By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Last week, 20th Century Fox released the kids film Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip on Blu-ray, the fourth entry in the franchise. When Dave (Jason Lee) starts dating a doctor (Kimberly Williams-Paisley), who brings with her a moody teenaged son Miles (Josh Green), the chipmunks become terrified that… Read More Blu-ray Review: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
By John Corrado Director John Frankenheimer’s groundbreaking political thriller The Manchurian Candidate is being released on Blu-ray this week, as part of the Criterion Collection. This 1962 classic follows a celebrated Korean War veteran (Laurence Harvey), who has been brainwashed to become an assassin who coldly kills in a trance-like state, and his controlling mother (Angela Lansbury), who is married… Read More Criterion Review: The Manchurian Candidate
By John Corrado Today, Paramount is releasing The Big Short on Blu-ray, one of the best movies of last year. The film recounts the true story of financial outsiders Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) and Mark Baum (Steve Carell), who predicted the Wall Street crash and hatched a scheme to get rich in… Read More Blu-ray Release: The Big Short
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) John (Jack Reynor) is a young man struggling to make money as a taxi driver in Ireland, forced to take care of his severely alcoholic mother (Toni Collette), who is slowly killing herself in drunken stupors, finding it too painful to face her broken life. But the pressure… Read More Review: Glassland
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) A Canadian-funded escape thriller, River follows John Lake (Rossif Sutherland), a volunteer doctor in Laos who is dealing with patients of trauma and emergency surgeries, as evidenced in the almost relentlessly graphic opening scenes. But when he intervenes in a violent rape after a night at the bar, accidentally… Read More Review: River
By John Corrado Sony is releasing Community: The Complete Final Season on DVD today, including all thirteen episodes from the excellent sixth season of the cult classic show that started in 2009. All in all, this is a remarkably consistent collection of episodes, and easily the best since the first three seasons. Released on Yahoo! after the network cancelled… Read More DVD Release: Community: The Complete Final Season
By John Corrado A hit on the festival circuit, the single take thriller Victoria is now available on digital platforms, including iTunes. Director Sebastian Schipper never stopped the camera once throughout the overnight shoot, opening in a throbbing nightclub where Victoria (Laia Costa) meets the charismatic Sonne (Frederick Lau) and his gang, and becomes involved in their… Read More Digital Release: Victoria
Zootopia Review By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) For a film intent on subverting stereotypes, Zootopia slyly upends our expectations of animated animal entertainment, using its all-mammal metropolis to explore timely and thought provoking themes of racism and cultural prejudices, through a plot rich with mature and surprisingly resonant political allegories. Following hits like Big Hero… Read More Three Views: Zootopia
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) For a variety of circumstances, The Danish Girl is one of those films that has kept eluding me over the last few months. Every time I would try to go see it, something else would come up. So by the time I finally caught up with it last night,… Read More Review: The Danish Girl
By John Corrado Today, Elevation Pictures is releasing Room on Blu-ray, one of the best movies of last year. Jack (Jacob Tremblay) has just turned five, but has lived his entire life locked in a small square room with his beloved mother (Brie Larson). She is fiercely committed to protecting her little boy, and will do… Read More Blu-ray Release: Room
By John Corrado Today, Elevation Pictures is releasing the gangster drama Legend on Blu-ray. Starring Tom Hardy in a dual role, this glossy biopic recounts the true story of notorious twin gangsters Reggie and Ronnie Kray, who together ruled the crime-riddled streets of London in the 1960s. Although I still think it’s got a lot of problems, Legend is one… Read More Blu-ray Release: Legend
By John Corrado Sony is releasing director Jonathan Levine’s holiday buddy comedy The Night Before on Blu-ray today, which leaves plenty of time to pick up a copy before next Christmas. With their annual tradition of spending December 24th together reaching its end, Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Isaac (Seth Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) set out in search of… Read More Blu-ray Release: The Night Before
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The film industry is a place ripe for satire, a world where movie stars are grossly overpaid, writers are criminally undervalued, and studio heads become God-like figures overseeing it all to make sure every piece of the machine works accordingly to turn a profit. This is the basic setup… Read More Review: Hail, Caesar!
By John Corrado Today, Disney•Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is being released on Blu-ray. The film imagines a world where dinosaurs never went extinct and follows Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), a scared young apatosaurus who becomes separated from his family when tragedy strikes, and forms a bond with a feral human child named Spot (Jack Bright), as they… Read More Blu-ray Release: The Good Dinosaur
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Today, Disney Junior is releasing The Lion Guard: Return of the Roar on DVD. A TV special that aired last fall to kick off the new animated series, the story follows Simba (Rob Lowe) and Nala’s (Gabrielle Union) second born son Kion (Max Charles), who is assigned to lead the Lion… Read More DVD Review: The Lion Guard: Return of the Roar
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Right from the ingenious opening credits, which announce the film as being produced by “asshats” and directed by “an overpaid tool,” as Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning” ironically plays on the soundtrack, Deadpool sets itself up as both origin story of its title character and gleeful sendup… Read More Review: Deadpool
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) If a belief in God also means believing in the devil, it’s no surprise that the deeply religious family at the centre of The Witch becomes so terrified and paranoid when apparently satanic things start happening around their New England farm. The year is 1630, and William (Ralph… Read More Review: The Witch
By John Corrado The one thing that stuck out to me when putting together this highly belated list of the best albums of 2015, is just how different the majority of these recordings are from each other. But like the wide range of movies I watch, the music I listen to is just as diverse,… Read More The Best Albums of 2015
Featuring one of the best roles of Lily Tomlin’s career, Grandma is a small gem that I’m happy to help support, so when Sony Pictures Classics reached out asking if I wanted to do a giveaway, I openly accepted the offer. We’ve got two copies of the newly released Blu-ray to give away to a pair of… Read More Contest: Win a Copy of Grandma on Blu-ray
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) This week, MGM is releasing Spectre on Blu-ray, the 24th James Bond movie. With a new head of security (Andrew Scott) threatening to enact overreaching government surveillance measures that would reduce the need for field agents, James Bond (Daniel Craig) goes rogue to track down a mysterious supervillian (Christoph… Read More Blu-ray Review: Spectre
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