All articles by Peter Suciu

Something is rotten in Charming in this modern day retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. Set in the rural California world of biker gangs, this puts a very different spin on the tale of the prince who would be king.

Writer Bret Easton Ellis offers a blast from the past that is confusing, goes nowhere and makes Los Angeles in the decade of decadence appear as if it were populated entirely by self-absorbed, self-centered caricatures from a music video.

One of director Akira Kurosawa’s true samurai epics gets the full Criterion Collection treatment on Blu-ray and has never looked or sounded better.

Time has been somewhat cruel to Terry Gilliam’s trippy time travel tale. While the visually surreal story seems somewhat dated at this point, the Blu-ray presentation is just a step up from the DVD version (and almost the same as the HD DVD version).

Before Die Hard and the its knock-offs blew apart buildings with over-the-top stories, director John Badham’s aerial escapist thriller offered a showdown in the sky that sent glass flying over Los Angeles. While light on plot, this one still packs some thrills more than 25 years later. Just don’t expect this Blue to deliver much thunder on Blu-ray.

While today’s big budget disaster epics have high tech CGI and cutting edge special effects, there is often little heart and practically no story. For that reason this 1974 epic, to paraphrase the Oscar winning song, proves "we may never see movies like this again."