Movie Reviews, Digital HD Reviews, and Television Reviews

Reviews By Chris Rebholz

Here at FlickDirect, our goal is to provide up-to-date reviews on theatrical, home entertainment, and television series. Check out the scoop on upcoming films or programming, and even our take on the classsics from our critics and Rotten Tomatoes Approved, Allison Rose.

The East

(Chris Rebholz) 10/4/2013 11:16 AM EST
The apple that's bruised on one side, the slightly stale bag of chips, and the carton of milk three days past its "expiration" date. All usually end up in the garbage. A recent NPR article highlights the obvious but too often overlooked paradox: "Hundreds of millions of people go hungry, and yet we waste a whopping 1.43 billion t... Read More

House of Wax

(Chris Rebholz) 10/4/2013 10:23 AM EST
This is the classic version of House of Wax, from 1953, starring Vincent Price, with its storied 3D visual production that helped set the 1950s 3D craze alight. A lavish remaking of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum (provided on this disc as well), and miles above the 2005 slasher remake, House of Wax was ironically directed by the one-eyed A... Read More

The Big Parade

(Chris Rebholz) 10/4/2013 10:01 AM EST
Though its impact may be reduced by decades of brilliant war-themed classics such as Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, The Dam Busters, and Das Boot, King Vidor's 1925 silent classic The Big Parade laid the groundwork for all of the films that would follow in its wake. Originally meant as a small production, upon seeing the early footage, MG... Read More

The Little Mermaid

(Chris Rebholz) 10/2/2013 12:22 PM EST
No one factor was singularly responsible for The Little Mermaid's success. It wasn't a surefire hit from the outset. Walt Disney Animation wasn't riding high, gaining momentum or in the midst of restoring its reputation. (Yet.) A new era in Disney animation had yet to begin, much less be realized or dubbed the Disney Renaissance. In Nov... Read More

Leverage: The Fifth Season

(Chris Rebholz) 9/27/2013 3:08 PM EST
Yes, Grifters, it's still sad that "Leverage" is no more, but at least we got a final season DVD set, which was released Tuesday, Sept. 17, and like the previous seasons' DVDs, it's packed with extras.For those of who don't know, "Leverage" starred Timothy Hutton as Nathan "Nate" Ford a former insurance inv... Read More

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia DVD Review

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: The Complete Season 8

(Chris Rebholz) 9/25/2013 9:16 AM EST
There are different reasons to watch television. Some people want to live vicariously through the characters, finding adventure and excitement. Some people want to weep with the characters as unending challenges face their emotionally-driven lives. Some people just want to laugh.Over the years, with dramas coming and going to varying degrees of suc... Read More

The Fly

(Chris Rebholz) 9/24/2013 4:30 PM EST
Horror films have often been the poor stepchildren of the film industry, relegated to B-movies or less than stellar production quality, including often less than A-list talent both in front of and behind the camera. Universal may have built much of its early empire on horror flicks like Frankenstein and Dracula, but at the time of those films' ... Read More

Sons of Anarchy: Season Five

(Chris Rebholz) 9/9/2013 1:49 PM EST
It used to be that ads on television about so-called private matters seemed to be the exclusive domain of women (think of products like Depends or Summer's Eve), but we're in an apparently more enlightened age now when any number of potentially highly embarrassing "male issues" are trumpeted over the airwaves with of course the co... Read More

Revenge: The Complete Second Season

(Chris Rebholz) 9/9/2013 11:33 AM EST
There was a period several years ago where it seemed that Bones was the only television show I watched on a regular basis. However, in recent years, the TV dance-card has been filled with more and more shows. As many have pointed out, there are a lot of great shows out there right now, both on network channels and on cable. These cable shows have i... Read More

Riddick

(Chris Rebholz) 9/6/2013 8:24 AM EST
"Somewhere along the way I lost a step… gotta find that animal side again."Those words, croaked early in the film by Vin Diesel's titular antihero and bathed in metatextuality, sum up far more than the character's intentions. Riddick manages to salvage a franchise that faltered by adopting the strategy that A Good Day to Di... Read More