Aladdin (1992) (4K Ultra HD) (Blu-ray) <small>by William Harrison</small><hr /> THE FILM: Disney's Aladdin was my favorite animated film growing up, and it remains near the top of my list. I was enthralled when I saw the film in theaters back in 1992, screened my family's VHS copy hundreds of times, bought the soundtrack to blast on my stereo, and played the 1993 videogame for hours on my Sega Genesis console. This is the animated film of my generation; a perfect mix of music, drama, action and comedy, with one gigantically memorable performance from the late Robin Williams. It has been a few years since I watched Aladdin, so I was happy to receive Disney's new 4K Ultra HD release of the film, timed with the home-video release of the recent live-action remake, and give it a spin. The movie definitely holds up, and it is refreshingly rough-and-tumble for a children's movie. While there are...Read the entire review »

Mirage (Blu-ray) <small>by Stuart Galbraith IV</small><hr /> Intended as a follow-up to Universal's successful romantic thriller Charade (1963), Mirage (1965) features a screenplay by the same writer, Peter Stone, and two up-and-coming actors from that film, Walter Matthau and George Kennedy. Gregory Peck, who had starred in a string of successful Universal releases earlier in the decade, including Cape Fear and To Kill a Mockingbird (both 1962), headlines the cast. (First-time viewers might want to stop reading here, despite this mostly spoiler-free review, and watch the film cold. It plays best knowing nothing about it going in.) A Hitchcockian thriller like Charade, Mirage is also a bit like a feature-length version of The Twilight Zone, built around a "What's Going On Here?"-type mystery with a slight but definitely science fiction component. Peck had starred in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), which...Read the entire review »

When A Stranger Calls Back (Blu-ray) <small>by Jesse Skeen</small><hr /> 1979's When a Stranger Calls was one of my first exposures to "scary movies". I remember hearing an ad for it on the radio at night (with a sinister voice saying "When a STRANGER Calls! Rated R.") and then being unable to sleep. It was over a decade later when I finally saw the movie and I realized how generally dull it was- the only "scary" part was the first 20 or so minutes with the babysitter (Carol Kane) getting the phone calls. That quickly wrapped up and the remainder of the movie was a rather boring, certainly not scary, manhunt after the bad guy escapes from prison. I'd known about this sequel, originally made for Showtime and then dumped on home video, and thought that just maybe it would deliver the goods that the original seemed to have promised. I've now been able to check it out through Scream Factory's B...Read the entire review »