Starbright (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Francesco LucenteRelease Date(s)
2026 (July 14, 2026)Studio(s)
Lucente Filmed Entertainment/Ruby Max Entertainment (MVD Visual)- Film/Program Grade: C-
- Video Grade: A+
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A
Review
Originally announced in 2010, Starbright started life as a completely different film with a completely different cast. What could have been a poignant modern-day fairy tale ends up an overlong, convoluted mess and it’s a weird shame. When you’re done watching the film you feel like you watched two or three different movies on shuffle and nothing of the collected experience makes much sense. It starts off promising, takes a few turns and ends with so many subplots and tone shifts it’s hard to remember where the story even began.
Aisling (Alexandra Dowling) is a very earnest Irish orphan living on her grandparents’ (Ted Levine and Becky Ann Baker) farm in the middle of nowhere USA. She was left here after the death of her mother, their daughter. She loves being here and helping her cherished grandparents, but she longs for adventure and to see the bright wide world. One night, during a lunar eclipse, she makes a wish and suddenly a star falls to Earth, and she runs out into the field where it landed to find it. It’s there that she meets the archangel Raphael (John Rhys-Davies) who places the star into Aisling’s mother’s locket and charges her with a mission to protect the star. Meanwhile, from a totally different film it seems, a crew of bad guys break one of their crew out a prison somewhere down the road and they too see the star crash into the field and notice that it changed a lead pipe into gold so they want the star for themselves and are willing to kill to get it. When the two storylines meet, a third is put into place: down the street in the other direction, a young businessman who runs his family’s hotel empire is fighting a hostile takeover. Driving back to his hotel he finds Aisling and Raphael on the road running from the bad guys and takes them in to help them. Now it’s three strangers running from men with guys protecting a falling star and it goes on from there. And it all takes place over a single night and might have been shot in real time because it truly feels like it—it goes on and on and on, and to be honest I forget most of the rest of what happens, and I just watched it. So that’s not good.
I wish I could recommend this. I thought it was going to be a hidden gem, but it just isn’t. But if you’re either a glutton for punishment and/or find that movies I recommend are terrible, so this must be a masterpiece: the good news is, this disc is packed with goodies. We can start with the presentation. Mastered from the original 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos master the 1080p looks gorgeous. The cinematography from Francesco Di Giacomo is the brightest spot of this film—it really looks nice and cleans up well on Blu-ray. Why it’s not a 4K presentation (with none currently available or announced, I have no idea). Sound is equally spot on. Presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 and 5.1, and LPCM 2.0, whichever way your speakers are wired, you’ll have a nice atmospheric sound field to play with. This being an all-Region disc, the subtitles run the gamut with all bets hedged: Brazilian Portuguese, French Canadian as well as Parisian French, German, Italian, Spanish Castilian, Spanish Latin American and English, or course.
The supplemental extras include Ludek Drizhal’s Lord of the Rings meets Disney Princess film score on a stand-alone CD and Starbright: In the Making, a one-hour documentary about the making of the film, starting at the beginning and on through the actual production. It’s insightful and full of behind-the-scenes footage. There’s also an early short film from director Francesco Lucente titled This Old Man, which is a dialogue free film told through sound design and music. Finally there is a deleted scene, a blooper reel that’s more outtake than blooper and a sequence of cut takes featuring John Rhys-Davies reciting a poem and not landing the delivery to the director’s pleasure it seems, the theatrical trailer, a teaser, and a TV promo.
- Todd Doogan