Matewan (Blu-ray) <small>by DVD Savant</small><hr /> Reviewed by Glenn Erickson Looking for a movie about a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil? &nbsp;Better experiences than Marvel superheroes and Star Wars fantasies can be found, if you know where to look. John Sayles' riveting true story of a violent labor confrontation in the 1920s has the outline and the action of a classic western. Matewan is no simplistic law 'n' order fantasy, no 'Shane in the Coal Country.' We instead witness a core drama of the real American experience, and a lesson that needs to be re-learned. The rise of the middle class after WW2 made too many people forget what labor struggles had achieved, back in a time when powerful business interests had even more freedom than they do now. As the old movie studios were mostly anti-Union as wel...Read the entire review »

Shaft / Shaft's Big Score! / Shaft in Africa (Blu-ray) <small>by Ian Jane</small><hr /> The Movies: Warner Archive does right by the black private dick whose a sex machine to all the chicks' with this three-disc collection bringing together all three of the original seventies Shaft films in high definition. Shaft: Directed by Gordon Parks and written by Earnest Tidymany (and based on his own book of the same name) and released in 1971, Shaft was a trendsetter, one of the first mainstream films to posit a black man as a tough talking, no-nonsense private investigator, the kind that didn't take any crap from anybody, regardless of skin color. We see this right away as John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) walks through thick Manhattan traffic, mouthing off to those who get in his way with a loud and clear Up yours, baby!' As he heads to his office, he gets a tip: two bad dudes are looking for him. When they inevitably attack him, he's ready and hi...Read the entire review »

Silver Bullet (Blu-ray) <small>by Kurt Dahlke</small><hr /> Silver Bullet: Silver Bullet, about a werewolf terrorizing a small New England town, is about as quintessential a mid-'80s Stephen King movie as one can imagine. Featuring an uneven tone, cheap special effects, corn-pone characterizations, and Gary Busey, Silver Bullet never had a chance to overcome its weaknesses on its way to becoming a mildly amusing Saturday afternoon time-waster. The year was 1985, a time ripe for this movie. Stephen King was (then and now) the world's biggest author, and despite discouraging degrees of success in cinema adaptation, about 172 movies based on King's works were released between 1984 and 1986, all of which were produced by Dino Di Laurentiis, a man who, back then, (in truth) had 5 movies in production at any given time. But if for the viewer, the concept of turning King movies into product churned out by a factory weren't strong enough a wa...Read the entire review »

Dog Day aka Canicule (Blu-ray) <small>by Ian Jane</small><hr /> The Movie: Jimmy Cobb (Lee Marvin) is an American gangster who lives in France. He's currently hiding out from authorities with a whole lot of stolen cash on his person, hoping to keep it for himself and not get banned. See, just a little while ago Jimmy gave his girlfriend a goodbye kiss and left to take care of a little business which involved robbing a bank truck. What Jimmy didn't realize before he left on this endeavor was that the cops were one step ahead of him, awaiting his arrival at the bank. Jimmy, however, was undeterred by this and, with some help from a rocket launcher, managed get the cash and make it out alive. Jimmy then steals a car and heads out into the rural Beauce region in hopes of lying low until this all blows over a bit. What he doesn't count on is a pair of farmers figuring out what he's up to and hatching a scheme to get what he's got, all while his fo...Read the entire review »

Stick (Blu-ray) <small>by Ian Jane</small><hr /> The Movie: Directed by and starring Burt Reynolds with a script from Elmore Leonard adapting his own novel of the same name, Universal's 1985 film Stick tells the story of Ernest Stickney (Reynolds), a man who has recently been released from seven hard years behind bars. Early in the story, he and his pal Rainy (Jose Perez) take some money from a pusher named Chucky (Charles Durning) to deliver to a supplier named Nestor (Castulo Guerra), but it doesn't end well and Rainy winds up dead. Stick blames Nestor for the setup and wants revenge, while wanting payment from Chucky, and winds up stuck in the middle of all of this. In the interim, he takes a job as a chauffeur for the wealthy Barry Braham (George Segal), allowing him to lie low for a while, and then quickly finds himself hooking up with Barry's financial advisor, Kyle (Candice Bergen). Revenge, however, is never far f...Read the entire review »