 40 follows after the jump.