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Now Available to Own For Leonard Maltin, “part of the fun of creating the Movie Guide is knowing it helps steer people to good movies that may have flown under their radar,” and it's a feat he achieves yet again in the latest edition of his perennial digest of cinematic reference. Collaborating with his crack-team of passionate movie scribes, Maltin delivers 300 all-new capsule movie review entries in addition to the esteemed critic’s most ambitious “best list” in years by revealing... Read Full Story

Now Available to Own         Photo Slideshow    It wasn’t until the theatrical release of The Sound of Music that West Side Story filmmaker (and Citizen Kane editor) Robert Wise asked audiences how to “solve a problem like Maria.” Yet roughly twenty years earlier, Wise’s West Side co-director Jerome Robbins was asked to solve the problem of the man who would become the lover of the Story ’s heroine – also named Maria – when a frustrated friend knocked on the legendary choreographer’s... Read Full Story

Now Available to Own     Original 2006 Theatrical Title: Shanghai Red As the old saying goes, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,” and this becomes a main theme that serves writer/director Oscar Luis Costo well in his intriguing albeit sluggish Shanghai-set mood piece Shanghai Mystery , where the adage is utilized again and again. Unfortunately by settling for a storyline that’s only faintly mysterious rather than a full-out Shanghai Mystery , from a viewer perspective... Read Full Story

Now Available to Own       Those who’ve had many small screen encounters with police procedurals of the British kind might be quick to assume that Luther series creator Neil Cross drew inspiration from similar sociological and psychologically fixated programs such as Murphy’s Law , Blue Murder , Prime Suspect and Cracker . Yet the roots for the eponymous brilliant but obsessive Detective Chief Inspector embodied by actor Idris Elba (HBO’s The Wire ) are far more diverse than you’d... Read Full Story

Now Available to Own     Photo Slideshow    As our new Pooh series narrator John Cleese informs us, Christopher Robin not only possesses a very active imagination but he also has an uncanny ability to collect things, including the charming and eccentric cast of stuffed animal characters that audiences treasure right along with Christopher Robin as well. But when pieces of his favorite collection go missing, Christopher and Pooh know that there’s no better person to turn to than their... Read Full Story

Now Available to Own     Photo Slideshow    Oscar nominated French filmmaker Julien Magnat (student short: The All-New Adventures of Chastity Blade ) makes his ambitious if ultimately awkward English language feature debut with this clunky thriller that destroys the promise of its clever premise with logic that’s so laughable that it leaves holes big enough to drive the strained script through. Bolstered by a solidly constructed foundation and anchored by the commitment and conviction... Read Full Story

Now Available to Own     The first film of the franchise that I’ve seen since taking in the official first film of the multibillion dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, On Stranger Tides is another efficiently made supernatural, seafaring swashbuckler. As opposed to being swept away by a sea of convoluted chaotic subplots, Stranger sets its sails early on in the first act to ensure we don’t get shipwrecked by too many competing storylines. Inspired by the titular novel by Tides... Read Full Story

Now Available to Own     Photo Slideshow    Intended as a comedic horror allegory of the state of irrational paranoia as well as genuine fear surrounding the Swine Flu epidemic that terrified the globe a few years back – writer/director Nicolas Goldbart’s Argentine import Phase 7 is proof that anything can inspire filmmakers to serve up a new twist on an old genre. A revisionist western, a dark comedy, an exploitative work of psychological exploration, a gory medical satire or a... Read Full Story

Now Available to Own     Photo Slideshow    Though he describes his dad as “more of a drunk who did interesting things,” as we discover in writer/director Dan Rush’s indie feature Everything Must Go , salesman Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell) might just as well have been talking about himself. Only in Nick’s case, the interesting things have a way of happening to him involuntarily. And it’s a good thing that he doesn’t live in a place where precipitation is all that common because for Arizona... Read Full Story

Now Available to Own     Simba the lion cub isn’t the only one who “just can’t wait to be king” in Walt Disney animation’s Hamlet inspired epic of lion-sized family dysfunction, tragedy of Greek proportions and biblical complexity (oh my!) as shortly into the film, Simba’s nefarious green-eyed Uncle Scar gives into the green-eyed monster that is jealousy to murderous effect. Pulling a Cain and Abel in a kiddie movie takes Disney villainy to a whole new level in what is arguably Disney’s... Read Full Story