Christmas in July (Blu-ray) <small>by Adam Tyner</small><hr /> <hr /> "If you don't sleep at night, it isn't the coffee &ndash; it's the bunk." <hr /> [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] Forget that musty old tagline on the Maxford House Coffee building; they just haven't gotten around to replacing it with the slogan that Jimmy (Murder, My Sweet's Dick Powell) dreamed up. You get it, right? C'mon...Read the entire review »

Batman Beyond: The Complete Series Deluxe Limited Edition (Blu-ray) <small>by Ian Jane</small><hr /> The Show: In 2019, Batman has started to age. While he still fights crime, he now uses a specially designed Bat-Suit to do it. When he has a heart attack while working a case, he decides that it's time to hang up the cape and cowl for good. Twenty years pass, and Gotham changes as all cities do. Bruce Wayne has just turned seventy, living alone in Wayne Manor and basically hiding from the world when a teenager named Terry McGinnis winds up being chased onto the estate by a motorcycle gang called The Jokerz. Bruce and Terry get into, and win, a fight with the gang but Bruce's heart problems creep up again and he winds up needing Terry's help to get back inside and settled. Terry pokes around inside and, after uncovering the entrance to the Bat-Cave, starts to piece together the puzzle only to then get caught by Bruce and kicked out of the manor. When Terry comes home, he finds his ...Read the entire review »

The Haunting of Hill House (Blu-ray) <small>by Oktay Ege Kozak</small><hr /> The Miniseries: Like Ari Aster, Mike Flanagan has a unique knack for blending psychological horror brought upon by family trauma with old-fashioned genre spooks and scares. We jump out of our seats in the moment of any given expertly structured ghostly set piece, take a relieved breath afterward, then move on. In that sense, he pays off the prerequisite conditions of modern horror. But it's the painfully relatable drama and neuroses that come from complicated and hurtful experiences with past family ties and relationships, still lingering as they darken our day-to-day lives while blocking our path forward for a content and peaceful existence, that makes his work special. That horror sticks, and Flanagan is fully aware of it. That's why his attention to character development and psychology, derived from a painful past with family, turns him into one of the most insightful horror fi...Read the entire review »

Light of My Life (Blu-ray) <small>by Ryan Keefer</small><hr /> The Movie: Occasionally when not providing contributions in features that are more universally respected, apparently Casey Affleck takes a turn with a movie that can be polarizing in some technical aspect that drags down the other virtues of the film, with 2002's Gerry being one that comes to mind for me, and is one that I haven't seen largely for that reason. There is the chance that Light of my Life may be one of those films, but who's to say. The Oscar winner from Manchester by the Sea wrote and directed this film, which he stars in as "Dad," a father who is walking around a post-apocalyptic landscape with Rag (Anna Pniowsky, He's Out There). Rag is a girl but her identity is concealed by her Dad, as a pandemic wiped out a large chunk o...Read the entire review »