Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Jeremy Butler on March 16th, 2015
Here’s a movie that took me by surprise, and for anyone who knows me that is a high bar to clear. I was not expecting much from the picture and miraculously found myself hanging on every second. It is not your traditional horror film with a clear-cut antagonist; in fact, at some point it becomes difficult to determine who the real enemy in the film is. Which is not to say that the presumed antagonist is in any way redeemable; it just means that once you know the story there comes the possibility, no matter how slight, that you may find yourself sympathetic to their plight.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on March 12th, 2015
When you think about the biblical stories that have made it onto the big (or small) screen, they tend to focus on names like Jesus, Moses and Noah. (And Moses again, just for good measure.) To be honest, I didn't even realize how few Bible adaptations focus on women until I popped in The Red Tent, a Lifetime miniseries based on Anita Diamant's best-selling novel of the same name. While The Red Tent certainly shouldn't be taken as gospel, it deserves credit for exploring biblical events from a different perspective.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Jeremy Butler on March 11th, 2015
I have multiple bones to pick with this film. Normally I would start at the bottom and work my way up. However, this time I simply feel the need to address what I believe the film’s biggest flaw: giving me a false sense of hope that it might actually turn out to be a decent film. I know, I know, part of this transgression is my own fault given that I am supposed to remain impartial. However, the blame for the monumental disappointment I felt when the credits rolled cannot be put on me alone.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 11th, 2015
"I'm Leonardo da Vinci. Revolutionary painter, artist and visionary, of the Republic of Florence."
The term “Renaissance man” is often used to describe a person who has a very wide range of interests in which they have become quite skilled. It's taken from the traits of the many artists, innovators and writers of the 15th century. And while the term might well apply to any number of such historical figures, there is none for whom it is more apt than Leonardo DaVinci.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on March 10th, 2015
I’m starting to wonder if it is time we officially made a sub-genre for kidnapping films. It’s a storyline that has been played out for decades but continues to offer up some engaging and oftentimes heart-wrenching tales that for the most part have happy endings but that seems to be a far stretch from reality, though I doubt audiences are looking for these bleak realistic endings and mostly prefer the Hollywood ending where everyone is rescued in just the nick of time. When Prisoners came out, I had hopes that it would be a film that wouldn’t shy away from the harsh realities, and for the most part it succeeded, but I still felt it held back.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on March 9th, 2015
Even though one of the main characters in The Red Road is a police officer, the show's six-episode first season plays less like your typical cop drama and more like an extended profile of two strained communities. There's the fictional town of Walpole, N.J. and the Lenape tribe that lives in the neighboring Ramapo Mountains. While the show certainly touches on the tension between the two communities, too much time here is devoted to multi-generational family drama that we've seen before. In other words, the show too often neglects the things that make it unique.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Brent Lorentson on March 8th, 2015
I’m going to come right out and say that before I got season 3 to review, all I had previously seen of Longmire was through advertisements I would catch every now and again. It was a show that seemed to have a lot of promise, but with the amount of DVD watching that comes with writing for the site, you have to be a bit picky about what you want to watch in your “spare time”. Thanks to the help of the internet I was able to watch some season 1 and 2 recaps and surprisingly when I started up season 3 there wasn’t much difficulty in catching up and getting into the groove of the show.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 6th, 2015
When Stephen King wrote The Running Man back in 1982, he might very well have been looking through a crystal ball at the television landscape of the 21st century. While we haven't started executing criminals in game-show fashion ...yet … reality television has had a huge impact on our pop culture. From Big Brother to Survivor, Americans continue to get their kicks watching attention-needy "contestants" engage in silly little dramas and the occasional shoving match. Maybe we should blame it all on Jerry Springer.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on March 5th, 2015
“There’s no place on Earth with more magic and superstition mixed into its daily life than the Scottish Highlands.”
To build its slate of original programming, Starz has largely decided to look to the past. In recent years, the premium cable network has produced shows like Da Vinci’s Demons, The White Queen, and Black Sails, each of them (loosely) historical dramas with varying amounts of nudity sprinkled in. But it took a trip to the Scottish Highlands — and to the 18th century — for the channel to find its biggest hit to date.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 3rd, 2015
"Remember when our biggest problem was which Mayan to kill?"
All good things come to an end, and all rides eventually reach their destination. It's all come home for the gang at Sons of Anarchy, and you can believe that if anyone is left standing when it's over, there will be scars. Kurt Sutter has taken the culture of the motorcycle club, don't call them a gang, and made it accessible to a regular audience. He did that not by attempting to overwhelm us with the iconography of the genre.
