It takes Bruce Willis awhile to get warmed up. He’s always just a bit below room temperature — a cool brother, dig, dating back to his Moonlighting days as a private dick belting out “Tighten Up” while going undercover as a man of the cloth in Wayfarer shades. He’s been…
Evan Almighty, the followup to Bruce Almighty, is the work of an angry God. At 89 minutes that last a lifetime, it’s a sanctimonious sitcom dolled up as the most expensive comedy ever made — $175 mil, so they say, no doubt choking — and marks an unfortunate low point…
A skilled actor vanishes into a role; a movie star appropriates it. As presence trumps character, the star personifies Brecht’s alienation effect, and whatever its ostensible subject, the movie becomes a vehicle — the latest installment in an ongoing career or, in the case of a great star, a public…
Look up in the sky: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a giant silver eunuch on a radioactive surfboard! That’s more or less the gist of this mercifully brief sequel to 2005’s surprise hit about that other band of Marvel mutants, here joined by the eponymous big kahuna,…
You don’t need to watch the included preview of Live Free or Die Hard to know it’s going to blow; as this set proves, only odd-numbered Die Hards are any good. The first one, of course, is the perfect popcorn flick, and the bonus-disc extras here illustrate what can happen…
Animaniacs: Volume 3 (Warner Bros.) Bridge to Terabithia (Buena Vista) Gray Matters (Fox) Harrison’s Flowers (Lionsgate) If . . .: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico (THINKfilm) Lucille Ball Film Collection (Warner Bros.) The Manhattan Project: Special Edition (Lionsgate) The Many Adventures of Winnie…
Eli Roth is obviously a poseur, but on the evidence of Hostel: Part II, he’s also kind of a pussy. Anyone can string a naked woman up by the ankles and slit her throat, and though I admit it takes a little extra something to position a Eurotrash villainess beneath…
In what could be construed as a very expensive home movie, the Shues (siblings Elisabeth and Andrew, of the proud glares and somewhat less reliable acting ability) rally to tell the story of how soccer saved a family in the wake of an eldest son’s death. Directed by Davis Guggenheim…
Mr. Brooks — in which Kevin Costner plays a respectable Seattle businessman who kills for thrills, thanks to the goading of an imaginary friend who looks a lot like William Hurt — is stunningly tepid, neither the clever and poignant metaphor for addiction it strives to be nor the darkly…
Glastonbury (THINKFilm) Only a Julien Temple concert doc would get the R rating — for nudity (male, mostly, and not terribly flattering at that), drug use (weed, mostly — yawn), language, and sexual content. Also dig the overwrought BBC narration, in which Glastonbury is described as a former refuge for…
Blood & Chocolate (Sony) Breach (Universal) The Cecil B. DeMille Classics Collection (Passport) Deadwood: The Complete Third Season (HBO) 52 Pick-Up (MGM) Ghost Rider (Sony) The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries: Season Two (Universal) Hellboy: Blood & Iron (Anchor Bay) James Stewart: Screen Legend Collection (Universal) Jesse Stone: Night Passage…
Lowest Common Denominator-ism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared,…
The cash-cow flippered ones rise again, this time as yellow-tufted surfer dudes riding the waves of life off the coast of an island that looks like a cross between Hawaii and Venice Beach. If you have to see another penguin blockbuster, you could do worse than this loose-limbed charmer written…
The 60th cannes Film Festival was a generous one — and so was its jury, bestowing the Palme d’Or on the least heralded, most critically acclaimed movie in an unusually strong competition, namely Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Mungiu’s skillfully directed, superbly acted account…
The Coen brothers’ pulpy, ultimately pretentious neo-Western No Country for Old Men screened early in the Cannes Film Festival and by the end had maintained its standing as the most widely approved Yankee feature to bow here since Pulp Fiction (though it didn’t win any awards). Once again, the appeal…
Last weekend, as Jerry Bruckheimer’s pirates were once again storming the international box office, the Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) bestowed its two top prizes on a gut-wrenching Romanian movie about backroom abortion and a plaintive Japanese drama about a sad old man who wants to dig his own grave…
There is a moment early on in “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” the 14th episode of the brilliant but canceled television series Freaks and Geeks, in which gangly, bespectacled, picked-last-in-gym-class high school freshman Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) arrives home from school, makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich, and sits down…
“I think the public doesn’t care about reviews,” says Eli Roth, writer-director of Hostel Part II, which — surprise! — isn’t being shown to the press before it opens Friday on more than 2,500 screens. Still, the 35-year-old perpetrator of high-grossing “torture porn” does appreciate critical kindness when he sees…
The Sergio Leone Anthology (MGM) Sergio Leone made westerns like Wagner made ditties. This essential box set — four films with four discs of supplemental material, much of it scholarly and insightful — shows the Italian director supplanting the elegiac Monument Valley iconography of John Ford with a darker, ruder,…
The Abyss: Special Edition (Fox) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: Extra Frills Edition (MGM) Bruce Springsteen With the Sessions Band: Live in Dublin (Sony) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: A Re-Imagining of the 1919 Masterpiece of Horror (Image) CHiPs: The Complete First Season (Turner) Coming to America:…
And so Disney’s immense, booty-busting, pro-piracy epic has come to an End. I doubt very much that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is, in fact, the last we’ll be seeing of Capt. Jack Sparrow and, you know, all of those other people. How could it be? Treasure remains…
Hannibal Rising (Weinstein) Pointless beyond belief, Hannibal Rising serves more as a cautionary tale than horror story. Made for $50 mil, the movie pocketed half that during its U.S. run and likely wound up in the red — an appropriate adios for a franchise starring a peripheral character better served…
