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10 May

Lake Eerie

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Skip It Director: Chris MajorsStarring: Meredith Majors, Betsy Baker, Anne Leigh CooperYear: 2016You may think you've seen painful acting before, but you have yet to meet Lake Eerie, a film that is as bizarre, awful, and unimaginative as its title. I'm not sure if my words can prepare you for such a film failure, an amateur attempt at something, I don't know what, that could not possibility have resulted in what the filmmakers were aiming for. Because, if this is the movie that they were trying to make, someone needs to take away their cameras and put them under lock…
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09 May

The Migrants

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Recommended Director: Tom GriesStarring: Ron Howard, Cloris Leachman, Sissy SpacekYear: 1974The Migrants is a film that has almost completed its slide away from our memories, becoming something of the past that very few remember and even the internet can't firmly hold captive in time. Made for television in 1974, this movie is an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams story, living in that on-stage feeling that Williams perfected, but also bringing a Steinbeck air to the screen with its focus on the traveling worker and his family's plight. Not much remains of The Migrants except a barely-seen IMDb page, perhaps one…
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09 May

Just About Famous

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Rent It In 10 Words or LessPlaying pretend for a livingReviewer's Bias*Loves: DocumentariesLikes: a good tribute showDislikes: Delusional peopleHates: Bad impersonatorsThe MovieConfessions of a Superhero is a fantastic documentary about the people who dress up like caped crusaders in Hollywood in search of fame or money, exploring their lives and all the questions you'd have about those folks. There are moments where Just About Famous approaches those topics, but it's mainly satisfied with keeping its distance from the celebrity impersonators it profiles and acting as a tourist in their world, focusing on the Sunburst Convention, an annual gathering of "tribute…
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07 May

Silence; Passengers; A Monster Calls and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Martin Scorsese repays his fans’ faith with his most rewarding film in years – but Passengers is a slight tale of lust in spaceNeither cinemagoers nor awards voters made much noise about Silence (Studiocanal, 15), though that was to be expected. If Martin Scorsese’s long-cherished, serenely austere passion project had been an easy sell, it wouldn’t have taken him over a quarter of a century to develop. Two hours and 40 minutes of 17th-century Jesuit priests suffering for their faith in feudal Japan is a pitch itself designed to test the religiosity of Scorsese worshippers. The reward for those who…
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03 May

The Mysterious Airman

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Highly Recommended The Serial:Movie serials were a staple of movie matinees in the 30's and 40's,but they were incredibly popular in the silent era too.Unfortunately, there are few chapterplays from the 1910's and 20'sthat still exist in complete form. That's why it's so exciting thatSprocket Vault has unearthed, restored, and released a complete 10chapter serial from 1928: The Mysterious Airman. Not only isthe film of interest to historians however, but it's a funcliffhanger in its own right. The tinted picture looks amazing too,especially for a film this old that was presumed lost for decades.Jack Baker (Walter Miller) is the owner…
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02 May

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson: The Vault Series Volumes 7-12

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Rent It The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson DVD Set ReviewThe TonightShow StarringJohnny Carson was a long-running NBCtelevision talk show and variety program which airedfor 30 seasons from 1962-1992. The series was beloved, in part, becauseof itslegendary host. Carson is highly regarded as one of the best televisionhostsin history. Johnny Carson hasoften been hailed as the father of modern late night television withhis use ofstand-up comedy and a format of television variety programming whichhas beenused in large part since. Though late night television has certainlyhad someupdates or tweaks over time, Carson's method of a comedy openingmonologue andintervie...Read the entire review…
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30 Apr

Hee Haw: The Collector's Edition

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Recommended Hee Haw DVD Collection ReviewHee Hawbeganas a variety entertainment series on the CBS network in 1969.  Though the series received impressivetelevision ratings, CBS decided to cancel many programs at thetime-period thatreflected country programming and Hee Hawgot the axe. However, the series continued in syndication and went onto becomeone of the longest running syndicated series in history with 21additionalseasons.There's no plot: theseries revolves solely around entertaining the audience. Hosts BuckOwens andRoy Clark lead an ensemble group of performers each week in a series ofsketchesand musical pe...Read the entire review Source: DVD Talk
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30 Apr

Casting JonBenet; Why Him?; I.T.; Diving Into the Unknown and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Kitty Green’s study of the unsolved murder of the child beauty queen is a multilayered masterpiece – and clever Netflix have acquired itThe risk of repeating oneself too frequently in a weekly column is one to be carefully considered, though sometimes the vagaries of the release schedule make it unavoidable: for the second week running, a Netflix premiere handily trumps any new offerings on the DVD shelf. The streaming giant’s intelligent taste in documentary cinema has been known for some time now, but in grabbing Casting JonBenet straight from the festival circuit – it premiered in Sundance only three months…
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29 Apr

We Don't Belong Here

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Rent It Director: Peer PedersenStarring: Kaitlyn Dever, Catherine Keener, Annie StarkeYear: 2017Anton Yelchin's final role comes in We Don't Belong Here, a film that doesn't feature him enough. Obviously I don't mean they should have known that this would be the end of an exciting career and so given him more screen time; his death was an unimaginable tragedy that caught every film fan with a sucker punch. He should simply have been given more to do in this movie, as he was by far the best thing about it. Director Peer Pedersen also wrote the script, and has no…
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29 Apr

Death Valley Days Complete First Season

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Recommended The earliest television Westerns, shows from the late 1940s and early 50s, mostly were adaptations of successful, long-running theatrical B-Westerns, series starring William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Gene Autry, etc. Although many of these shows originated as B-Westerns for general audiences or even specifically adults, by the time television was rolling out their audience consisted primarily of children who adored such shows. In past reviews I've extolled the virtues of TV's earliest adult Westerns, particularly Gunsmoke (premiering in 1955) and Have Gun - Will Travel (1957), but one series predates those, a semi-adult transitional TV…
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24 Apr

Youth in Oregon

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Rent It The Movie:I really didn't intentionally make Frank Langella a common thread in two of my last three standard definition DVD reviews. But the case handler in The Americans finds himself the unwanted center of attention in Youth in Oregon, a comedy-drama that is copious amounts of one genre and perhaps not enough of the other.Written by Andrew Eisen and directed by Joel David Moore (Spiral), Langella plays Raymond, an 80-year old patriarch who lives with his daughter Kate (Christina Applegate, Bad Moms) and her family, along with his wife Estelle (Mary Kay Place, Sweet Home Alabama). He makes…
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24 Apr

Night Has Settled

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Recommended The subject of "troubled youth" in Night Has Settled interested me, as most of my teenage years were rather boring and I now think of both the good and bad points of not having been more adventurous then. A review quoted on the DVD's back cover compares it to the films of Larry Clark (best known for 1995's controversial Kids), which is a somewhat fair comparison though this film from Steve Clark (no relation) doesn't seem intended to shock audiences as much.Our main character is 13 year old Oliver (Spencer List), who first appears innocent and childlike. He lives…
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23 Apr

Vitaphone Varieties Volume Three

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Highly Recommended The Shorts:After a long wait, Warner Brothers, through their direct-to-consumerprogram The Warner Archives, have released the third volume of VitaphoneVarieties. It's been over four years since the second volumewas released, and it's great that they are continuing thecollection. This single disc (the previous installments weremulti-disc collections) contains 16 rare shorts with appearances byperformers who are great, not so great, and just weird. It's a funand entertaining collection that's sure to amuse.Most of these one-reel shorts feature performers that were recruitedfrom the vaudeville circuits. (One performer didn't even bother tochange the patter in his act, and discusses how everyone…
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23 Apr

Tramps; Sand Castle; Madame Bovary; Salt and Fire and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
‘Straight to Netflix’ needn’t be a derogatory term – there are still gems to be found on the streaming platform“If a movie premieres on Netflix, is it still even a movie?” asked the American film critic David Ehrlich last week, stoking an ongoing, still-heated industry debate over the streaming giant’s handling of the new films it exclusively acquires, making them skip the cinema circuit entirely. For more tradition-bound cinephiles, “straight to Netflix” has the same stigma “straight to video” once did, though in the case of so-called Netflix Originals such as Adam Leon’s Tramps, it really shouldn’t.Leon turned heads at Cannes…
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19 Apr

The Bureau: Season 1

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Rent It Following the introduction of James Bond to movies in the 1960s, the spy genre has slowly polarized itself into two camps: the over-the-top thrill ride with the gadgets and the dashing hero, and the gritty, realistic approach with an eye for detail (Bond never got too close to the latter, but the current run of Daniel Craig movies are certainly attempting to have their cake and eat it too). To this pile, we can now add "The Bureau", a decent French spy series that never exactly catches fire but delivers some well-orchestrated thrills.The series is comprised of three…
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17 Apr

Mifune: The Last Samurai

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Rent It As perhaps the most globally recognized Japanese film star of all time, the legendary Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997) was featured in nearly 200 films during a career that spanned almost 50 years. Largely remembered for his collaborations with director Akira Kurosawa between 1948 and 1965---which include such classics as Rashomon, <A href="http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/44857/seven-samurai/" target="blank...Read the entire review Source: DVD Talk
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16 Apr

Circle

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Rent It In 10 Words or LessSci-fi, ethics, psychology, disappointment...this one's got it allReviewer's Bias*Loves: Smart sci-fi, psychological filmLikes: Bottle episodes, indie filmsDislikes: Obvious button-pushingHates: Disappointing endingsThe MovieAll due respect to the people involved in making Circle, but I hate this movie. That's not a judgement on the technical effort, which is solid. It has nothing to do with the performances, which are uniformly good. And it's not a problem with the story. The reason I came away from this film with a negative opinion about Circle is solely the ending, which has to be one of the most disappointing…
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16 Apr

Sully; The Birth of a Nation; Four Days in France and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
A lighter hand on the controls might have helped Clint Eastwood’s film about the Miracle on the Hudson, but Nate Parker’s account of a 19th-century slave rebellion is just a macho messClint Eastwood, like Woody Allen, is routinely praised for the near-clockwork regularity of his output: not every film’s a gem, but you can be sure another one’s coming down the pike. Sully: Miracle on the Hudson (Warner, 12), however, is one of those Eastwood films you wish he’d taken a little more time over. There are whispers of a deeper, sadder, more stirring psychological portrait in this study of…
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09 Apr

Rogue One; Swiss Army Man; The Pass; Frank & Lola and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
The force loses its lustre as Rogue One takes itself too seriously, while Daniel Radcliffe excels as a flatulent corpseMuch was made in advance of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Disney, 12) being a standalone film in the now 40-year-old space-hopping franchise, a narrative that tucks in snugly before the events of 1977’s series starter, but introduces fresh characters and objectives within a known world. It’s a good idea: studio money guzzlers wouldn’t dream of letting the whole thing lie, but the overt nostalgia mined by The Force Awakens isn’t a limitless resource. So why does Rogue One, for…
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02 Apr

Moana; Allied; Snowden; One More Time With Feeling and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Disney’s uplifting Polynesian adventure is a cut above Robert Zemeckis’s silly wartime caper while Oliver Stone makes a hash of whistleblower Snowden’s storyThe profitable new recycling scheme that Disney has hit upon – remaking its own animated catalogue, minus the animation – is moving ahead so fast, one wonders how much time even their new cartoon efforts have got before getting expensively humanised. Perhaps a live-action Moana (Disney, PG) can be rustled up while its leading voice star, 16-year-old Auli’i Cravalho, is still suitably young. In the title role, her lively, lilting vocal presence is the most immediately winsome element…
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DVD Guide reviews current dvd releases of movies and TV shows. The reviews of these dvd releases are my thoughts and understandings of the movie, dvd releases or TV show and not be taken as fact.

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