DVD Talk DVD Reviews https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/list/DVD Video DVD Talk DVD Review RSS Feed en-us Beer League (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73918 Fri, 19 Jul 2019 14:10:03 UTC Recommended

Beer League:

This laziest of lazy loser comedies, made manifest through comedian Artie Lange's Howard Stern-aided celebrity, repped Lange's potential leap to greater fame. The movie flopped, bringing in under 500k at the box office, which is probably good, because movie star Artie probably would have quickly turned into dead Artie. (For more on this, if you're not familiar, read Lange's Autobiographies detailing his battles with addiction, etc.) But is the movie, and this Blu-ray release, any good? Long story short, if you like loser comedies, absolutely you should Rent It, Artie Lange cultists will probably find this nominal upgrade Recommended if they don't already own the earlier Blu-ray release.

Beer League is a spectacularly lazy, knockabout comedy firmly set in the New Jersey world of goombahs and Mets jokes. Lange stars as Artie DeVanzo, an unemployed-by-choice â...Read the entire review

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The Vault (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73790 Thu, 18 Apr 2019 18:02:24 UTC Skip It

The Film:


Plot twists can be a lot of fun to witness unfold, but they're far less enjoyable when there seems to be no purpose behind their place in the grander cinematic story. When details are revealed about the seeing of ghosts in The Sixth Sense, they're backed by the personal strife endured by the characters throughout; when the true nature of Nicole Kidman and her childrens' conditions are revealed in The Others, they're supported and deepened by her mother character's neuroses and obsessions. The most intriguing thing about The Vault, a hybrid of a bank heist caper and supernatural horror, lies ...Read the entire review

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Dark River (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73780 Fri, 12 Apr 2019 18:20:29 UTC Skip It

The Film:


Most people who like to watch movies have a small collection of titles that they have waiting for when they're "in the mood", ones that are of a deliberately bleak, harsh nature that aren't exactly ideal for popping in and enjoying on a whim. Had Dark River achieved in what it sets out to do, I would've recommended lumping it into that category, largely because of how the material ventures into the territory of physical abuse and unrestrained sibling rivalry. Emotionally-charged performances and gritty visual composition against a decaying farmhouse landscape lend rawness to this tale of sibling rivalry and guilt, but the content's so heavy -- and heavy-handed -- that it yields an unpleasant drama without rewards or virtues to counterb...Read the entire review

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The Miseducation Of Cameron Post (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73758 Wed, 03 Apr 2019 23:07:59 UTC Highly Recommended

The Movie:

Depicting pure evil in cinema is easy, you just pump a character full of despicable thoughts and acts without much depth as to their motivation or background, and voila! What takes work, patience, and strength is to write the kind of evil that comes from an intrinsically human place, depicted with unforeseen empathy towards the perpetrators. Understanding the other side makes us understand what we're dealing with, and in turn further humanizes the opposition. This makes evil even more terrifying, potent, and immediate, since it no longer comes from a comic book ideal of make-believe, but from a flesh and blood human reality. Desiree Akhavan, co-writer and director of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, an intimately heartbreaking drama about the many horrors of gay conversion therapy, is able to imbue her film with empathy towards those who are actively destroying the li...Read the entire review

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The Greasy Strangler - Special Director’s Edition (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73739 Thu, 28 Mar 2019 19:34:54 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

An older man named Big Ronnie (Michael St. Michaels) lives in a rundown home with his middle-aged son Brayden (Sky Elobar). Ronnie makes a living offering horribly managed ‘disco tours' where he shows gullible tourists bogus that supposedly have to do with disco history, and Brayden assists him. They wear matching pink shorts and sweaters when they do this. One day, after one of these tours concludes, Brayden gets friendly with one of the customers, a curly haired curvy gal named Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo). Ronnie, who confesses to his disbelieving son that he may in fact be ‘the greasy strangler' one morning, isn't keen on Brayden dating Janet. In fact, he's apparent from the start that he'd prefer to have the girl for himself and is not above threatening to evict his son in order to make that happen.

Regardless, Brayden soon loses his virginity to Janet and it's cl...Read the entire review

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Vengeance: A Love Story (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73738 Thu, 28 Mar 2019 19:26:49 UTC Rent It

The Movies:

Based on Joyce Carol Oates‘ novel, Rape: A Love Story (it's no wonder the title was changed for the film adaptation!), 2017's Vengeance: A Love Story tells the story of a Gulf War veteran named John Dromoor (Nicolas Cage) who now works as a Los Angeles police officer. When he meets Teena (Anna Hutchison), a young single mom, they quickly bond over the one thing that they have in common: loss. It's clear that they care for one another but before their relationship can develop any further, Teena is raped by a gang of hooligans on her way back from a party. This happens in front of her daughter, Bethie (Talitha Bateman), the only witness to the attack. Teena is left for dead by her assaulters but manages to survive.

Eventually, this issue winds up in court where her attackers are defended by a lawyer named Jay Kirkpatrick (Don Johnson). When it starts to l...Read the entire review

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Chicago - Now More Than Ever: The History Of Chicago DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73661 Tue, 19 Feb 2019 15:05:06 UTC Recommended

I was introduced to Chicago in the early 1980s, when their big hit "Hard to Say I'm Sorry" was all the rage- the sort of sappy ballad that I just hated. Their follow-ups such as "You're the Inspiration" had me simply write them off as a band that only did those kind of songs, staples on "adult contemporary" format stations. Later I heard a song that was much older but very catchy, "25 or 6 to 4" and was amazed to learn that it was by the same group. This had me checking out more of their earlier music and I was amazed at the difference- no light piano, strings or sappy lyrics here, just harder rhythms with a unique horn section reminiscent of Blood Sweat and Tears. I thought "Wow, they used to be great, what happened?" Of course I soon learned that this sort of thing has happened with a lot of bands that have been active for a long time, their sounds changing sometimes for the better, often for the ...Read the entire review

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Learning To See: The World Of Insects - Special Edition (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73530 Mon, 24 Dec 2018 15:52:04 UTC Rent It

If you judge a movie by its cover, Jake Oelman's Learning to See: The World of Insects (2016) looks like a standard nature documentary about...well, bugs. Yet the write-up and short text introduction reveals a more personal film: it's about Jake's father Robert, who became dissatisfied with his career as a psychoanalyst and, in the early 1990s, moved to Columbia -- the South American republic, not the city -- after reading Love in the Time of Cholera. After purchasing a hillside home and surrounding farmland for roughly $40,000, he befriended a local family and took up macro photography. This eventu...Read the entire review

]]> 24x36: A Movie About Movie Posters DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73283 Fri, 31 Aug 2018 11:15:03 UTC Highly Recommended

24x36: A Movie About Movie Posters DVD Review

24x36:A Movie About Movie Posters has it's description right in thetitle. Yes, this is a feature length documentary about movie posters.Yes, that is the whole point of the film (that and 27x40 posters).Movie poster enthusiastsshould certainly consider viewing it. This documentary isn't made foranyone other than it's target audience of poster fans. This featurewas produced by David Lawson Jr. (The Endless) andGraham Lee.It explores the history of movie posters as promotional materials andalso evaluates the collector value and artistic merit of movieartwork.

Read the entire review

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My Friend Dahmer (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73249 Tue, 14 Aug 2018 12:49:26 UTC Recommended

The subject of famous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, arrested in 1991 and killed by a fellow inmate in 1994, has been taken on a few times such as the uneven Dahmer and watchable yet not very memorable Raising Jeffrey Dahmer, but My Friend Dahmer easily outdoes those as not only delivers far better performances from the cast but includes insight from someone who went to high school with him. Credited as Derf Backderf and sometimes referred to as John (likely not his real name, as I learned from Little Man Tate that "Derf" is "Fred" spelled backwards), he was one of Dahmer's few friends during that time. He was also an aspiring cartoonist who has since made a graphic novel about Dahmer's high school days, on which this movie is bas...Read the entire review

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I Called Him Morgan DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73155 Tue, 10 Jul 2018 21:25:48 UTC Recommended

Murdered at the age of 33 by his common-law wife Helen, legendary jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan is the subject of I Called Him Morgan (2016), the second film by Swedish director Kasper Collin. Carefully guiding viewers through the years, months, and days leading to Lee's death on February 19, 1972, I Called Him Morgan is half biopic and half retrospective: combining recent video interviews with Lee's contemporaries and a lengthy 1996 audio interview with Helen (who, eerily enough, died just one month later), it paints a detailed picture of Lee's short but extremely prolific career.

The film's commitme...Read the entire review

]]> Body of Deceit DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73152 Mon, 09 Jul 2018 19:20:11 UTC Skip It



Director: Alessandro Capone
Starring: Kristanna Loken, Sarai Givaty, Antonio Cupo
Year: 2015

What's shocking about Body of Deceit is not that it's bad; lots of movies are bad, tons of movies actually, thousands of movies, and sometimes you have to slog through them in order to understand what good movies really look like. Without the bitter, the sweet ain't as sweet, right? That applies to films as much as to anything else, how else are you supposed to develop your taste if all you ever taste is the best? So awful cinema has its niche, it can even be fun, and not every project can be tops. But sometimes you can still be surprised by just how awful a final product can be, after multiple teams of people sat down and de...Read the entire review

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Manifesto (2015) DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73090 Wed, 13 Jun 2018 13:18:04 UTC Rent It

Manifesto is an ambitious new movie by visual artist Julian Rosenfeld, who enlisted Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett to make an experimental, political film about art and artistry. Blanchett, in a free-flowing series of vignettes, inhabits 13 different characters -- a rich woman, a blue-collar worker, a bum, a religious homemaker, a newscaster, and her remote-reporting co-worker, to name a few -- all of whom repeat manifestos from various famous political and artistic figures, ranging from Karl Marx to Alexander Rodchenko. There is no overarching story, nor do the characters have much, if anything, in the way of dialogue outside of the manifestos. The movie is based on Rosenfeld's existing art project, where all 13 pieces were played simultaneously on separate screens.

What's complicated about reviewing Manifesto is that the philosophies about art that the Rosenfeld expr...Read the entire review

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My Friend Dahmer DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73073 Tue, 05 Jun 2018 12:50:46 UTC Highly Recommended



Director: Marc Meyers
Starring: Ross Lynch, Alex Wolff, Anne Heche
Year: 2017

Anne Heche puts on the best performance of her career in My Friend Dahmer, and she's probably the third best thing about this film, which you should take as a very healthy sign. For a movie nobody saw about a serial killer nobody wants to remember, this strange biography does so many things right, and cements itself as an under-the-radar yet top-notch production that will surprise a few people when they finally get around to popping it into there DVD player. That doesn't help the filmmakers or the cast and crew, but it's something; My Friend Dahmer is better than the limited coverage it received and should be bumped up your list.

Read the entire review

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The High Schooler's Guide To College Parties DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72181 Mon, 26 Jun 2017 23:53:14 UTC Skip It



Director: Patrick Johnson
Starring: Nate Rubin, Kris Kiley, Brina Palencia
Year: 2015

Your guess is as good as mine as to why American Pie worked when so many other coming-of-age sex comedies die a terrible death as soon as they hit the screen, some as soon as they hit the straight-to-DVD shelves. Maybe it was Eugene Levy, maybe it was the pie, who knows, but that film is now a classic, and in comparison, The High Schoolers Guide to College Parties will never be. Not only will it never become a classic, it will never be seen by more than the 200 people globally who invested their time in watching this complete waste of space and regretted every minute of it. Add this film to the long list of those who tried and...Read the entire review

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Lake Eerie DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72060 Wed, 10 May 2017 21:47:49 UTC Skip It



Director: Chris Majors
Starring: Meredith Majors, Betsy Baker, Anne Leigh Cooper
Year: 2016

You may think you've seen painful acting before, but you have yet to meet Lake Eerie, a film that is as bizarre, awful, and unimaginative as its title. I'm not sure if my words can prepare you for such a film failure, an amateur attempt at something, I don't know what, that could not possibility have resulted in what the filmmakers were aiming for. Because, if this is the movie that they were trying to make, someone needs to take away their cameras and put them under lock and key. I can only imagine that "haunted house story with Egyptian magic thrown in for good measure" sounded like a great idea, a script was written, and a f...Read the entire review

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For the Love of Spock DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/71947 Thu, 06 Apr 2017 04:19:48 UTC Recommended

Such an industry is Star Trek that it supports not only various television and film series, but a growing number of documentaries about it. The first seems to have been Trekkies (1997), directed by Roger Nygard and starring Denise Cosby, with affectionate humor it explores the world of Star Trek fandom. It's funny but not condescending, introducing its audience to fans whose obsessions never hurt anyone but often do good or are empowering, and it's even rather touching at times. A 2004 sequel ventured outside the U.S., in search of international fans.

In between came Mind Meld (2001), a My Dinner with Andre-type conversation between Original Series stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. What might easily have been a vanity project (Shatner co-produced) instead proved to be a highly engrossing dialogue between two actors uniquely positioned in this pop culture lexi...Read the entire review

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Five Nights in Maine DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/71922 Wed, 29 Mar 2017 11:48:42 UTC Rent It

Following the unexpected death of his wife Fiona (Hani Furstenberg) in a fatal car accident, Sherwin (David Oyelowo) retreats into an isolated depression, his days consisting of drinking and mourning. His sister and business partner Penelope (Teyonah Parris) finally forces Sherwin out of the house in order for him to make an obligatory but nerve-wracking trip up to Maine, to bring the ashes to Fiona's mother Lucinda (Dianne Wiest), with whom Fiona had a notably contentious relationship.

The study of grief through a narrative art like filmmaking is always tricky, in which the filmmaker must find the right balance between messy real-life human emotions and the demand of the audience for a story that has, at the very least, an emotional beginning, middle, and end. With Five Nights in Maine, writer/director Maris Curran attempts to lean further toward the messy reality, but in doing so, creates ...Read the entire review

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Sneakerheadz DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/71893 Sat, 18 Mar 2017 12:29:40 UTC Recommended

In 10 Words or Less
Greed, style, obsession and sneakers

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Documentaries
Likes: Learning about niches
Dislikes: Expensive sneakers
Hates: Sneaker-based crime

The Movie
I was in an elevator in Boston one night, and a guy asked me about the brown and tan low-top sneakers I was wearing.

"Nice sneakers," he said. "Where'd you get them?"

I looked down, thought for a moment, and replied. "Target."

The revelation that I was wearing mass-market Mossimos resulted in obvious disgust on the man's part, and he departed when the doors opened, while I pondered my fashion faux pas. I have never cared much about the shoes I've worn, as happy with the expensive Nikes my wife bought me shortly...Read the entire review

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Addicted to Fresno DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/71867 Thu, 09 Mar 2017 14:45:01 UTC Recommended

Film and television fans have had more reason than ever to lament Hollywood's underutilization of the great Judy Greer, what with a number of small and sometimes thankless roles in big-budget blockbusters like Jurassic World, Tomorrowland, Ant-Man, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Another set of film and television fans have had reasons to celebrate, in seeing the renaissance of character actor Natasha Lyonne's career through "Orange is the New Black". Anyone who fits in the part of the Venn diagram where those two types of people cross over may like to know, if they don't already, that an obscure 2015 indie comedy by Jamie Babbit (director of Lyonne's LGBTQ cult classic But I'm a Cheerleader) attempts to resolve the first and support the second, by casting Greer and Lyonne as sisters working in a hotel who get wrapped up in trying to get rid of a body th...Read the entire review

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For The Love Of Spock (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/71702 Thu, 12 Jan 2017 17:03:07 UTC Highly Recommended

Originally conceived as a "Spock doc" celebrating one of Star Trek's most iconic characters for the franchise's 50th anniversary, Adam Nimoy's For the Love of Spock (2016) grew from extended character study to full-fledged biopic after his father's death in February 2015, just four months into development. Funded by nearly 10,000 backers on Kickstarter...Read the entire review

]]> Being Evel - Standard Edition DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/71644 Thu, 22 Dec 2016 13:26:50 UTC Recommended

In 10 Words or Less
A true ‘70s icon's biggest jumps and bigger fall

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Documentaries
Likes: Evel Knievel, Johnny Knoxville
Dislikes: Egomaniacs
Hates: Filmrise's standard editions, cheaters

The Movie
The kind of American icon the ‘70s were experts at bringing us, Evel Knievel did one thing really well: jump his motorcycle far and high. Well, he did something else as well, and that's crash spectacularly. Famous for his huge leaps, he was likely even more well-known for his ability to recover from horrifying spills. Knievel was the kind of oddball celebrity that the era feted on shows like That...Read the entire review

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Steve McQueen - The Man & Le Mans DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/71492 Thu, 10 Nov 2016 17:42:21 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

We know a lot about Steve McQueen by this point; great looking guy, appeared in several tent pole films, and succumbed to cancer far too early. But he was also a racing devotee of both motorcycles and cars, getting into racing discussions and occasional activities with co-star James Garner on the set of The Great Escape in the early ‘60s. McQueen wanted to eventually make a movie about racing (and eventually did make one about motorcycle racing with documentary filmmaker Bruce Brown with On Any Sunday). Garner beat him to the punch with the Monaco-set film Grand Prix, but McQueen eventually did one on Le Mans, which this documentary attempts to touch on.

Subtitled The Man & Le Mans, the film chronicles McQueen's attempt to ...Read the entire review

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All Things Must Pass DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/71279 Fri, 16 Sep 2016 02:02:42 UTC Recommended

In 10 Words or Less
The rise and fall of Tower Records

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Documentaries, Tower Records, music
Likes: Colin Hanks
Dislikes: Tales of failure
Hates: Missing the past, standard editions

The Movie
For most of my life, there was no Tower Records. Of course, the chain existed, but it didn't exist in my world, where I was shut off from such wonder in the suburbs of the east coast. Eventually, in my young adulthood, I discovered the New York City versions, and we got a few of our own on Long Island, noteable for the long lines waiting outside for Ticketmaster sales. Making up for lost time, I spent several n...Read the entire review

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Elstree 1976 DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/71100 Mon, 04 Jul 2016 16:45:51 UTC Rent It

In 10 Words or Less
A look behind the mask (or helmet)

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Star Wars, good documentaries
Likes: Nostalgia
Dislikes: Seeing Z-listers ignored at comic conventions
Hates: Delusional fame hunters, ineffective editing

The Movie
In my memorabilia collection, I have a photo of David Prowse, both in and out of his Darth Vader costume, and it's signed "David Prowse is Darth Vader". I got this when I was a child (how, I'm not entirely sure) but it's the main reason I know, to this day, who the guy in the helmet was, when all the fame of playing Darth went to James Earl Jones, the man behind that iconic voice. So I ...Read the entire review

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All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/70163 Wed, 17 Feb 2016 04:23:57 UTC Recommended

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

If you lived in a city with a Tower Records in the 1970s, it was something of a landmark -- the one sure place to find music you were looking for. My contact with Tower was as a long-haired square from UCLA with no money, snooping foreverr before choosing some single item on sale, like a stereophonic soundtrack for Master of the World. Milling through the long store aisles night and day was every music fan in Southern California. Located dead center on the Sunset Strip, tucked under the Hollywood hills, Tower was adjacent to every form of show biz. It wasn't unusual to see rock stars there, buying stacks of records. One wondered if they were ever opened. You'd be looking at something and discover you were next to some guy decked out in fancy fashions, love beads and what looked like $200 dark glasses. Maybe he was a musician or a record producer,...Read the entire review

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