Rob Reiner’s latest film is, among other things, a reflection of our persistent cultural belief that you haven’t really lived until you’ve ticked off a list of Earth’s Greatest Hits. Jack Nicholson plays Edward, a quadruple-divorced billionaire who has just been hospitalized with inoperable brain cancer. In a nice twist,…
Billy Jack (Image) The Heartbreak Kid (Universal) Indie Sex: A Revealing Look at Sex in Cinema (IFC) Jimmy and Judy (Anchor Bay) Living & Dying (HBO) Resident Evil: Extinction (Sony) Seaquest DSV: Season Two (Universal) September Dawn (Sony) Shoot ‘Em Up (New Line) Solstice (Weinstein) The Tudors: The Complete First…
Eastern Promises (Universal) David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen are becoming a Bizarro World Hitchcock/Cary Grant combo, and the world is a better (and bloodier) place for it. Chucklehead critics too smitten by Cronenberg’s “messages” dismissed this film — a vicious and brilliant exploration of the Russian mob in London —…
A great brooding thundercloud of a movie, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood arrives as if from nowhere on a gust of critical acclaim, lowering over a landscape of barren mesas and hot, scrubby hills. Anderson’s epic, no less than his career, is both fearfully grandiose and wonderfully eccentric…
Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Warner Bros.): It’s the collector’s-set briefcase that seals the deal, a gunmetal gray case that all but shouts “Completist dork!” Also: There’s damn near every single version imaginable, plus a making-of doc almost as essential as any iteration of the movie itself. Film school in…
Hell of a thing, getting Mike Nichols to adapt the yer-kiddin’-me story of Charlie Wilson, the congressman from Lufkin, Texas, who damn near single-handedly helped the Afghans kick out the Russians in the 1980s. Says right there on page 11 of the paperback edition of George Crile’s 2003 book Charlie…
Tim Burton has taken Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Grand Guignol operetta, hemmed in the narrative, cast confessed nonsingers in the principal roles, and somehow produced something magical — the only one of the new-millennium Hollywood musicals that succeeds both musically and cinematically. Burton breathes new life into the genre…
American Pie Presents: Beta House (Universal) The Brothers Solomon (Universal) Eastern Promises (Universal) Galactica 1980: The Complete Epic Series (Universal) The Heartbreak Kid (Universal) Intimate Affairs (Universal) The Kingdom (Universal) Lost and Found: The Harry Langdon Collection (Facets) Shattered (Lions Gate) WWE: The Best of Raw 15th Anniversary (WWE)…
Once (Fox) Easily the year’s most perfect pop album — damn good movie, too, the finest “musical” of the past 20 years. The disc’s making-of refers to it as a “modern musical,” but Once is as old-fashioned as it gets: Boy (Glen Hansard) meets girl (Markéta Irglová), they fall in…
As an actor, John C. Reilly is the opposite of Mr. Cellophane. He doesn’t disappear into a role; roles disappear onto him — the unlikely porn sidekick of Boogie Nights, the inadequately adequate family man of The Hours, the cutup cowboy of A Prairie Home Companion, all stamped and imprinted…
During its early moments, Jason Reitman’s second feature threatens to choke on its quotation-marks catch phrases — like when The Office’s Rainn Wilson, cameoing as a convenience-store clerk, tells Ellen Page’s 16-year-old Juno MacGuff that her positive pregnancy test is “one doodle that can’t be undid, home skillet.” Or when…
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume Two — The War Years (Paramount) Alien Apocalypse (Anchor Bay) Balls of Fury (Universal) Black Moon Rising (Anchor Bay) Boy Eats Girl (Lionsgate) Braveheart: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) Bring It On: In It to Win It (Universal) Cinderella II: Dreams Come True Special…
The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal) The final installment in the Bourne-again trilogy is the one in which the CIA assassin’s true identity is revealed. It’s the origin story in reverse — how brilliant. But solving the mystery (and misery, for Jason Bourne is among the most tormented action heroes of all…
There are two momentous performances in the Darwinian horror fable I Am Legend. One is by the movie’s star, Will Smith — but more about him in a minute. The other is by the movie’s visual effects — not the ones that bring to life a nocturnal army of shrieking,…
There are comedies of discomfort, and then there’s Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s scalding followup to The Squid and the Whale. An immersion in sibling malice and simmering resentment, with one of the most infuriating characters in recent movies holding us under, Margot tramples the commandment that only the…
For any high-fivin’ “Movies for Guys Who Like Movies” bros hoping for the Guy Ritchie of yore, Revolver disappoints. It’s no return to rock, but rather Ritchie’s soporific, proggy-conceptual Film of Ideas, with Vivaldi interludes, fussbudget set design, recurrent references to chess, and a hit man inexplicably got up as…
Beverly Hills 90210: The Third Season (Paramount) Big Love: The Complete Second Season (HBO) Born Killers (Lionsgate) The Boston Red Sox 2007 World Series Collector’s Edition (A&E) The Conscientious Objector (Cinequest) Dave Attell: Captain Miserable (HBO) Dirt: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) Flight 29 Down: Volume Three (Discovery Kids)…
Casting Nicole Kidman as The Golden Compass’s glacial, intractably smooth megalomaniac Mrs. Coulter is no less inspired for being obvious. Indeed she was the one and only choice for director Chris Weitz, who adapted this first installment of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Despite the book’s description of the…
Can-do pep is the resonant key in this profile of six individuals, spread across three continents, working to provide relief in western Sudan. Featured are a sheik displaced by internecine warfare, International Criminal Court prosecutor Dr. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a young L.A.-based activist, and … Don Cheadle. The film tarries briefly…
Battlestar Galactica: Razor (Universal) The Best of Crank Yankers (Paramount) Bob Hope: MGM Movie Legends Collection (MGM) Erik the Viking: The Director’s Cut (MGM) Exiled (Magnolia) The Flash Gordon Collection (Passport) Tyler Perry’s House of Payne (Lionsgate) Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks (Criterion) Lady Chatterly (Kino) Law & Order: Special Victims…
The Girl Next Door (Anchor Bay) If the horror of Saw were a poblano pepper, this here is a habanero. Derived sometimes word-for-word from Jack Ketchum’s infamous novel — itself based on a true story — Girl Next Door is a sort of Hostel meets Stand by Me: A group…
Re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement last weekend, my first thought was: I hope to God that Joe Wright — whose broadly grinning Pride & Prejudice made a mess of Jane Austen two years ago — doesn’t screw up this wonderful novel about lust, love, loss, and what art can do to…
