You know how in most romantic comedies the best friends are nearly always more interesting than the actual leads we’re supposed to care about? The Break-Up doesn’t play that game. Vince Vaughn is the focus and the primary source of entertainment, which is all the more impressive when you consider…
Toward the end of Saraband, the uneven new film from legendary director Ingmar Bergman, a character sits down with his daughter, a taut girl who is obviously in emotional distress. “I have the feeling that some sort of discussion is coming on,” he says. Indeed it is — as it…
Will & Grace: Series Finale (Lions Gate) The way this got hustled to shelves, mere days after Will Truman and Grace Adler said their mushy farewells, you’d think this were some classic adios — another M*A*S*H or Cheers wrapup. Alas, it was just another Very Special Episode of a show…
The Bette Davis Collection, Vol. 2 (Warner Bros.) A Fine Romance (Tango) Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (Dark Sky) Freedomland (Sony) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Fox) Hercules/Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules (Image) John Wayne: An American Icon Movie Collection (Universal) The Kids in the Hall: Complete Season 4 (A&E)…
The Old West has vanished, John Wayne is dead, and — this just in — the two most famous ranch hands in America are gay. But there would be no point in telling any of that to Harlan Fairfax Carruthers, the deceptively charming protagonist of Down in the Valley. Like…
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the Fifties couldn’t have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page, and…
All four current leaders of a secret society called the Priory of Sion have been killed, but the last one — a Louvre curator named Saunire (Jean-Pierre Marielle) — has left an elaborate cryptic clue as to the identity and motive of his killer before dying from a gunshot wound…
Boston Legal: Season One (Fox) David E. Kelley’s latest legal drama is nothing more than a TV show about TV shows; hence the casting of Captain Kirk and Murphy Brown, with guest shots by Diane Chambers, Golden Girl Rose Nylund, and Alex Keaton. It’s like a Nick at Night mashup,…
Africa Screams (Image) April’s Shower (Liberation) Back Door to Hell (Fox) Bloodrayne (Uwe Boll Productions) The Closer: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) Deadwood: The Complete Second Season (HBO) The Devil’s Miner (First Run) The Dirty Dozen: Two-Disc Special Edition (Warner Bros.) The 4400: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) Game…
If some religious extremists in India had gotten their way, the gorgeous fury of Deepa Mehta ‘s Water never would have reached the screen. As it is, these self-appointed censors shut down the production for years by staging demonstrations, torching Mehta’s sets, and threatening her life. Eventually the filmmaker moved…
The lovable hero of Goal! The Dream Begins is the kind of guy some Americans don’t find very appealing these days — a Mexican immigrant who’s trying to make a better life in East Los Angeles. Little matter that young Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker) busts his butt working two crappy…
It feels like I’ve already seen this movie four times, after witnessing the parade of commercials for junk Over the Hedge’s characters are pimping. Perhaps it makes perfect sense: The entire movie is built on a scenario that involves the stealing and hoarding of junk food. A swindling raccoon named…
Winter Passing (Fox) Try this, should you be inclined to rent this downer from writer-director Adam Rapp: Skip from chapter to chapter and see whether they all don’t begin with exactly the same image, accompanied by exactly the same sound. There is always someone (usually Zooey Deschanel as a would-be…
All You’ve Got (MTV) American Soldiers (Velocity) The Big Valley: Season One (Fox) Con Air: Unrated Extended Edition (Buena Vista) Crimson Tide: Unrated Extended Edition (Buena Vista) Doogal (Weinstein) Duma (Warner Bros.) Funny Games (Kino) Garçon Stupide (Picture This) Hill Street Blues: Season Two (Fox) My Mother’s Smile (New Yorker)…
Art School Confidential is very much like every movie pilfered from the Saturday Night Live playbook, in which the slight giggles of a four-minute sketch are wrung into two-hour yawns. The work upon which it’s based is a four-page excerpt from a fourteen-year-old comic book called Eightball, written and drawn…
The makers of this Belgian drama, about a twenty-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed, have referred to it as a “love story,” and so it is. As the film opens, we discover that Bruno (Jérémie Renier), a panhandler and petty thief, has traded his…
Fateless (THINKFilm) I’ve no patience for the Holocaust docudrama — didn’t even see Schindler’s List till years after its 1993 release, to my parents’ everlasting shame. And so it was I avoided Lajos Koltai’s acclaimed adaptation of Imre Kertész’ Nobel Prize-winning autobiographic novel; are we not already gorged on the…
The Barbie Diaries Gift Set (Family Home Entertainment) Battle in Heaven (Tartan) The Best of Rocky and Bullwinkle: Volume 1 (Sony Wonder) Big Momma’s House 2 (Fox) Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist: Season One (Paramount) The Facts of Life: The Complete First and Second Seasons (Sony) Grandma’s Boy: Unrated Edition (Fox)…
Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for an Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige’s The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute of it passes without a concentrated dose of digital frou-frou and lavish cartoon-poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen,…
The most important thing to know about the new movie Hoot, adapted from the children’s book by Carl Hiaasen, is that it’s coproduced by Jimmy Buffett, who also appears in a small role and provides new music for the soundtrack. Middle-age drunks and boat owners might possibly rejoice at the…
Doug Atchison’s sweet-natured, immensely likable family film recasts the innate human drama of the spelling bee — captured memorably in the 2002 documentary Spellbound — in the familiar but satisfying terms of an after-school special. Keke Palmer plays a bright eleven-year-old languishing in an underfunded, underequipped South Central L.A. public…
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (Warner Bros.) All that’s missing from this boxed set — six movies, one doc, eight discs — is a jar of sweat; even Williams is here, in a 1973 documentary. Then there’s Brando, Beatty, Newman, Taylor, Burton, Gardner, Leigh, Malden, Huston, Kazan — the last of…
