New in Home Entertainment
April 5, 2016
Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%
Available on DVD and Blu-ray
The biggest movie of 2015 (and the reigning all-time box-office king) hits store shelves this week where it will most likely break records again. Continuing the saga, the film takes place decades after Return of the Jedi where a defected storm trooper (John Boyega) joins forces with a beautiful young scavenger (Daisy Ridley) as they find themselves the target of an Empire-like First Order and their leader Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Joining forces with an aged Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca, the team attempts to take on the First Order while they are on a desperate search for the missing Luke Skywalker. Director J.J. Abrams here did an impressive job of giving us everything that was sacred from Episodes IV-VI while at the same time delivering special effects that have a completely organic look and feel to them. Sure the plot around the Star Killer Base is pretty similar to what we’ve seen before, but overall the similarities are well-handled and the differences give us something to hope for in future films, which will be coming at a rapid pace over the next several years. Included in this set is a good amount of supplemental material worth watching including a rather intricate look at how the film was put together from concept to completion. I wish they had included at least a trailer for the new Rogue One film coming in December but I’m sure that’s all coming soon. A
Noma: My Perfect Storm
Unrated but contains much adult language
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 54%
Available on DVD and Blu-ray
Rather than making another simple food porn movie about the world’s most celebrated restaurant, director Pierre Deschamps here gives a good, bad and ugly account of how chef Rene Redzepi has won the world over with his Copenhagen restaurant touting an all-Nordic cuisine menu. While I did come away with a pretty decent sense of the chef’s vision, I thought I’d be ready to book a trip to Denmark after watching and that just wasn’t the case. It’s a fascinating subject, and worthy of a feature-length documentary, but if they were trying to sell their audience on Redzepi and his food (and I’m not sure if that was their goal) then they could have done a better job with their presentation. B-