Knocked Up (Universal) Apparently as Judd Apatow was making Knocked Up, he was also prepping for its DVD release, because most of the bonuses here were shot during breaks on location. And they’re no small treats, either — finally here’s a “collector’s edition” worthy of the moniker. Chief among the…
Behold the shark! “The very symbol of impending danger,” intones the narrator of an old air force training film. The scratchy black-and-white footage, cut into the opening reel of the new documentary Sharkwater, shows the piscine predators in a frenzy underwater as an airman floats on his makeshift raft above…
Four decades ago, the American space program was synonymous with the pinnacle of human achievement. Thirty-eight years later, the program that punched a hole in the heavens barely dents the public consciousness. It took a vengeful astronaut in diapers to put NASA back on the nation’s front pages this year…
Directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power by David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises is very much a companion to A History of Violence. Both are crime thrillers that allow Viggo Mortensen to play a morally ambiguous and severely divided, if not schizoid, action-hero savior; both are commissioned works that permit…
As You Like It (HBO) Babel: 2-Disc Collector’s Edition (Paramount Vantage) Broken (Weinstein) The Bronx Is Burning (ESPN) Building Bombs (New Video Group) Chalk (Arts Alliance America) Cinema 16: European Short Films (Warp) Cujo: 25th Anniversary Edition (Lionsgate) Davey and Goliath: The Lost Episodes (Starlight) Drawn Together: Season Two (Paramount)…
Saturday Night Fever: 30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) For all of its camp-classic status as the ultimate disco-fever dream, John Badham’s movie truly is remarkable — a foulmouthed, mean-streets masterpiece that just happens to feature a Bee Gees score that spreads like melted cheese 30 years later. And, of…
In the new Neil Jordan movie, Jodie Foster plays New York talk radio DJ Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging and becomes an urban crusader devoted to cleaning up the city — with a Glock instead of a broom. Yes, The Brave One is that movie: the…
After Hair and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the Sixties be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes that nervous popularizer Julie Taymor, incongruously partnered with the happily vulgarian British writing duo of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, to run this transgressively utopian moment through the…
Beyond the Gates (Fox) Blade: House of Chthon (New Line) The Boss of It All (IFC) Boston Legal: Season Three (Fox) Brothers and Sisters: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) Catherine Deneuve: Essentials (Wellspring) The Condemned (Lionsgate) Deliverance: Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.) Family Guy: Volume Five (Fox) Flashdance: Special Collector’s…
The Graduate: 40th Anniversary Edition (MGM) Fifteen years after its last home-video commemorative edition (extras from which appear here), The Graduate once more gets the bonus-laden makeover — and if ever a movie deserved its kudos, it’s Mike Nichols’s masterwork. That said, the movie is its own bonus. Not since…
The arrival of Balls of Fury on local screens is an extraordinary event that calls for an extraordinary approach to film reviewing — namely the following test. Here at New Times, we understand that predictability can be an underrated part of the moviegoing experience. So we’ve decided to test your…
Bad Santa gets worse every time he trots out the same mean routine. Does anyone at this late date recall a movie starring Billy Bob Thornton in which he doesn’t yell at retarded kids and bark at their stupid parents? After coaching The Bad News Bears to ruin and flunking…
Andre Rieu: Live in New York (Denon) Away From Her (Lionsgate) Bones: Season Two (Fox) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (HBO) Casper Meets Wendy: Family Fun Edition (Fox) Charmed: The Final Season (Paramount) DOA: Dead or Alive (Weinstein) Ever Again (Starz) Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes — Volume Two…
There have already been critical rumblings about the extreme violence in Shoot ‘Em Up, but it’s difficult to get too worked up about a film whose very title announces its maker’s intent, and which opens by raking the New Line Cinema corporate logo with machine gun fire (a gesture long…
Huffing and puffing to resuscitate a long-moribund genre, James Mangold imbues a 50-year-old western with the semblance of life. Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma isn’t as startling a resurrection job as his Johnny Cash biopic, but it does send a saddlebag full of western tropes skittering into the 21st…
Rob Zombie’s Halloween isn’t quite a remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher masterpiece. The first hour, which vividly and viciously imagines the dirtbag childhood of an abject little psychopath named Michael Myers (the exquisitely wormy Daeg Faerch), might be considered a prequel. Yet even when it kicks in on familiar…
The Black Donnellys: The Complete Series (Universal) Chill Out Scooby-Doo! (Warner Bros.) City of Violence (Weinstein) Delta Farce (Lionsgate) Desperate Housewives: The Complete Third Season (Buena Vista) Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams (Disney) Georgia Rule (Universal) Gumby Essentials (Classic Media) It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Seasons 1 &…
The Office: Season Three (Universal) After a shaky first season and a better-with-every-episode second, The Office proved itself one of the most consistent comedies in the history of the medium. The show has long since escaped the shadow of its BBC forebear and boasts an ensemble from which you could…
Year of the Dog (Paramount Vantage) It’s just about the First Commandment of Hollywood: Don’t kill the dog. So it’s a testament to the clout of writer-director Mike White (School of Rock) that killing off the dog is the first of many rules broken in this weird-ass movie. Folks fooled…
It is as you’ve always suspected: Rob Zombie’s house is way cooler than yours. For one thing, the punk/metal god turned filmmaker has a 12-foot stuffed polar bear in his living room. (Zombie to dumbstruck interviewer: “I know, right? How fuckin’ big is that bear?”) The bear presides over dozens…
Leonardo DiCaprio wants you to know we are in serious trouble. No amount of artful chin stubble, it seems, will reverse the depletion of fossil fuels or help to slow population growth. Not even three Oscar nominations will save you — without an actual statuette, there’s nothing to wedge under…
Is there a Razzie Award for worst casting? If so, reserve it early for this fourth, spectacularly lousy screen version of Jack Finney’s 1954 novella The Body Snatchers, which some bright light envisioned as the ideal starring vehicle for the Cold Mountain herself, Nicole Kidman, and for Daniel Craig, last…
