The 1990/1992 Captain America movie that came to home video as a made-on-demand DVD in 2011 is now going to be available on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory. (As best I can piece it together, the movie was made in 1990 but shelved in the US until a 1992 home video release, although it played in some European countries earlier.) Unlike the DVD release, there is an extra included here, “Looking Back at Captain America With Director Albert Pyun and […]

The Rabbi’s Cat, which did not get nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar this year (since all the slots were taken by bigger-budget, non-foreign cartoons), will be out on Blu-ray later this spring. It’s also playing a few selected theaters in the U.S. starting this month. In the meantime, I got a chance to check out a screener. Here’s a subtitled trailer: Like the trailer, the movie is told in French with English subtitles. The first thing I noticed […]

The sequel to Red, a comic book movie adaptation I was really surprised to enjoy, has had its first trailer released. Red (said to stand for “Retired, Extremely Dangerous”) was based on a comic by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner about retired CIA agents that have to reunite and demonstrate how they’re still incredibly competent when one of them is targeted. Here’s the trailer: Based on this, the key actors of Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren […]

Dredd is an extremely violent science fiction action movie that is also very faithful to its comic source. For fans of either genre, it’s worth watching. Comic fans will also appreciate the mini-documentary on the source material included in the home video release. Judge Dredd was created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra in 2000 AD in 1977. In a nice touch, that’s the very first of the end credits, before even the actors’ names appear. The movie is faithful […]

Dick Tracy was released on Blu-ray last month. I saw the movie when it came out, and I was impressed by the cast. I also liked the limited palette, with only a few shades of bright colors used to give the movie a comic-strip look. For instance, early on, a set of oil barrels are red, green, and yellow, and suits are similar crazy shades — emerald, purple, and so on. It looks like someone spilled their crayon box all […]

The Rabbi’s Cat, an animated adaptation of Joann Sfar’s graphic novel about a talking feline and Jewish life in 1930s Algeria, is being pitched for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. It’s now screening in NY, opens next week in LA, and launches nationwide (with subtitles) in January. Sfar co-wrote and co-directed the film. Here’s the description: Algeria in the 1930s is an intersection of Jewish, Arab, and French culture. A cat belonging to a widowed rabbi eats the family parrot […]

As I said when the DVD was announced, I wanted to see The Dark Knight Rises mainly because of Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman, um, Selina Kyle. I didn’t catch it in theaters, because I find these spectaculars too dark for my taste. I don’t even recall if I ever saw The Dark Knight (because I was upset by Heath Ledger’s passing), and I was three years late on Batman Begins. So this is something of a naive writeup. Plus, at 2 […]

The marketing for Iron Man 3, opening in theaters May 3, 2013, is ramping up with today’s release of the trailer, as shown here: The movie, directed by Shane Black from a screenplay by Drew Pearce and Shane Black, features Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) fighting the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). As shown in various promotional photos, different suits of the Iron Man armor play a role, including what I’m assuming is a more patriotic version for War Machine (Don Cheadle […]