This might as well be titled A Day at the Races. Like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, with which the latest Adam McKay/Will Ferrell collaboration shares its essential plot of a celebrity humiliated and redeemed and an obsession with Ferrell’s pale paunch, the writer-director and star offer just enough…
V for Vendetta (Warner Bros.) Illustrator David Lloyd calls this adaptation of the comic he made with writer Alan Moore “very good” — so why did Moore beg to have his name removed? The intentions are noble, sure; name another big-studio blockbuster in which a government manufactures fear to keep…
Beavis & Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume 3 (Paramount) Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf (Panik House) Broken Saints: The Animated Comic Epic (Fox) Dallas: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner Bros.) Elvis: ’68 Comeback (BMG Heritage) A Fish Called Wanda: Deluxe Edition (MGM) Girls Next Door (Fox) The Graduate (MGM)…
Hot Nights Cool Films 3 is the Miami Jewish Film Festival’s tight and ambitious movie weekend at the Cosford. It’s not the main event, but this August 5-6 minifest produced on the University of Miami campus with the Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education crams a breathtaking diversity of…
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is like a car that’s been stripped of everything but its two bucket seats and rebuilt from the ground up. The protagonists are — as if you didn’t know it — a pair of detectives named Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx). A…
The Ant Bully is based on a very short children’s book by John Nickle, who wrote and illustrated the 1999 work all by his lonesome after years of providing illustrations for The Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated, not to mention other works of kiddie lit. The book, as most…
Feed (TLA) Remember the old jokes about “What’s grosser than gross”? The makers of Feed do, as they prove in the first 10 minutes — one-upping their opening scene featuring a voluntary victim of cannibalism by bringing in a guy who gets nekkid and shoves cheeseburgers down the throat of…
2005 Academy Award Nominated Short Films (Magnolia) Animaniacs: Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Ask the Dust (Paramount) Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! (ThinkFilm) The Benchwarmers (Sony) Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story (Shout! Factory) Bogie & Bacall: The Signature Collection (Warner Bros.) Chappelle’s Show: The Lost Episodes (Paramount) Electric Shadows (First Run)…
Woody Allen might have done well to end his expatriate adventure in London with last year’s intriguing morality tale Match Point. This alleged return to comedy — starring Point’s nubile Scarlett Johansson as a naive American journalism student, Allen himself as the phobia-rattled magician who poses as her father, and…
In the latest extravaganza from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, millions of dollars and long hours in the digital animation studios have produced … a photorealistic, computer-animated, generic American suburb! Location costs must be getting pretty damn expensive nowadays. As Monster House begins, we follow a leaf slowly…
It would be a mighty sweet thing to see M. Night Shyamalan as the great redemptive storyteller he clearly thinks he is — or as he portrays himself in those American Express commercials. Genuine yarn-spinning, even as a doomed ambition, is virtually extinct in American movies; what had been the…
This is a note-for-note cover of its predecessor, 1994’s Clerks, the charmingly crude black-and-white heap upon which writer-director Kevin Smith built his frustratingly uneven career as a maker of cult favorites about average people leading below-average lives. If the footage weren’t in color and if the actors reprising their roles…
Edison Force (Sony) Gritty cop stuff must write itself — just make sure everyone’s tough, corrupt, and talking like they stole Mickey Spillane’s thesaurus. Then cast Justin Timberlake. Screech! Employing the talented (at music) popster as a crusading journalist isn’t this lame flick’s worst flaw — merely the one you’ll…
The Best of She-Ra Princess of Power (Brentwood) Carnivale: The Complete Second Season (HBO) The Cavern (Sony) Clean (Palm) Don’t Move (Wellspring) An Early Frost (Wolfe) Flash Gordon: The Complete Series (Brentwood) The Incredible Hulk: The Complete First Season (Universal) Intimate Stories (New Yorker) Jack of All Trades: The Complete…
Owen Wilson has moved up in the world: He’s gone from crashing weddings to crashing entire marriages. In the listless farce You, Me and Dupree, his eponymous ne’er-do-well shows up on the doorstep of his childhood friend Carl (Matt Dillon), having lost his job and been evicted from his apartment…
Perhaps no one can pinpoint the exact moment Vaudeville died, but there’s a moment early in Strangers with Candy when you’d swear you had just witnessed the death of visual comedy. En route to her first day of high school, a tarty middle-age jailbird — this is not a Disney…
Gymnast Dan Millman (Scott Mechlowicz) is one of the best at what he does, and he has it all — perfect abs, a big bulge in his crotch, beautiful girlfriends, and the ability to balance full beer glasses on his feet. There’s just one small problem: He has bad dreams…
Grand Prix (Warner Bros.) John Frankenheimer, as underrated as he was brilliant, made a racing picture in 1966 that’s yet to be topped 40 years later. James Garner suffered through the director’s churlish demands (which Frankenheimer reveals and owns up to, in archival footage on one of the documentaries here)…
Basic Instinct 2 (Sony) Bill Maher: New Rules (HBO) Bridezillas: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons (Weinstein) Care Bears: Hearts at Sea (Family Home Ent.) Dennis Miller: All In (HBO) Dolla Morte (Grimoire) The Dudesons Movie (Rhino) The Ellen Show: The Complete Series (Sony) ER: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner…
The fact that 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was such a hit had much to do with viewers’ prelaunch expectations, which were approximately none. Who could have been blamed for thinking a Gore Verbinski-directed, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie based on a theme-park ride would proffer…
Slipped into the summer movie season like acid in your Happy Meal, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is a blockbuster of counterprogramming. No matter that the dude from The Matrix is its star — or would be, if he weren’t half-hidden under a thick swath of digital paint. Linklater’s return…
It may not be an “iconic manifestation of civilization,” as documentarian Ken Burns proclaims, but the New York Times crossword puzzle is undoubtedly an institution — and director Patrick Creadon wants to understand why. His sweet, lightly amusing, and largely superficial documentary brings the story to a climax at the…
