American Gangster is a movie with obvious gravitas and a familiar argument: Organized crime is outsider capitalism. As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott’s would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson…
John Cusack, who more or less began his career sneaking a peek at Molly Ringwald’s panties in Sixteen Candles, has finally become an onscreen daddy — only took, what, 23 years? Except he’s not exactly the most fortunate family man on film: First, in Martian Child he plays a widower…
An irresistible subject for a documentary: the charming celebrity of Marla Olmstead, an artist from upstate New York whose talent for impossibly confident abstractions triggered a media frenzy and five-figure price tags. Unveiled at a local coffee shop, Marla’s middling AbEx doodles might not have inspired more than a glance…
Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick (Warner Bros.) Most of the old Kubrick DVDs were crap: full-screen editions with poor pictures and virtually no special features. This set makes up for them with 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut (hey, who farted?),…
Dan in Real Life has this much going for it: It is not the worst Steve Carell film of 2007. That honor, of course, goes to Evan Almighty, which even the Lord walked out of during the second reel. Fact is, Dan in Real Life isn’t really much of a…
I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pablum that hopscotches among the points of view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad, and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run…
Kenneth Branagh’s ferociously arty, vacuous remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1972 screen version of Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 stage play pares the action down to a slim two-hander in which a famous English writer (Michael Caine) plays cat’s paw with his wife’s lover, a cocky arriviste played by that other Alfie,…
The Adventures of Aquaman (Warner Bros.) The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume One (Paramount) Battleship Potemkin (Kino) Breathless: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Commune (First Run) The Company (Sony) Fantastic Planet (Accent Cinema) Home of the Brave (MGM) Hostel: Director’s Cut (Sony) Hostel: Part II (Sony)Into Great Silence (Zeitgeist) The…
Transformers (DreamWorks) No doubt, Michael Bay’s slam-bang action-figure commercial doesn’t play nearly as well on television, no matter how high or high-def your screen; this demands to be seen on a screen the size of a skyscraper and heard on speakers as large as jet engines. As such, the first…
The estranged brothers Whitman have reunited for a journey onboard The Darjeeling Limited, a colorful old locomotive traversing the Rajasthan region of India. Along the way, they will stop to visit temples (“Probably one of the most spiritual places on Earth!”) and shop for souvenirs (slippers, cobras, pepper spray), with…
Calling all pundits. It’s a baffling caprice of the Zeitgeist to have two studio westerns released in the same month, 30-odd years after the genre basically gave up the ghost. James Mangold’s better-than-competent and highly crowd-pleasing 3:10 to Yuma has provided a harmonica fanfare for something more ambitious and polarizing…
“Poker is a cosmic metaphor,” Woody Harrelson explains early in The Grand. “No matter how the cards fall, you think you can still beat them.” This apparently is the film’s guiding philosophy, for if the advance press is telling the truth, The Grand was largely improvised. As Harrelson (“One-Eyed” Jack…
AC/DC: Plug Me In (Sony) Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection (Hit Entertainment) Bully 911: Stop Being a Victim (Bayview) Believers (Warner Bros.) Best Picture Collection (MGM) The Hoax (Miramax) Hollow Man: Director’s Cut (Sony) The Invisible (Disney) Ironside: Season 2 (Shout) The Jazz Singer: Three-Disc Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.)…
Will you leave your kingdom to a heretic?” That was the question posed to a dying Queen Mary in 1998’s Elizabeth, director Shekhar Kapur’s grim and dingy film now viewed in retrospect as the origin story of a superhero: the Armored Virgin Queen, faster than a speeding lead pellet, more…
More of a remix than a remake of the Elaine May-directed 1972 original, Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s The Heartbreak Kid seeks to rekindle There’s Something About Mary’s critical and box office magic by casting Ben Stiller as a newly wed sporting goods salesman, and newcomer Malin Akerman (a blond Diaz…
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Three (Universal) Black Sheep Unrated (Genius) Bob Mould: Circle of Friends (Granary) Bruce Springsteen: Under Review-1978-82: Tales of the Working Man (Sexy Intellectual) Concert for Diana (Universal) CSI New York: The Third Season (Paramount) Man Push Cart (Koch Lorber) The Marx Brothers Collection (Passport) Meerkat Manor:…
You Kill Me (Genius) Funny thing seeing Philip Baker Hall in You Kill Me, because he’s already played the role of a drunken hit man’s boss in The Matador, to which this feels like a slapshtick-noir sequel. It’s also the photonegative of Sexy Beast: Once more Ben Kingsley plays a…
It will no doubt be said time and again of Michael Clayton: best John Grisham adaptation ever. Only, of course, it did not spring from the billion-dollar mind of the attorney turned franchise, but from Tony Gilroy, who made his big-screen bow 15 years ago as the screenwriter of the…
Caligula: Imperial Edition (Penthouse) (Spoiler alert: Fisting!) One day back in the swingin’ Seventies, somebody mentioned how “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and then Bob Guccione, Gore Vidal, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole said, “Let’s make a big-budget movie about that, with come shots.” And Caligula was born. Actually…
To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…
Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can’t go home again — and for Luigi, the main character in La Terra, why even bother? Home, for the classy Milan professor, is a small town in southern Italy, chock full o’ intrigue, corruption, and dysfunction. When Luigi travels to his hometown to sign…
The Audrey Hepburn DVD Collection (Paramount) Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Collector’s Edition (Sony) Christmas Television Favorites (Warner Bros.) The Comedians of Comedy: Live at the Troubadour (Image) Criminal Minds: The Second Season (Paramount) Day Night Day Night (IFC) Entourage: Season Three, Part 2 (HBO) Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer…
