Big Gay Picture Show

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema and more

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema & more

DVD and BLU-RAY REVIEWS

The latest reviews from the world of home entertainment

American Assassin (Blu-ray Review) – Dylan O’Brien takes on the terrorists

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Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) is just a normal guy until his world is turned upside down when terrorists storm a beach he’s on, shooting him and kill his fiancée. After that he becomes obsessed with hunting down the bad guys and making them pay. Initially he tries to do this by himself, until he’s pulled into a CIA programme and trained by Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton) to be able to go into the field and take the terrorists down.

He gets pulled into something deeper and potentially even deadly when an investigation into some seemingly random attacks leads them to a mysterious operative. Even worse, that operative may have a nuclear bomb. [Read more…]

Logan Lucky (Blu-ray Review) – Steven Soderbergh takes Channing Tatum on a blue collar heist

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Director Steven Soderbergh hasn’t done very well at retiring. After a career that’s ranged from Sex Lies & Videotape, Erin Brockovich and Traffic to the Ocean’s 11 trilogy, Out Of Sight and Magic Mike, he announced that his last feature film as a director would be 2013’s Liberace biopic, Behind The Candelabra. However, just four years later he’s back with Logan Lucky.

What appears to have brought him back wasn’t just the story and script, but that they managed to find a way to essentially cut out the usual mainstream film machine by pre-selling foreign distribution and TV/streaming rights and then releasing the movie in the US himself. [Read more…]

American Made (Blu-ray Review) – Tom Cruise gets into the 1980s drug trade alongside the CIA

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Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) is working as a pilot for TWA in the late 70s when she’s spotted by CIA agent Monty ‘Schafer’ (Domhnall Gleeson). Schafer wants Barry to fly reconnaissance missions in Central America, where the Soviet Union is backing Communist militias. His success at that leads to missions where he acts of the CIA courier to General Noriega in Panama, as well as helping to arm the anti-Communist Nicaraguan Contras in Honduras.

All this leads him to some dodgy places, including into the sphere of the Medellin Cartel, who get Barry to help them smuggle drugs into the US on his return trips. The CIA turn a blind eye to his side job as long as he still gets results. However, not every US law enforcement agency is as keen to ignore Barry’s smuggling. [Read more…]

The Limehouse Golem (DVD Review) – Bill Nighy investigates possibly LGBT Victorian murders

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A murderer is stalking the streets of Limehouse in Victorian London, killing viciously and spreading panic. The killer has become known as the Limehouse Golem; named after the medieval Jewish monster made of clay. Police Inspector John Kildare (Bill Nighy) is brought in to investigate, soon coming to wonder whether the killer is the recently deceased John Cree (Sam Reid).

This line of questioning introduces him to Cree’s wife, Lizzie (Olivia Cooke), as well as the world of the music hall theatre she used to work at, which is led by cross-dressing comedy star Dan Leno (Douglas Booth). The number of potential suspects continues to grow – at one point even leading Kildare to the door of Karl Marx – especially after the discovery of a book that may be the murderer’s diary. But who wrote it and why? [Read more…]

Dunkirk (Blu-ray Review) – Christopher Nolan goes to war in impressive fashion

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Christopher Nolan is one of the few directors who can pretty much make any movie he wants. Thanks to the success of unconventional big budget movies such as Interstellar and Inception – and of course The Dark Knight trilogy – Warner Bros. trusts him to deliver. On the surface Dunkirk seems a more straightforward proposition as it’s a World War II movie, but as this is Nolan, he’s not going to make a war film quite like anyone else.

For a start there’s remarkably little dialogue and while there are main characters, we learn comparatively little about them. Likewise, while it’s about an incredibly famous event, it’s not interested in being an exposition-heavy historical overview, complete with officers pushing little boats around a war-room map to explain to us what’s going on. Instead it’s a film that wants to create a sense of realism about the events it’s talking about. It also has an almost puzzle-box nature – three intercut stories each taking place at a slightly different time – helping to create a sense of the chaos and uncertainty for those caught up in the events of late Spring 1940. [Read more…]

The Dark Tower (Blu-ray Review) – The Stephen King fantasy saga finally makes it to the screen

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It’s a movie 10-years in the making (at least this attempt took 10 year), but when it arrived in cinemas The Dark Tower was met with negative reviews and muted box office. It currently has a pretty abysmal 16% on RottenTomatoes and just 5.9/10 from viewers on IMDB. So is it really that bad? No, it’s not, but its easy to understand why it’s had such bad reactions.

The film focuses on teenager Jake (Tom Taylor), who’s been having strange visions of a giant tower at the centre of the universe and the ‘Man In Black’ (Matthew McConaughey), who’s determined to destroy it. While those around him are beginning to think Jake is becoming unhinged, the teen discovers what he’s been seeing is real. [Read more…]

England Is Mine (DVD Review) – The early days of Morrissey gets a movie

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To some, Morrissey is a figure who inspires devotion – the musician-poet of outsiders and of those wish the world were a different place. To others though, he’s a man who’s spent the past 35 years whining and becoming increasingly out of touch with life as lived by everyone else (not helped by the messianic adoration he still attracts from those who love him). He’d also probably be the last person to collaborate on a film biopic, so England Is Mine is very much unofficial, picking up Steven Patrick Morrissey’s life in the 70s, before anyone knew who he was. By concentrating on the time before he started collaborating with Johnny Marr, also helps the movie get around the fact that it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for them to get the rights to use any of The Smiths’ music. [Read more…]

Strike: The Cuckoo’s Calling (DVD Review) – JK Rowling’s detective hits the small screen

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Apparently, the BBC enquired about the rights to Robert Galbraith’s novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, before it was revealed that Galbraith was actually a pseudonym of JK Rowling. However, it’s likely their plans for a TV version changed once they realised the interest that would be generated by the connection to the Harry Potter author.

This year we got five episodes of ‘Strike’, the first three of which adapted The Cuckoo’s Calling, and the other two The Silkworm. This DVD just contains the former, introducing us to private eye Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) – an injured war veteran (he lost part of his leg in Afghanistan), who’s swimming in debt and sleeping in his office. [Read more…]

War For The Planet Of The Apes (DVD Review) – Caesar’s story reaches a dark & impressive crossroads

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The recent Planet Of The Apes prequel trilogy is probably the most consistently impressive ‘blockbuster’ franchise of the past decade. The movies break the rules far more than they’re generally given credit for, getting progressively more radical as they’ve gone along. This is, after all, a big budget, tentpole franchise where human beings are the bad guys – they’re increasingly presented as brutal, arrogant, cruel and largely deserving of being wiped off the planet.

The three movies have been about the rise of a new civilisation, becoming increasingly confident in having non-human heroes, and that the audience won’t mind siding with the apes against humanity. It’s an oddly radical thing for them to have done. They’ve also become more confident in their moral complexity. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes was essentially about an insurgency from the point of view of the insurgents, using the fact that it was apes and humans to hide the fact that its strongest parallels were about America had done in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Read more…]

Jabberwocky (Criterion Blu-ray Review) – Terry Gilliam’s first directorial fantasy returns (including its little gay Easter Egg)

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In 1977 Monty Python had made their TV series and their first film, The Holy Grail, but hadn’t yet brought us Life Of Brian or The Meaning Of Life. In amongst this came Jabberwocky, which wasn’t a Python movie (although their production company was involved), but marked Terry Gilliam’s first movie as a solo director, and starred Michael Palin and Terry Jones.

The result is a movie that’s semi-Python, with echoes of the zany, off-the-wall humour, but which is still its own beast.

Palin plays Dennis, an apprentice cooper in a fantasy medieval kingdom. He’s desperately in love with Griselda (Annette Badland), and so to prove himself – and after a falling out with his father – he sets off to the city to make his fortune. [Read more…]

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