No doubt Oscar Wilde would have approved of director Duncan Roy relocating the setting of his Victorian-era Faustian exploration of youth, vanity, lust, and power to modern-day New York City. His superficial social-climbing stud — who now employs a multiscreen art installation, rather than a portrait, to prevent his beauty…
Planet Earth (BBC/Warner Bros.) Roll over, Marlin Perkins, and tell Jacques Cousteau the news: There’s never been another nature series like this. You will spend forever glued to this five-disc collection, finding among such holy-shit discoveries a herd of never-before-photographed camels who live in the frozen wastelands, great whites dining…
Al Franken: God Spoke (Docurama) Code Name: The Cleaner (New Line) Columbo: Mystery Murder Collection 1989 (Universal) Déjà Vu (Buena Vista) The Documentaries of Louis Malle (Criterion) The Drew Carey Show: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) Flipper: Season One (MGM) .45 (Velocity) Ironside: Season 1 (Shout! Factory) Jean Renoir:…
Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show (Sony) The greatest boxed set ever — not so much for the made-up irritainment as for the real thing, which this collection serves up by the ton. There are 23 brilliant episodes of the HBO show here, but they pale in…
Brute Force: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Cutie Honey: The Movie (Bandai) Double Happiness (Image) Forgiving Dr. Mengele (First Run) Freedom Writers (Paramount) George Lopez: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons (Warner Bros.) Happy Days: The Second Season (Paramount) The History Boys (Fox) The Image (Warner Bros.) La Haine: The Criterion…
For all the huzzahs deservedly heaped upon the 2004 film Shaun of the Dead, in which it took a good long while to discern the living from the walking deceased, the zombie-flick spoof was little more than an extended sketch taken, oh, nineteen minutes beyond its breaking point. But the…
This week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Fracture, has the good sense to begin where last week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Perfect Stranger, ended — with the solution to that tedious riddle: Whodunit? The answer this time is Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer whose pockets of…
Perfectly suited to the shabby delights of the hometown drive-in theaters of yesteryear, director Nimród Antal’s creepy cockroach of a thriller feels less horrifying than it does curiously nostalgic. David (Luke Wilson) and Amy Fox (Kate Beckinsale) are a miserable, bickering couple driving back to L.A. when David’s wrong turns…
Frylock, Meatwad, and Master Shake — the three Stooges inhabiting Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters — will survive should you choose to avoid their movie. Truth be told, you’ve probably never heard of them anyway, unless you’re a regular viewer of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming…
Writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth receive sole credit for the movie Disturbia, which is surprising, as the film clearly is based on both a previously published work (a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich, titled “It Had to Be Murder”) and the John Michael Hayes-penned, Alfred Hitchcock-directed, Academy Award-nominated…
Will Ferrell, having moved on from the anchor desk and NASCAR, at long last ridicules a hallowed profession. I refer, of course, to men’s figure skating. Who until now has dared to mock the sequined costumes, the fondness for power ballads, the Spandex pants? Luckily Our Man Ferrell is up…
Sleeping Dogs Lie (First Look) Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait takes a subversive concept (honesty is overrated) and marries it to an outrageous scenario (a woman’s family learns that she once, uh, performed for a dog) to create . . . a romantic comedy? Well, sort of. Like Goldthwait’s underrated Shakes the…
The Aura (Genius) Avatar: The Last Airbender — Book 2: Earth, Volume 2 (Paramount) The Batman: The Complete Third Season (Warner Bros.) Beneath Still Waters (Lions Gate) Bobby (Weinstein) Coming Soon (Lions Gate) Dead and Deader (Anchor Bay) A Guide for the Married Woman (Fox) Life of the Party (THINKFilm)…
There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term “grindhouse,” and even a certain confusion about the origins of the word itself — whether it refers to the movies that comprised a gilded age of exploitation cinema, or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown…
Sharply adapted from the William Joyce book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, this speedy animated film features Lewis (voiced by Daniel Hansen and Jordan Fry), a bespectacled science geek and orphan who, though well cared for by a loving foster mom (velvety-voiced Angela Bassett), is too weird to get himself…
Twin Peaks: The Second Season (Paramount) So, here it is: perhaps the most infamous shark-jumping in TV history. The first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s comedy-horror-mystery-soap opera caused a cultural frenzy of “damn good coffee” quips and questions over who murdered prom queen/town doorknob Laura Palmer. It’s also…
All That Jazz: Special Music Edition (Fox) The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (Image) Back Stage (Strand) Bong Water (First Look) The Brady Bunch: The Complete Series (Paramount) Charlotte’s Web (Paramount) Copying Beethoven (MGM) Dancing With the Stars: Cardio Dance (Lions Gate) Entourage: Season Three, Part One (HBO) Jump In!:…
At various times over the last decade, David Fincher, Sam Mendes, and Michael Mann were all slated to direct Scott Frank’s screenplay for The Lookout, about a brain-damaged high school hockey stud who’s smooth-talked by distant acquaintances into robbing a small-town bank. That Frank — best known for straightening and…
War movie, horror movie — the difference is negligible in the grim sequel to last year’s hit remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 mutant thriller. After a grisly childbirth and some gory killings, the real action starts with a group of gung-ho National Guardsmen blasting their way through Kandahar. It proves…
Children of Men (Universal) Set in a tomorrow that looks like yesterday, Alfonso Cuarón’s wrenching adaptation of P.D. James’ novel feels more like documentary than fiction. In the movie’s world, women have gone barren, and immigrants are tossed into prison camps; it’s the proverbial nightmare to which we might actually…
Bow (Tartan) Comeback Season (First Look) Curse of the Golden Flower (Sony) The Eden Formula (Westlake) The Addams Family: Volume 2 (MGM) Errol Flynn: The Signature Collection, Volume 2 (Warner Bros.) Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes, Volume 1 (Fox) Following Sean (New Video Group) Hacking Democracy (Docurama) Happy Feet (Warner…
In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he’s a…
