Here are our latest reviews of films on DVD from 2010 and earlier.
Blade Runner
Marco Albanese @ Stanze di Cinema [Italian]
- Excerpt: il mito Blade Runner è più forte delle incongruenze, dei rimaneggiamenti e delle intenzioni equivoche dei suoi autori
Candyman
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Casino Royale (2006)
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: Casino Royale is a Bond film that has never settled itself with me: I love it, I hate it, I like it, I dislike it.
Chicks
Henry Stewart @ The L Magazine
- Excerpt: Girls just wanna have fun in this charmingly aimless portrait of Paris coeds.
The Dead Pit
- Excerpt: …’The Dead Pit’ at least shows some ambition before gradually petering out.
Eating Raoul
Dusty Somers @ Cinema Sentries
Ella Enchanted
- Excerpt: Ella is content with simply being light-hearted entertainment and it easily earns that label with its fun, gently subversive depictions of olden lifestyles (as a parallel to our time), fantastic creatures (ogres, elves, giants, and a guy stuck in a book), and Cinderella equivalents.
Friday the 13th
From a Whisper to a Scream
- Excerpt: …a selection of mainly forgettable stories that still aren’t as limp-wristed as director Jeff Burr’s attempts to tie them all together.
Good Morning, Night
Marco Albanese @ Stanze di Cinema [Italian]
- Excerpt: L’utopia libertaria e vitale della Resistenza si rispecchia, senza più riconoscersi, nella freddezza di morte del terrorismo brigatista.
I Walked with a Zombie
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Instead of true horror, what the film has to offer is atmosphere by the bucketful.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Lake of Dracula
Peter Nellhaus @ Coffee Coffee and more Coffee
- Excerpt: Michio Yamamoto’s second vampire film makes more effort to transpose Hammer horror to a contemporary Japanese setting.
The Leopard Man
Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: The film has atmosphere to spare… [but] uses it like a crutch for a story that doesn’t work on its own.
The Mad Ghoul
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Monster High
- Excerpt: …there’s something delightful in mankind’s potential destruction resembling a puffy lounge singer in a vinyl muumuu.
Mystics in Bali
- Excerpt: ‘Mystics in Bali’ is a nifty grab bag of gory goodies and assorted homegrown horrors.
O Pagador de Promessas
Marcio Sallem @ Cinema com Crítica [Portuguese]
Of Unknown Origin
- Excerpt: …it’s a lean, mean chiller that embraces a mindset I think we all agree with: rats can just go to hell.
Once Bitten
- Excerpt: Everything is so neutral and dialed-down, from the sense of humor to even the ’80s-ness of the whole thing…
The Penalty
- Excerpt: This pulpy 1920 silent drama stars Lon Chaney in a remarkably diabolical role as a criminal mastermind that also happens to be a double amputee. The Penalty is notable for the excellent and painstaking effects work hiding the lower halves of Chaney’s legs, but it’s also got a pretty good story and some nice work from the female supporting cast, who give the dark material its heart.
Pete’s Dragon
- Excerpt: Pete’s Dragon holds up as a fun and heartwarming film.
Re-Animator
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: Anchored by a brilliant performance by Jeffrey Combs as this brittle, narcissistic, yet almost endearing nutjob Herbert West, Re-Animator has earned its place as both a true horror film and a wicked black comedy.
Reincarnation (2005)
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers
- Excerpt: …while grade-school A.J. would’ve inhaled a frothy frivolity like ‘Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers,’ bitter twentysomething A.J. is still trying to set it on fire with his mind.
Spike of Bensonhurst
Dennis Schwartz @ Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
Strangers on a Train
- Excerpt: Strangers on a Train remains a riveting thriller and an essential part of any Hitchcock collection.
Three Crowns of the Sailor
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: If you’re in the mood for literate confusion with a vein of humor as black and dry as gunpowder, you couldn’t do much better than “Three Crowns of a Sailor.”
Transylvania 6-5000
- Excerpt: …by the end, I was praying that Colin Clive would whisk me away for an impromptu brain removal.
The Trial
Marcio Sallem @ Cinema com Crítica [Portuguese]
Umberto D.
Dusty Somers @ dustysomers.com
Vincere
Marco Albanese @ Stanze di Cinema [Italian]
- Excerpt: Marco Bellocchio ci ha regalato un altro ritratto impietoso, un altro padre tirannico, un’altra figura maschile arida ed accecata dall’ideologia e dal potere.
Yellow Submarine
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: Even the most jaded among us can gaze at Pepperland’s rainbow-striped hills and its flowers that blossom in paisley, hum to ourselves “all you need is love,” and sadly wish that we still had some of what these guys were smoking.
