Maxim’s Movie Reviews and Opinions Blog

This week is big on releases of various TV series on DVD. But the highlight of the week is…

Transformers – Two Disc Special Edition
(2007) PG-13
Based on the popular toys that transform from machines into giant robots, this live-action movie from Pearl Harbor director Michael Bay finds the planet Cybertron inhabitants engaging in a secret [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

Death Race (2008)

The Death Race is an action movie based on 1975 film Death Race 2000 and written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Both movies were produced by Roger Corman. The original movie was starring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone. The new movie has Jason Statham in the main role.
The plot: In the [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

Stop-Loss (2008)

This Paramount Pictures’ Iraq war-themed drama shot in Texas and Morocco was directed by Kimberly Peirce (writer and director behind Boys Don’t Cry) and written by her and Mark Richard. Starring Ryan Phillipe, Timothy Olyphant (Catch And Release, Live Free or Die Hard, Hitman, Turok) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Beethoven, Roseanne, The Lookout, 10 [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006)

This award-winning picture was directed by Tommy Lee Jones, his first work as director, and based on the book by Guillermo Arriaga, an Oscar-nominated author and play-writer. Arriaga also wrote script for Universal/Focus feature film Amores Perros (2000) starring Benicio Del Torro, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, 21 Grams (2004) and [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

The Nightmare Before Christmass
(1993) PG
Enter an extraordinary world filled with magic and wonder – where every holiday has its own special land … and imaginative, one-of-a-kind characters. The Nightmare Before Christmas tells the heartfelt tale of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town and all things that go bump in the night. DVD | [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

The partnership that Netflix and LG announced around New Year had resulted in a long-awaited product, just in time for back-to-school and Thanksgiving holiday. LG’s next Blu-Ray disk player BD300 will also be able to stream Netflix to TV-sets.

Users will be able to select a title from their Netflix queue and playback will begin [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

Sony discovered pretty quickly that the original 60GB PlayStation 3 [read Maxim's Review] may have been too expensive for some people, so they came up with cheaper 40GB PlayStation 3. This new model had no backwards compatibility with PlayStation 2, but was cheaper, quieter, and cooler.

But we live in the age where multiple competitors [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

After a devastating and embarrasing loss to Sony in the high definition video disk war, Toshiba ended production of its HD-DVD players, but they still found a use for their powerful upscaler. Previously, Toshiba’s HD-DVD players were capable of up-converting regular DVDs to 1080p with amazing quality, and that’s where Toshiba believes the near-term [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

House, M.D. – Season Four
(2007) NR
In the fourth season of this Emmy-nominated drama, the always-cranky House (Hugh Laurie) deals with the departure of his entire diagnostic team by hiring 40 new doctors and forcing them to compete in “Survivor”-like fashion for permanent positions on his staff. While firing unqualified candidates left and right, House [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

Tropic Thunder (2008)

This latest summer comedy is directed by Ben Stiller – his first movie since Zoolander (2001), and is written by Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen.
The plot: A big-budget war movie with star-actors is being cancelled by the studio. Desperate to save the movie and turn it into a biggest baddest war movie ever [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

Pineapple Express (2008)

After Seth Rogen and his buddy Evan Goldberg wrote the script for Superbad when they were 15 years old, they also were itching to write a script for an action movie, but with a twist. Nobody has done this before: if an action movie married a stoner comedy and they had a child, and [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor (2008)

Brendan Fraser returns to movie theaters for another adventure as intrepid explorer Rick O’Connell.
The plot: Rick and Eve O’Connell spend the fortune they earned in the past two adventures in after-war England in a huge mansion. Both of them pretend that they are quite happy with this [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]

Foyle’s War: Set 5
(2008) NR

Detective chief superintendent Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen) is forced to come out of retirement to aid the undermanned police force in Hastings, a coastal English town surrounded by the chaos and confusion of the ongoing WWII campaign. Expertly blending fiction and history, the fifth season of this period crime drama [...]

Bookmark

[Read more →]