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.

Heart of the Country

(Chris Rebholz) 8/30/2013 10:17 AM EST
"Heart of the Country" releasing to DVD on Aug. 20, isn't necessarily a bad movie, but there's really not much that is too memorable in the 87-minute runtime. The story is a by the numbers affair, taking cues from so many better features that have come before it. It seems these days that any film or TV show featuring a woman at th... Read More

Star Trek Into Darkness

(Chris Rebholz) 8/27/2013 1:00 PM EST
I was completely swept away by the 2009 reinvention of "Star Trek". Director J.J. Abrams approached an impossible creative challenge with startling confidence, restoring awe to a brand name that had lost its way while removing the need to be slavish to Gene Roddenberry's original creation as it paved the way for its own universe of alien ... Read More

Epic

(Chris Rebholz) 8/27/2013 10:38 AM EST
The title of Blue Sky Studios' latest animated film seems to be both ironic and sincere, the former because Epic is concerned with an incredibly small-scale view—it stars little woodland creatures and a race of tiny, fairy-like humans—and the latter because the film tries to mount a large-scale action-adventure that pits the forces ... Read More

Grey's Anatomy: The Complete Ninth Season

(Chris Rebholz) 8/26/2013 10:49 AM EST
Grey's Anatomy came onto the TV scene, believe it or not, over 9 years ago and during that time has garnered a strong and loyal following. Mostly, the audience for this show is women which isn't so surprising when you take a closer look at the plot of the show. Take a few handsome television actors, make their characters good and noble with just th... Read More

The Great Gatsby

(Chris Rebholz) 8/26/2013 9:45 AM EST
There's no shortness of irony swirling around Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, a slick but shallow retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of the same name. From Strictly Ballroom to Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! to Australia, the famously ritzy, operatic visionary is known for elevating, even celebrating style over substance. Sub... Read More

The Muppet Movie: The Nearly 35th Anniversary Edition

(Chris Rebholz) 8/15/2013 3:32 PM EST
The first, some would argue best Muppets movie could have easily been the last. On-set tensions between director James Frawley and producer Jim Henson could have spilled over into the film. Henson's hand-stitched felt puppets could have failed to make the transition from the cozy confines of a television room to the revealing expanse of the big... Read More

Trance

(Chris Rebholz) 8/5/2013 3:28 PM EST
Woody Allen famously said, "The heart wants what the heart wants," but what we often forget is that everything we attribute to the "heart" is actually a product of the brain—its twisting neural pathways, its reserves of memory, its manufactured construction of the self. And the brain can easily be fooled or otherwise manip... Read More

Twixt

(Chris Rebholz) 8/5/2013 11:02 AM EST
Who'd've thought we'd see the day when the once-great Francis Ford Coppola, the director who brought us The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, would be reduced to releasing a cringe-worthy straight-to-video horror movie? Twixt was born out of a Poe-like, particularly melancholy dream the filmmaker had a few years ago after a drunken night in... Read More

Oblivion

(Chris Rebholz) 8/5/2013 10:49 AM EST
"Oblivion" is sci-fi entertainment that recalls genre pictures from the 1980s and ‘70s, where character and spectacle were more evenly matched. It's a strikingly designed and photographed effort that indulges only a handful of blockbuster bonanza moments, more attentive to its exploration of identity and paranoia, almost old fas... Read More

Stoker

(Chris Rebholz) 6/26/2013 1:36 PM EST
A "stoker," for those of you who don't know, is someone who adds fuel to a fire. Gets it roaring, heated up, feeding the flames. This is the underlying metaphor of Stoker, a twisted coming-of-age thriller about a morbid teenaged girl whose inner appetites—sexual and otherwise—are fed by a charismatic long-lost uncle who ar... Read More