DVD and Blu-ray Releases for April 15th, 2014

April 15th, 2014

It is a busy week on the home market with five films that either opened at least semi-wide or expanded semi-wide. However, unlike last week, there's no monster hit like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug leading the way. In fact, most of the semi-wide or wide releases on this week's list were critical and box office disappointments. Only Philomena did well with critics. Fortunately, it did well enough that it is a contender for Pick of the Week without even considering the extras on the DVD or Blu-ray. There are a few other new releases that are noteworthy, but most of them are catalog Blu-ray releases. These include Touch of Evil on Blu-ray and Double Indemnity on Blu-ray. In the end, I went with Touch of Evil, but I literally had to roll a dice to decide. More...

Featured DVD Review: Flowers in the Attic

April 13th, 2014

Flowers in the Attic started out as a book in 1979 and was first turned into a movie in 1987. This movie earned poor reviews, but did okay business at the box office, mainly because of the controversial nature of the book. Earlier this year, the film was released as a TV movie on Lifetime and brought in more than 6 million viewers to the channel, something none of their original movies from 2013 were able to accomplish. On the other hand, Lifetime's original movies don't exactly have a great reputation and there is already one bad movie based on the book, so my expectations are not exactly high. Is this film a good surprise? Or should I have lowered my expectations more? More...