Into the Wild (Paramount) Sean Penn waited a good decade before adapting Jon Krakauer’s book about Chris McCandless, who graduated college in 1990, then disappeared into the American unknown, re-emerging as Alexander Supertramp before his final, tragic farewell in the Alaskan wilderness in ’92. Penn’s patience is evident in every…
Archie’s Funhouse: The Complete Series (Classic Media) Army of the Dead (Maverick) Arranged (Film Movement) Ben 10: The Complete Season 3 (Turner) Billy Wilder Film Collection (MGM) Dead Moon Rising (Anthem) Half Moon (Strand) Lonesome Dove: Season One (Echo Bridge)Magnum P.I.: The Complete Eighth Season (Universal) Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium…
Semi-Pro is much better than Blades of Glory, which wasn’t nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had…
Mataharis: Three women who work as private eyes at a Madrid detective agency find that their cases illuminate troubling aspects of their own lives. Ines (María Vázquez) goes undercover at a factory and winds up enmeshed in a power play between the company and union workers opposed to its outsourcing…
Obsessed with gaining the profitable favor of King Henry VIII (Eric Bana), the Duke of Norfolk’s original plan was to have niece Anne (Natalie Portman) become Henry’s mistress and give him the son — and heir — that his wife, Katherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent), has not. After Anne overplayed…
Barbie: Mariposa and Her Butterfly Friends (Universal) Comanche Moon (Sony) Day Zero (First Look) Extras: The Extra Special Series Finale (HBO) Family Affair: Season Five (MPI) The Fugitive: Season One, Volume Two (Paramount) Goya’s Ghosts (Sony) Highlander: The Source (Lionsgate) Jesse Stone: Sea Change (Sony) The Last Emperor: The Criterion…
La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon): The festival’s opening-night selection is the feel-good tale of a nine-year-old Mexican boy’s odyssey to reunite with his mother, who has lived in Los Angeles for four years. The film is part adventure story, part study of the hardships engendered by illegal immigration…
Justice League: The New Frontier (Warner Bros.) Based on Darwyn Cooke’s comic-book miniseries — a masterpiece starring all of DC Comics’ major-leaguers at the dawn of their immortality during the Cold War — this animated adaptation plays stronger, faster, and further than any direct-to-DVD in recent memory. It’s a grown-up…
During one fateful night of insomnia in 1894, Frenchman Louis Lumière invented the cinématographe, a portable, hand-cranked film camera that fit into a suitcase one man could easily carry. Soon he began setting it up in places where people gathered — train stops, busy intersections, and riverbanks — trying to…
Remember the 1985 movie version of the Parker Brothers whodunit board game Clue, with its pre-DVD-era gimmick of multiple endings? Well, Vantage Point is like that, only instead of multiple endings, it gives us multiple beginnings. Oh, and Vantage Point, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t supposed to be…
The pleasures of Be Kind Rewind do not extend far beyond the promise of its premise: Jack Black, magnetized and manic (yawn), erases every single videotape in the rental store where he hangs out and has to reshoot the movies with pal Mos Def. Theirs becomes a ramshackle filmography of…
Like most wannabe heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) is too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough. Expelled from his ritzy private school, our blazered hero soon finds himself dispatched to a public school by his desperate single mother (Hope…
Margot at the Wedding (Paramount) Margot (Nicole Kidman, or someone who looks just like her) is a fiction writer whose tales are based, uncomfortably and unkindly, on the real-life family for whom she seems to care very little. Hence sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) late discovery that Margot’s a “monster”…
Black Water (Sony) Catacombs (Lionsgate) Chaos (Lionsgate) Cops: 20th Anniversary Edition (Fox) The Death of Adolf Hitler (Koch Vision) The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town (1977) (Warner Bros.) The Final Inquiry (Fox) Gangsters: The Ultimate Film Collection (Universal) German Expressionism Collection (Kino) In the Valley of Elah (Warner Bros.)…
No Reservations (Warner Bros.) From its cheap, mid-’90s-looking package to its woefully scant extras (one pre-chewed Food Network behind-the-scenes, blech) to its wide-screen/full-screen option, this feels like something dropped right into the discount bins; it probably debuts at half off this week. And this soufflé of a romantic comedy deserves…
The Amateurs (First Look) The Beatrix Potter Collection (BBC Warner) Becoming Jane (Miramax) Blade: The Series — The Complete Series (New Line) Blue State (MGM) Charlie Chan: Volume 4 (Fox) Dallas: The Complete Eighth Season (Warner Bros.)Dedication (Weinstein) The Equalizer: Season One (Universal) Family Ties: The Third Season (Paramount) General…
Fleet-footed corpses are, from a physiological point of view, complete bullshit. “If you run that fast, your ankles will snap off,” says Jason Creed (Josh Close) to fellow film student Ridley (Philip Riccio), the gauze-wrapped lead of his no-budget mummy opus The Death of Death. Pausing to regroup, cast and…
No celebrity hairdresser should ever be allowed near Colin Farrell’s eyebrows with a tweezer. Black, fluffy, and gloriously unilateral, they still aren’t the prettiest things about In Bruges — that honor falls to the Belgian city itself, known for its scenic medieval turrets, bourgeois tedium, and unfavorable comparisons to Amsterdam…
Sandwiched somewhere between the American Spirit commercials and the Clinton campaigning that make up Definitely, Maybe is a surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy. Imagine, really, old-school Woody Allen starring that shit-eating smirker from Van Wilder, Ryan Reynolds. If this isn’t exactly Annie Hall or Manhattan, the mere fact it aspires to…
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros.) Beautifully shot, masterfully acted, and 19 hours too long, Assassination is an uneven mix of the artful and the arty that never had a shot at bringing in the audience that Brad Pitt’s chiseled melon should’ve delivered. Pitt…
Across the Universe (Sony) The Apartment: Collector’s Edition (MGM) The Aristocats: Special Edition (Disney) Blonde and Blonder (First Look) Boy Meets Girl (Unearthed) Drive-In Cult Classics: 8 Movie Collection (Navarre) Feast of Love (MGM) Fierce People (Lionsgate) The Jane Austen Book Club (Sony) Midnight Express 30th Anniversary Edition (Sony)Psychotronica: Volumes…
When a friend recently told me she’d been confused by the poster for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson fortune-hunting romp Fool’s Gold adorning her local multiplex — that she’d thought for sure this movie had already come and gone — I understood her bewilderment. Even as a professional film critic trained…
