New in Home Entertainment
July 7, 2015
Slow West
Rated R for violence and brief language
Available on DVD and Blu-ray
This unconventional western stars Kodi Smit-McPhee as a love-torn young man who must travel across the country to find his girl and Michael Fassbender as a mysterious traveler who wants to help him get there for his own undeclared reasons. Beautifully shot and superbly paced, this is an easy enough film to watch with lots of shocking moments and a hugely talented cast. While Fassbender always impresses, I love that they threw in my favorite movie villain, Ben Mendelsohn, as a peculiar and unpredictable bounty hunter. This is the kind of western that makes you wish they’d bring the genre back in full force. A-
Maggie
Rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic material including bloody images, and some language
Available on DVD and Blu-ray
In this post-apocalyptic world a zombie virus infects Abigail Breslin leaving her father, Arnold Schwarzenegger, only weeks to say goodbye to his dear daughter forever. We’ve had a ton of cross-genre films lately, especially in the zombie realm where zombie rom coms have proved to be a semi-successful stretch. But zombie melodramas? In this case, it just doesn’t work. There’s not nearly enough horror and the long goodbye is just too long. The makeup effects are interesting and the story isn’t a bad idea, but there just seemed to be something missing. That being said, it does feel like there is a real vision here and it was fully realized on screen. Also, the performances are actually pretty good considering what the actors are doing and who they are playing. C+
Woman in Gold
Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and brief strong language
Available on DVD and Blu-ray
Based on a true story, Helen Mirren is a woman who, sixty years after fleeing Vienna for America during World War II, tries to get back her family’s famous Klimt painting “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” after it was stolen by the Nazis and placed in a museum in Vienna. Ryan Reynolds plays her inexperienced lawyer who spends years of his life trying fight for her right to claim what is hers. The story itself is fascinating and the script and cast do a very good job of telling it. It’s not the most exciting film you can spend an evening in front of, but it has its moments. My biggest disappointment was reading about the events that happened after this story ends on film. It just shows that Hollywood can really turn on the spin when it wants to. B-