Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, we have a pretty full slate to get into, led by James Cameron‘s latest Avatar adventure, Avatar: Fire and Ash. Today also features new releases like The Bride!, The Napa Boys, Sirât, and more. There’s also several 4K and Blu-ray re-releases, alongside a pair of Criterion Collection debuts. What else is hitting shelves? Find out below…
Joey’s Top Pick
Avatar: Fire and Ash
I’ve never been the world’s biggest Avatar fan, but each film has been nothing short of enjoyable. The first one was mesmerizing while being narratively thin. Avatar: The Way of Water managed to up the ante in all manners, making for the most overall complete movie in the franchise. Now, with Avatar: Fire and Ash, we have a visual spectacle that’s still fun, but now is narratively spinning its wheels a bit. My review here on the site began like so:
Three films in, as well as a little more than ten hours spent watching, and James Cameron‘s Avatar franchise has had varied expectations each time out. Initially, Avatar was a phenomenon, showing audiences that movies could still look different, transporting everyone to Pandora. The sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, had to build upon the first one while still showing folks something new. As I wrote in my review at the time here, its success was proof never to bet against Cameron. So, we all went into the third flick, Avatar: Fire and Ash, with some degree of confidence that he’d knock this one out of the park as well. Well, the highs are still certainly incredibly high. At the same time, repetition and wheel spinning has set in, making for the first in this franchise that had some degree of boredom attached to it.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is not the longest film ever made, I factually know that to be the case. However, there were points during the movie where you could not convince me otherwise. That’s the trouble I had here with this third installment. When it’s good, it’s very good. For the first time though, the negatives were almost running neck and neck with the positives. That keeps me from doing anything close to the raving that I was able to do with Avatar: The Way of Water. Quality wise, this is similar to the first Avatar, just with less of the novelty factor at play.
Also Available This Week
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
Alligator (4K)
Arco
Conan the Barbarian (4K)
The Conjuring Universe: 9-Film Collection (Blu-ray)
The Da Vinci Code (4K SteelBook)
Fallout: Season Two (TV)
The Front (4K)
Ginger Snaps (4K)
Hearts of Darkness 4K: The Art of Eleanor Coppola (SteelBook)
The Napa Boys (Interview with co-star Mike Mitchell here)
Reminders of Him
Scarlet
Sirât
Snowpiercer: The Complete Series (TV)
Speed Racer (4K) *Interview with star Emile Hirsch here*
Talk Radio (Blu-ray)
The Walk (4K)
The Warriors (4K)
Criterion Corner
Body Heat
From The Criterion Collection: “With his debut feature, acclaimed writer-director Lawrence Kasdan brilliantly updated the conventions of 1940s film noir for the 1980s, resulting in one of the steamiest and most influential erotic thrillers ever made. On the sultry South Florida coast, lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt) is drawn into a torrid affair with unhappily married housewife Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner, in a star-making performance)—and it’s not long before they’ve hatched a scheme to murder her wealthy husband. Featuring ingenious plot twists, memorable hard-boiled dialogue, and an atmosphere so evocative you can practically feel the humidity, Body Heat is a languorously seductive tale of greed and desire, one that paved a new path for American crime cinema.”
–
Fresh Kill
From The Criterion Collection: “A disturbingly prescient ecofeminist parable and a brain-wave-scrambling cyberpunk fantasia, the debut feature from new-media pioneer Shu Lea Cheang merges a bold vision of resistance with an exuberant early-internet aesthetic. In a dystopian-chic New York where sushi joints and toxic-waste sites exist side by side, a lesbian couple (Sarita Choudhury and Erin McMurtry) turn to the hacker underground to solve their daughter’s disappearance, in the process exposing a conspiracy involving corporate greenwashing and tainted fish. Swinging between outré satire and agitprop, Fresh Kill sounds the alarm about a capitalist system that pollutes everything from our waterways to our bodies to our minds.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
Comments
Loading…