The Blu Spot

The Film: It really is quite amazing that it took this long for there to finally be a biopic about one of the most legendary music icons who ever lived. Sure, there had been a few TV documentaries about Michael Jackson over the years, but somehow we had never gotten a big budget, theatrical film about the King of Pop until now. It's hard to imagine the intense pressure of trying to get something like that right, knowing full-well that millions of fans around the world are cla

The Film: Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who has brought us such classics as "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," "Erin Brockovich," and "Traffic," has been going through a bit of a dry spell lately. His last three outings have included the poorly-received "Magic Mike's Last Dance," the bland haunted house drama "Presence," and "Black Bag," a spy thriller that was more interested in being clever than it was in telling a compelling story. It's been unfortunate to see him st

The Film: It's been quite a while since we've heard from acclaimed filmmaker Gus Van Sant, whose past works include great films like "Good Will Hunting" and "Milk." His last project, "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot," came out all the way back in 2018, receiving mixed reviews and coming & going without making much of a splash, but at long last he's returned with his latest feature, the real-life crime thriller "Dead Man's Wire." Will this rendition of an actual hostage

The Film: It seems like every year or two, a horror film comes along that gets everyone really riled up, causing critics to shower it with praise and act like it's one of the greatest things to come along in the genre for quite some time. The problem is, at least within the last several years, these films typically don't live up to the insane hype heaped upon them, making it seem like those doing the raving were simply too easily impressed by what they saw. This year, the fil

The Film: Like most of the classic monsters of the '30s, "The Mummy" is one that's been done to death over the subsequent decades, with highlights including the original Boris Karloff classic (which is more of a melodrama than a horror film), the 1959 Hammer film with Sir Christopher Lee, the action-filled 1999 rendition with Brendan Fraser, and the 2017 outing with Tom Cruise, which was such a disaster that it killed an entire planned universe of films before it could even g

The Film: Last we saw of writer/director Kristoffer Borgli, he delivered the rather intriguing "Dream Scenario," a film with a fascinating premise in which everyone is inexplicably dreaming about the same ordinary person. Unfortunately, it ended up being another classic example of a filmmaker having a really neat idea, but not really knowing where to take it or how to use it effectively, ultimately leading to a film that basically meanders for its brief 90-minute runtime. Now

The Film: Hot on the heels of "Crime 101," here we have another crime caper of a completely different sort with "The Mastermind." Coming to us from writer/director Kelly Reichardt, whose name you may remember from such films as "First Cow," "Night Moves," and "Wendy and Lucy," it attempts to approach the sub-genre from a slightly different angle in order to give us a single-focus, character-driven outing, while toning the excitement factor down considerably. Having been aroun

The Film: As always, when it comes to the over-saturated genre of romantic-comedies, the single biggest hope one can have when watching one of these films is to find one that doesn't have a strict adherence to the standard formula that the vast majority of them can't seem to get away from. Whenever they recycle it yet again, all we end up with is a banal, predictable, cliched mess in which the audience can name every beat well before it happens, making the need for a hefty do

The Films: There are very few people who can claim to have achieved such monumental global success as an action star as the great Jackie Chan. His incredible martial arts skills & prowess have been entertaining audiences for several decades, starting all the way back in the '60s, followed by his major breakout in Asia in the late '70s, and further still with his introduction to the US in the '90s. To celebrate this phenomenal icon, Arrow Films has assembled a collection of si

The Films: Back in 1992, a little video game called "Mortal Kombat" was unleashed and instantly became an insanely popular phenomenon. Utilizing an intriguing photo-realistic style that had actors standing in for its characters, this little fighting game also became a rather controversial one among parents for its use of blood (though obviously quite tame to what would follow in the proceeding decades), leading to it being omitted from certain versions of the home port. It wo