We have picked a winner for William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959) prize box set of pure entertainment.  David Seim is our winner and he says, “I loved it as a kind and would love to see it again.” We’ll David…you get to see it again!

David, you can watch it at home on a giant screen with the movie completely remastered. You will appreciate this Blu-ray package with booklets and other extras you enhance your viewing pleasure. I can safely say this is the closest near-perfect version we will ever see.

Ben-Hur took home an unprecedented 11 Academy Awards in 1959 and clearly deserved every single one. Prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and his estrangement from old Roman pal Messala (Stephen Boyd) is grand in detailed, and sensitively portrayed. Directed by William Wyler, who was the junior assistant on MGM’s original silent version in 1925, the story is magnificent and never sacrifices the human focus in favor of spectacle. Miklos Rozsa’s grandiose musical score, notably one of the greatest ever written for a Hollywood picture. At four hours it’s a long tale but worth every moment.

Available on Blu-ray Combo Pack, DVD, On Demand and for Download 9/27! Please make sure you Like Ben-Hur on Facebook and Follow Ben-Hur on Twitter.

You might think that it’s difficult to write a movie about Russian roulette. Sure, The Deer Hunter had a couple scenes involving it, but a whole movie about people competing in a game where the loser kills himself? Not exactly easy to do. And the folks out at Anchor Bay are going to take the chance on it as evidenced by 13, a copy of which they sent out to us for review. While you won’t be able to get hands on this one until a week from today, you’ll almost certainly want to see it when it hits.

13 follows a young newcomer to this most bizarre of blood sports, in which he’s found himself a participant wearing a number. And while the risk is high, so too is the payout for those who compete…and those who win. It’s entirely too high, in fact, for our boy to resist, being as his father’s in the hospital and the family home is on the line. But while he’s playing the game, he’s also drawing a lot of unwelcome attention, and it’s that attention that may well wind up killing him just as surely as losses in the game would.

Most of the first third of the movie is devoted to the intricacies of getting to be a competitor in the Russian roulette underground, a baffling and downright Byzantine performance featuring mail drops, train ticket chicanery, and more. It may be a bit much, but it really does go to show just how deeply, deeply underground all this is, and it’s impressive, but it does take up a lot of run time.

You might expect this to be an action title, and while there will indeed be gunplay, it’s rather in short supply through most of the first hour. This focuses much more on the dramatic side of things, with the various competitors and their reasons for being involved in a game in which they could all quite easily die. It’s still pretty interesting because, after all, when’s the last time you saw a movie entirely about Russian roulette? I frankly can’t recall the last time I did, so this is at least mostly new territory.

The Screenhead Ten Scale always welcomes new effort, and hands 13 about half its score, a seven out of ten. It’s a little on the dull side, a little too much drama and gambling, but given the nature of the movie itself it’s hard to avoid. That and it being largely untraveled ground gives it that little something extra that should be experienced.

It was just a couple days ago when we got to go hands on with The Avengers Volume 3, and now, the folks out at Disney are giving us a whole new chance by sending over a copy of The Avengers Volume 4. The last three volumes have been terrific, but will Volume 4 break the chain? Turns out it will not. Not in the least.

The Avengers Volume 4 picks up where Volume 3 left off, following the invasion of Kang and his time-traveling army.  This time around, we’re going to be a bit more focused on Thor, though Ultron will also make an appearance, along with the Fantastic Four, in a bit of a surprise. But there’s a lot more going on here, and thankfully, at this stage of the game the team has pretty much gelled together nicely, with just a little infighting going on almost more for comic relief than anything else, so they’ll be in their best position yet to go forth and knock some supervillains’ heads around in a bid to make the world a safer place.

This volume does carry on with the kind of high-powered action that the series has come to be famous for, and indeed, there’s plenty of good old fashioned skull bashing and people getting blasted by various bits of energy. This one does seem to have a little more sheer schmaltz in it than previous installments, with a little more of that thoroughly comic-book dialogue going on that doesn’t have the kind of authenticity you’d hope for. However, the plots do seem at least reasonably close to their comic book counterparts (the Cask of Eternal Winters makes an appearance, for example), so that’s something of a plus.

This entire series so far has proven to be a lot better than, frankly, I think we had any right to expect. After all, you come right down to it this is a kids’ show on Disney XD, for crying out loud. And based on Marvel characters at that. But it still managed to put on a reasonably good show with more than enough action and some downright iconic characters. It’s good, fun stuff, especially if you’re a comic buff with a fondness for Marvel.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives The Avengers Volume 4 the same eight out of ten that it gave the other three, in recognition of the fact that it’s pretty good stuff on a variety of fronts, though not without a few minor flaws and some relatively limited appeal outside of the niche. But still, for any comic buff, action fan or sci-fi lover, you’ll enjoy this one very much.

Here’s an idea. Take all of classic novels, and try to make them feel relevant by setting them in space. Like the Dickens classic A Tale of Two Planets. Or Mitchell’s Gone with the Meteor Shower. Or Uncle Tom’s Cockpit. As silly as this sounds, it seems as if one idea ias actually gaining tracition: Moby Dick…. IN SPACCCEEEEE.

The good news is that one of the most interesting directors around is behind it. In an interview with Radio 5 in the UK, Lynne Ramsay announced that she is indeed working on the Moby Dick in space idea. Ramsay was behind indie darlings like Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. Most recently she made We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won Best Film at the London Film Festival and also happens to be the best film so far this year. It hits the US in December.

So will it work? Well, the classic novels has already been set in space on several occasions. There was a comic book story in 1965, A Ray Bradbury novel (Leviathan ’99) in 2007, and of course Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, in which Khan played the Ahab role (even quoting directly from the book). Indeed, unlike most other classic novels, the isolated nature of the story (a ship in sea, hunting a single entity) makes it more possible for a transition to outer space, even if the prospect does conjure up all sorts of camp imagery.

Oh man, folks, do we ever have a doozy today. The folks out at A&E sent out a copy of Robotech: The Complete Series, and if you have even the vaguest interest in animation, especially of the Japanese variety, then you’ll definitely want to get in on this.

Robotech: The Complete Series is pretty much what it says on the box, nearly thirty four hours of Robotech, from the First Robotech War to the Third Robotech War and including the Robotech Archives. Things all get started when humanity finds itself in possession of an alien space fortress that has mysteriously crash-landed on the planet. Themselves in the midst of a world war, humanity decides to shut down its various wars and band together to figure out just what the hell it is that crashed on the planet in the first place, and what it may represent. You’ll get to watch humanity take on the Zentraedi, and then fend off the Robotech Masters, and then the Invid will get involved. And, after all that, you’ll get a whole load of behind the scenes footage and the like–a whole disc’s worth, in fact–just to cap the whole experience off.

Naturally, as you’d expect from something as extensive and all-inclusive as this, some of it will be better than others. And indeed, some parts will lag a bit while other parts will be packed with more action than you ever thought a cartoon from the eighties (and beyond) could offer up. But for the most part, the action will be relatively dense. It’s pretty hard to get bored while watching Robotech, if for no other reason than something is constantly shooting at someone else, occasionally interrupted by something else blowing up.

And you might think this is simplistic, and you’d have good reason to think so, but this is actually a whole lot more complex than you might think. After all, we’re talking about a series that covers almost a full day and a half of footage, so you know there’s a lot going on in here. It’s a fine piece of anime, and nicely representative of the genre. If you want a good look at where anime came from–and where anime might well go from here–then you’ll want to settle in with this massive chunk of Robotech.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Robotech: The Complete Series a full ten out of ten. There’s more than enough action to keep most anyone satisfied, and as a history lesson, it represents a major achievement in anime and is well worth your time to watch.

With the recent release of a new Spy Kids title, the folks out at Lions Gate shipped over copies of the first three titles for us to review. And thus, they’re completely sponsoring the second of our big multi-reviews, covering Spy Kids, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, and Spy Kids 3: Game Over.

Spy Kids kicks the series off with a family, of whom the mother and father were spies in competing countries. And while you might think they’d no longer be in the spy game following their retirement, they were still just as much targets as they were in their previous life. And when they go on what they believe to be one last mission, and find themselves captured by a rather unlikely target, it’s now up to their children to recover them.

This one is likely the best of the lot, with a sufficiently compelling mixture of laughs and action to keep interest throughout. Robert Rodriguez has often done a good job of blending humor and action–you’ll all remember our previous reviews of the movie Shorts–and it shines through here quite nicely indeed. This one should be a lot of fun for both kids and grownups alike, which is no mean feat and well worth celebrating.

Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams takes us back into the fray with the Cortez family–three generations worth of them, in fact, as not only father and mother Cortez, son and daughter Cortez, but even the grandparents Cortez–as the whole brood finds themselves tackling a crazed geneticist with a penchant for bizarre creatures.

This is where the series starts to lose steam. Sure, it’s still got many of the grander elements that made the first one good, but the problem here actually is that they’ve discarded most of their subtlety in favor of a much bigger project. The grandiose nature, this kiddie-grade Island of Dr. Moreau with godawful CG effects, proves to be a detriment on this one. The second title suffers from what a lot of sequels suffer from–a little too much ambition for their own good. They lose focus on what made them great in the first place. They’re so focused on what they CAN do that they don’t stop to consider whether or not they SHOULD do it. Thankfully, there’s still quite a bit of the same good stuff from the first in here, but they’ve lost a good piece of it. It only starts to lose steam here, not lose it altogether.

Spy Kids 3: Game Over pretty much ignores the parents Cortez this time around and sticks to the kids–with the exception of a brief cameo–and puts the kids into a video game with a whole lot more danger than you’d expect from a video game, driven by a madman with ambitions of global domination.

And this one, well, this one just loses pretty much all of it together. It’s a little too much CG and not enough story, and bringing in Sylvester Stallone to play the film’s nominal villain (pretty much the entire series doesn’t really specialize in is any kind of villain past the Saturday morning cartoon school of supervillainy) smacks more of a desperation move than a good call in casting. It’s not terrible, but it’s still a pretty low-rent exercise compared to the first two.

It’s a slow descent into low-rent for us on the Spy Kids series, but while it starts out good, it doesn’t manage to stay that way for long. Still though, a great series for the kids and a vaguely tolerable one for their parents.

If there was an Oscar for most bizarre news of the year, surely this would be a shoo-in for a nomination. Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to cast Werner Herzog as the villain in Tom Cruise’s next vehicle? It’s so insane it just might work…

According to Variety Herzog will play the villain The Zec in One Shot, an adaptation of the novel by Lee Child. Part of the Jack Reacher series, Tom Cruise will play Reacher, the ex US military officer who now roams his country and ends up getting into all sorts of trouble. In this film, the first adaptation of the series (even though the book is the sixth), Reacher investigates a sniper accused of murder. Herzog’s character will play the man behind the big conspiracy.The films is written and directed by Chris McQuarrie (who wrote the latest Mission Impossible film and The Tourist)

Herzog has of course acted before, whether playing a version of himself in Incident at Loch Ness or in Julian Donkey-Boy as a domineering dad. But most of us know (or should know) him as a documentary and feature film director, often obsessed with the stager individuals and phenomena in this world. Those unfamiliar should check out Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man immediately.

Screenhead is holding an online giveaway for Legend of Millennium Dragon. Anyone, who enters the giveaway, has a chance to be picked as the winner of the DVD/Blu-ray combo pack of the film.

The movie is about a spectacular journey of an unwilling young hero thrust into a mysterious past full of monsters, dragons and strange hidden powers. Through a series of out of this world battles and adventures, Jun, a shy middle school boy, is transformed into a hero destined to battle evil and ensure harmony and tranquility in the world.

To enter the giveaway, post your name and we will pick the winner October 18, 2011.

The song in the trailer is Miho Fukuhara’s “Starlight.”

This poster of Tom Cruise, returning as Ethan Hunt in Paramount Pictures’ Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, shoots me off the planet.

As the fourth installment of the hugely successful spy series, it is going to be big. So big, in fact, they had to shoot it in IMAX. Director Brad Bird (Finding Nemo, Incredibles) had Cruise hanging off the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world in Dubai. I am thinking the perspective on the poster is vertigo-inducing. Wow! I can’t wait until I see it projected seven-stories high in the IMAX Theater.

Ghost Protocol will open everywhere on December 21, 2011, but it will screen early on select IMAX screens on December 16.

Trainees, start your engines! Preschoolers from coast-to-coast will get on the fast-track to fun and learning with “The Chugger Championship”! The newest “winner” in the “Chuggington” DVD series from Anchor Bay Entertainment, “The Chugger Championship” hits retail stores nationwide on October 11, 2011. Screenhead is giving one a way!

A colorful and contemporary CGI-animated TV series encourages early social readiness skills, “Chuggington” follows the amusing escapades of three young trainees, Wilson, Brewster and Koko, as they learn to “ride the rails” of life and become productive chuggers. The exciting train property for preschoolers airs daily on Disney Junior, Disney Channel’s programming block designed for kids ages 2-7 and their families.

In “The Chugger Championship,” the traintastic trio is ready to put their “wheels to the rails” for the biggest race in Chuggington! These six, action-packed adventures will have your kids cheering. Young fans join Wilson, Brewster and Koko as they prepare for a test, invent a new contest and pick up a fun hobby, while learning about the importance of accountability and responsibility. Along the way, the three friends – and viewers at home – discover that a true champion isn’t always the one who finishes first! Boy that is a tough one to learn.

“The Chugger Championship” is the newest addition to Anchor Bay Entertainment’s “Chuggington” DVD collection, which also includes “Chuggers to the Rescue,” “It’s Training Time” and “Let’s Ride the Rails.”

To enter the giveaway, post your name and I will pick the winner October 11, 2010.