When Disney first brought “Sleeping Beauty” to DVD in 2003, they did so after a painstaking five-year restoration, and the result was breathtaking. Even in standard definition the colors were pristine, the picture free from grain or blemish, and a Dolby Digital…
It was way back in 1959 when Disney made their first sporting film loosely based on a real event, and that movie—“Third Man on the Mountain”—inspired the Matterhorn bobsleds at Disneyland. No new attraction seems forthcoming as a result of…
In the same way “Left Behind” puts a faith-based spin on the apocalyptic genre, “Persecuted”takes a similar approach to the political/conspiracy thriller, pitting a man of strong religious convictions against the machinations of corrupt power and murderous deceit. Busy character actor…
The creators and writers for “Reign,” a popular CW series, must have been fans of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, because they chose to ignore history and follow the more fantastic (and yes, enjoyable) path. Rather than chronicling the actual rise of Mary, Queen…
Sordid. Adjective. Involving ignoble actions and motives; arousing moral distaste and contempt. If you’re a film critic who’s tasked with reviewing the indie flick “Sordid Lives,” you start to feel a little ignoble if you come down hard on a movie that’s so…
Philip Seymour Hoffman died in February 2014, but he was such a prolific actor that we’ll be seeing him well into the near future. “God’s Pocket” is the first of his 2013-14 projects to reach home video, but we still have…
If “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” feels more like a ‘70s conspiracy thriller, that’s because it is one. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were heavily influenced by espionage thrillers such as Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor,” while directors Anthony…
Impactful. Aside from the “Ken Burns Effect”—the documentarian’s trademark slow pan and scan and pullback on a still photograph to give it cinematic life—you’d have to say that the distinguishing characteristic of a Ken Burns documentary is the impact it…
William Randolph Hearst did everything he could to prevent Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” from playing in theaters because the maligned “hero” of that film, Charles Foster Kane, was obviously Hearst. Though the names had been changed and the situations altered…
Zombie movies are big again, and a sub-genre that’s emerged in recent years is the zombie Western. “The Quick and the Undead” may have kick-started the trend back in 2006, because a number of zombie Westerns followed: “Undead or Alive”…