It’s a busy time, but the studios are still squeezing in some new releases on DVD and Blu-ray before the year’s end. Surprisingly, some of them are quite good. As always, be sure to click on any links to read more. So if you can’t make it out to the movies this week, be sure to give one of these titles a try!

 

Big New Releases!

American Honey - In this indie coming-of-age drama, a poverty-stricken teenage girl decides to leave home and join a traveling troupe who sell magazines during the day and party hard at night. She finds a kindred spirit while on the road. Notices were very strong for the feature and it received positive reaction at film festivals. A few did...

Rating: « out of 4 stars

Running Time: 116 min.

Occasionally, you see a bad movie with so much talent in front of and behind the camera, you begin to wonder where exactly it all went wrong. There’s plenty that is calamitous with the big-budget, sci-fi/drama, Passengers. My only guess is some kind of interference or unnecessary rewrites on a script to make it more genial threw this project off the rails. Whatever the case, one couldn’t have possibly read this screenplay and not believed that there weren’t major problems.

One of the biggest is the main character, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt). He’s a technical engineer (essentially, a mechanic) resting in a sleep chamber on an...

Welcome back to another Blu-ray and DVD roundup. Just because the holidays are here, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t a number of interesting new releases. You’ll find them all listed below. As always, click on any links you see to read full reviews. So if you can’t make it out to the movies this week, be sure to give one of these titles a try!

Big New Releases!

31 - The latest from musician/filmmaker Rob Zombie is another gritty grindhouse effort. It follows a group of carnies in the 1970s who are kidnapped by maniacal killers, taken to a remote location and forced into a deadly game of survival. Reaction was extremely split for this effort. Those who didn’t care...

Rating « out of 4 Stars

Running Time: 110 minutes

This is a weird flick.

Judging the cover, Sing should be at least decent. Great cast [McConaughey, Witherspoon, Johansson…], a Christmas opening date and it’s a cartoon about talking animals from the studio that brought you Minions and Despicable Me.

Sounds good. But now let’s discuss what it’s about. There’s this koala bear named Buster Moon (an excitable McConaughey) and he owns a theater. He needs a hit so he puts on a singing competition. Right there is the first major misstep. Singing competitions reached peak popularity about 7 years ago. Old news. So right out the gate, the film seems dated.

So Buster holds...