Walker: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) by Justin Remer The Movie: Walker (1987) is the last film to date that director Alex Cox has made with a major Hollywood studio, and one suspects that neither party is all that torn up about it. Cox, who made his name with Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, is the kind of unrepentant rebel whose point-of-view makes for wild and challenging films but not often a lot of money. (Of his lesser-known independent productions, I recommend the Beckettian travelogue Three Businessmen.)One wonders what exactly Universal Pictures thought it was getting when it greenlit Walker, ...Read the entire review »

The Contractor (2022) (4K Ultra HD) (Blu-ray) by William Harrison THE FILM:\r\nThe pandemic and related rise of streaming-video platforms and exclusive releases has been interesting. Suddenly, movies that would have crashed and burned at the box office are billed as big-ticket items on streaming services. The initial HBO Max premiere releases like Dune and The Matrix Resurrections are perhaps the exceptions, as they were planned theatrical releases, but production companies were willing to sell the distribution rights to many of these films for a reason: they're trash. Tarik Saleh's The Contractor falls somewhere in the middle. It is competently made and acted, relatively entertaining, and entirely generic and forgettable. The film wrapped production in late 2019, then STXfilms sold the distribution rights to P...Read the entire review »