Okja: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) by Justin Remer The Movie: Bong Joon-Ho's Okja could almost pass for a children's film for a long chunk of its runtime. There's a forty-minute section of the film in which tween Mija (An Seo Hyun) hangs out with her giant superpig pal Okja in the enveloping forest near her family's humble mountaintop farm. Thanks to seamlessly rendered digital effects, Okja looks like a living, breathing giant creature that also has the sweetness of a family pet. This section of the film is not without drama -- Okja saves Mija from falling off a cliff at one point -- but it has an idyllic quality that feels almost like a fairy tale.Well, let's not forget that director Bong is the same filmmaker who wrought the dark comic violence of

Flying Guillotine Part II (Blu-ray) by Ian Jane The Movie:Also known as Palace Carnage, 1978's Flying Guillotine Part II is a mess of a movie, a fact that surely wasn't helped by the fact that it had at least two directors working on it at different times once Ho Meng-Hua, the director of the original 1975 film Flying Guillotine decided he didn't want anything to do with a sequel. On top of that, various cast members from the original weren't too keen on reprising their roles, or just happened to completely vanish off the face of the Earth before cameras started rolling. Never ones to look a sure thing in the eye, the producers at Shaw Brothers got how Cheng Kang and then Hua Shan to step in and fill Ho Meng-Hua's rather large shoes, and the results are…. Ridiculous, and ridiculously entertaining.The story begins when a few surviving members of the Han clan do their best to stand up to Emperor Y...Read the entire review »