Although he plays a college professor in his latest film, Robert Redford was, by his own admission, never much of a student, consistently more interested in what was going on outside the classroom window. But there’s one moment from Redford’s academic past that burns brightly in his memory. The year…
Fresh from creating domestic cyber-anarchy in this summer’s Live Free or Die Hard, Timothy Olyphant goes global as top-flight international assassin Agent 47 in producer Luc Besson and director Xavier Gens’s bargain-basement adaptation of the titular videogame. Cut loose by his Orwellian parent organization (known only as “the organization”) following…
Bratz (Lionsgate) Drunken Angel: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Elvis: Blue Suede Collection (Warner Bros.) ESPNU Honor Roll: The Best of College Football (ESPN) Happy Days: The Third Season (Paramount) Hot Fuzz: 3-Disc Collector’s Edition (Universal) The Land Before Time: The Wisdom of Friends (Universal) Laverne & Shirley: The Third Season…
Hot Rod (Paramount) Andy Samberg, best known for stuffing his dick in a box on Saturday Night Live, is Rod Kimble, a wannabe stuntman with very little “man” in him. He lives with his mom (Sissy Spacek, not kidding) and a stepdad (Ian McShane) who needs a new heart at…
Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head. But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play. — Bob Dylan, “Brownsville Girl” Literally speaking, Bob Dylan isn’t “there” in Todd Haynes’s staggering mixtape biopic I’m…
As one of what novelist Stephen King calls his Constant Readers, I was as jazzed as every other monster-lovin’ geek when word came that filmmaker Frank Darabont was making a movie of King’s classic novella The Mist. Cynics suggested that after tanking big time with his Frank Capra homage, The…
The premise had promise: Characters from a “vintage” Disney movie suddenly find themselves thrust into our world. But somewhere between conception and execution, what could have been so much smart, sharp fun turned decidedly pedestrian. Julie Andrews (awww) narrates the opening animated sequence about a girl named Giselle (voiced by…
Angel-A (Sony) The Batman: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Bill Maher: The Decider (HBO) Broken (First Look) Chappelle’s Show: The Series Collection (Paramount) CSI: Crime Scene Investigation The Complete Seventh Season (Paramount) Eric Clapton: Crossroads Guitar Festival 2007 (Rhino) Gene Simmons Family Jewels: The Complete Season 2 (A&E) Hairspray…
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Paramount) At last available on DVD, Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary about her husband’s tumultuous trek downriver remains, easily, the best film ever about the making of a movie and unmaking of a man. Francis Ford Coppola thought he was going to spend 16 weeks…
The Princess Bride: 20th Anniversary Edition (MGM) As far as anniversary-edition DVDs go, The Princess Bride is crushingly disappointing: no Rob Reiner commentary track, no outtakes, no making-of doc, no nothing, save for a lousy game and a few short interviews with Robin Wright Penn, Mandy Patinkin, Christopher Guest, and…
Hold still” — it’s what the hunters say to the hunted in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men. The first time we hear it, it’s the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on…
Midway through the amiable children’s movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium comes a speech that writer-director Zach Helm probably has been saving for use ever since he discovered the Bard. As pop philosophy goes, it’s bracing stuff: Paraphrasing King Lear, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman) — a 243-year-old “toy impresario” with shell-shocked…
This is easily — easily — the worst adaptation of a major novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author. Director Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and writer Ronald Harwood have rendered Gabriel García Márquez’s novel little more than a sudsy telenovela — Lifetime by way of Telemundo…
The Addams Family: The Complete Series (MGM) Amazing Grace (Fox) Annie Duke’s Texas Hold’em Supercourse (Big Vision) Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Close Encounters of the Third Kind: 30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition (Sony) Gilmore Girls: The Complete Seventh Season (Warner Bros.) It’s a Wonderful Life: 2-Disc Collector’s Set (Paramount)…
Back in the day, he was Cassius Clay, a handsome and sharp young boxer with a smart mouth and a knack for showmanship. He had won the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics, but he hungered for a new title — Sonny Liston’s world heavyweight championship, to be…
Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 (Genius) On the heels of the Electric Company box sets, which were at once educational and groovy as all get-out, comes the latest in greatest hits from Sesame Street before the neighborhood was gentrified for Elmo’s protection. Chief among the copious highlights in this…
After making a mint off a series about nothing, Jerry Seinfeld apparently decided his first feature film ought to be about something — in the case of Bee Movie, the enslavement and torture of bees for the pleasure and profit of humans, which is, like, hilarious. It’s rather tempting to…
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs might be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy — and it wasn’t even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The…
In keeping with the series’ preference for the literal over the mythic, Saw IV offers no miraculous, Michael Myers-style resurrection for torture artiste John “Jigsaw” Kramer (Tobin Bell), who went out with a bang at the end of Saw III and makes his first appearance here as the toe-tagged specimen…
The Best of the Colbert Report (Paramount) Blame It on Fidel! (Koch Lorber) Blood Car (TLA) The Crown Prince (Koch) Deck the Halls (Fox) Election (Tartan) Flight of the Conchords: The Complete First Season (HBO) Help!: Deluxe Edition (Capitol) I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (Universal) James Bond Ultimate…
The Amicus Collection (Dark Sky) Angel: Complete Series Collector’s Set (Fox) Beastie Boys: The Complete Story (Video Music) Benny Hill: The Complete Megaset (A&E) A Christmas Story (Warner Bros.) CSI Miami: The Fifth Season (Paramount) The Cup (Festival Media) Day Watch (Fox) Dear Jesse (Sovereign) The Devil Came on Horseback…
No End in Sight (Magnolia) Charles Ferguson’s debut doc, easily the most important in a year full of notable fact-gathering films, assembles some of the key players behind the invasion and occupation of Iraq and seems to ask them but one question: “What went wrong?” In short: everything. But Ferguson’s…
