Category Archives: For Your Queue

Find the best new releases and pair those with something from the stacks that you might have missed.

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of April 16

Two-word titles available for home viewing this week. Do you want to watch a slick, important movie about that reminds you just how far America has fallen? Spielberg for you. Rather watch that same Liam Neeson movie you’ve grown to need somehow in your life? That’s here, too.

Click the film title for the full review.

The Post

The Commuter

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of April 9

Good looking week this week for those of us too damn lazy to get off the couch. Oscar nominees, great directors, brilliant actors, songs, dances…hard to go wrong.

Click the movie title for the full review.

Phantom Thread

All the Money in the World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCSNwXMpntg

Molly’s Game

The Greatest Showman

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of April 2

What’s new in home entertainment? Three movies you probably missed in theaters that deserve your attention and one dog. Choose wisely. Let us help.

Click the movie title for the full review.

Jane

Thelma

Sweet Virginia

Insidious: The Last Key

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of March 26

You know a fun way to pass the time during a boring holiday weekend? With Star Wars movies. Lucky for us, the latest drops for home entertainment this week. Piss off your Fox News watching uncle and your most self-indulgent of white male nerd friends with the strong female lead and natural character arc of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

For a full review, click the movie title.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of March 19

You know the best cure for a St. Patrick’s Day hangover? The Rock. That’s what he told me, anyway, and who am I to argue? His better-than-expected Jumanji comes out this week, as does the better-than-you-heard Downsizing and the worse-the-third-time Pitch Perfect 3. Let us help you choose.

Click the film title for a full review.

Downsizing

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Pitch Perfect 3

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of March 12

It’s Oscar week, people. Not the week of the Oscars, but the week the Oscar winners and nominees come home to us. All told, five Oscar nominees (including the best picture winner) are available for home entertainment. And, if you prefer bad movies, Justice League is also out. Choice!

Click the film title for a full review.

The Shape of Water

Call Me By Your Name

I, Tonya

The Disaster Artist

Ferdinand

Justice League

Metaphorically Yours

The Cured

by Hope Madden

Zombies have proven to be metaphorically versatile over the decades. For Romero, they were sometimes the mindless consumer, sometimes the oppressed, sometimes the political outcasts.

David Freyne’s new Irish horror, The Cured, pushes the epidemic/ostracism angle to create xenophobic and racist parallels, as well as flashes of the kind of contagion-phobic hatred the AIDS epidemic met with. And Freyne does so without losing sight of a compelling, sometimes punishing story.

The Dublin of the not-so-distant future is home to the world’s most cataclysmic outbreak of the MAZE virus—a 28 Days Later kind of thing.

Senan (Sam Keeley) is among the stricken. Along with thousands of his countrymen, Senan has spent the last several years a zombie of sorts—a mindless, cannibalistic killing machine.

And though a cure has been found—relieving 75% of the infected—returning to a society proves difficult because the cured can remember their beastly behavior. So can the uninfected.

Plus, there is still that tricky question of what to do with the other 25%, “the incurable.”

Ellen Page (who also executive produces) co-stars as Senan’s widowed sister-in-law, and becomes  our window into what humanity may be left in humanity.

For a world in chaos (ours, not that of the movie), zombies offer a simple way to contend with the unimaginable: racism being celebrated at the highest offices, child molestation being excused when it’s politically convenient, Nazis being labeled good guys. For Freyne, publicly sanctioned fear and hatred leads first to oppression and then to uprising.

His set decoration echoes WWII-era propaganda as his characters struggle with shame, disenfranchisement, and righteous indignation. Keely’s deeply human performance remains focused on overcoming, but it’s the unnerving turn by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor that makes this film a keeper.

A barrister with political aspirations before the outbreak, Vaughan-Lawlor’s Conor proves a natural to lead a revolution. But what feels at first like an imbalance between entitlement and outrage slowly blossoms into something impressively fiendish.

There are two concerns with The Cured. 1) By horror standards, it’s a sociopolitical drama. 2) By the time it decides to become a horror movie, any hint of novelty or originality vanishes.

But don’t discount it. The Cured is smart and relevant. It doesn’t leave you guessing and won’t satisfy your bloodlust, but there is something satisfying in knowing that the ugliness and chaos of the day has not gone unnoticed.

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of March 5

Some super kick-ass women available to entertain you with tales of adolescence, murder, God and mayhem this week. Nicely done, ladies.

There’s also a man who invented Christmas, but honestly, only a man would claim to have invented Christmas. Sheesh.

Click film title for the full review.

Lady Bird

Mohawk

Midnighters

The Man Who Invented Christmas

Novitiate

Wonder Wheel

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of February 26

It is one hell of a week in home entertainment, people. Oscar nominees aplenty! No reason to leave home even one time this week. Woot!

Click the film title for a full review.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Coco

Darkest Hour

Murder on the Orient Express

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of February 20

I had a dream last night. It was about a poor wise man who changes the city.

Yes, among the very worst and most embarrassing (for us as a people) films Same Kind of Different as Me is available for home “entertainment” this week, but fear not. So are tons of other things: a colorfully adorable superhero flick, a couple of solid horror flicks, and one bad comedy. Though it not as bad—or as funny—as Same Kind

Click the link for the full review.

Thor: Ragnarok

The Cured

Mom and Dad

Daddy’s Home 2

Same Kind of Different as Me