Bob Saget: That Ain’t Right (HBO) The Boris Karloff Collection (St. Clair) Broken English (Magnolia) Carlito’s Way: Crime Saga Collection (Universal) Dark Shadows: The Beginning (MPI) The Essential Ozzie & Harriet Collection (Mill Creek) Friday Night Lights: The First Season (Universal) Gideon’s Trumpet (Acorn) Heaven & Hell: Live From Radio…
The Lives of Others (Sony) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, easily the best of last year, exists on many levels: as tragedy, dark comedy, and love story — not between a man and a woman, but between two seemingly opposite men bound by the same damnation. On the one hand…
Chicago, May of 1945. Two people, ages 27 and 21, are getting married. They are also deaf, as are most of their guests. The camera recording them has no sound, but we can see them signing to one another. At the reception, because no one can hear the music, couples…
Resurrecting the Champ is a great movie about journalism — maybe the best there ever was — because Resurrecting the Champ is mind-erasingly boring. It’s a solid story about the newspaper business — specifically about how a well-intentioned writer occasionally makes a mistake totally by accident, a mistake that is…
A smarmy score, some orgiastic farting from a herd of walruses, and a modicum of cutesy anthropomorphism from narrator Queen Latifah prove a small price to pay for this stunningly photographed narrative documentary about a year in the endangered life of Arctic ice floe. With 15 years of experience in…
Broken English (Magnolia) The Ex (Weinstein) Exorcism: Special Edition (BCI) The Far Side of Jericho (First Look) The Films of Michael Haneke (Kino) House of Games: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) House: Season Three (Universal) JAG: The Fourth Season (Paramount) Man About the House: The Complete First and Second Series (BCI)…
All Creatures Great & Small: The Complete Collection (BBC Warner) Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters For DVD (Turner) Back to School: Extra-Curricular Edition (MGM) The Black Widow (First Look) Charlie Chan Collection: Volume 3 (Fox) DangerMouse: The Complete Series (A&E) The Dark Crystal: 25th Anniversary Edition…
Taxi Driver: Collector’s Edition (Sony) “Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads: Here is a man who would not take it anymore.” Martin Scorsese’s 1976 vision of hell as city-of-night New York rips through the reverential treatment on this special edition like a hunter’s blade through deerskin. A second disc of eight…
The latest comic meteorite to hurtle forth from the galaxy of producer Judd Apatow, Superbad is about a couple of chronically unpopular best friends who, after four years stuck on the lowest rung of the high school social ladder, find themselves invited to a legitimately cool party. Goodbye, Friday nights…
It’s impossible to write about David Wain’s The Ten without first making passing reference to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. The former, originally made for Polish TV 20 years ago and first shown in the United States in 2000, offered a modern-day take on the…
Asger Leth’s documentary explores the Port-au-Prince slum Cité Soleil, identified by a UN agency as the “most dangerous place on earth.” It’s a prismatic, jagged, none too coherent travelogue — a portrait of Haiti’s post-Aristide political chaos centered on the rivalry between two gang leaders or “ghosts”: the charismatic 2pac…
Chris Tucker still believes in Michael Jackson. You can tell, because in the very first scene of Rush Hour 3, the actor-comedian squeals melodically, grabs his crotch, and throws his arms up to the heavens. All that’s missing is a giant offstage fan to make Tucker’s shirt billow out behind…
This Is Elvis: Two-Disc Special Edition (Warner Bros.) This crazy-quilt of death porn gets two takes in this DVD box set: the original 1981 version and the longer ’83 VHS copy, which shows an actor playing Elvis actually slumped over the shitter within the first five minutes. Hard to say…
Nothing if not appropriate for summer blockbuster season, Werner Herzog’s latest feature, based on his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, offers a suitably fantastic tale of war, freedom, and fortitude, set in the jungles of Indochina and featuring an immigrant lad who turns out to be just as…
Poor Underdog, ending up Disney’s bitch and working for the folks who snuffed Old Yeller. The pill-popping canine crime-fighter from the 1960s Total TeleVision cartoon comes to the big screen as a realistically (I guess that’s what you’d call it) computer-animated beagle who talks in Jason Lee’s pleasantly scruffy Earlspeak…
Beneath (Paramount) Brigitte Bardot 5-Film Collection (Lionsgate) Luis Bunuel: 2-Disc Collector’s Edition (Lionsgate) Disturbia (DreamWorks) The Dog Problem (THINKfilm) The Dresden Files: The Complete First Season (Lionsgate) 8 Simple Rules: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) The Fly: Collector Set (Fox) Full House: The Complete Seventh Season (Warner Bros.) The…
Hot Fuzz (Universal) The second feature from writer-director Edgar Wright and writer-star Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) has been available on home video for decades: Hot Fuzz is, after all, a witty and wisecracking montage of clips from some hundred-plus A-list and bargain-bin action films, chief among them Lethal…
The Bourne Ultimatum opens in Russia as the amnesiac superspy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) does what he does best: elude capture, crack skulls, brood. Lickety-split he’s en route to Paris, nursing his wounds and breaking out with a bad case of those itchy-scratchy hallucinations known as Hollywood Flashback Syndrome. Choice…
In the observation room of the spacecraft Icarus II, passengers sit on a bench in front of a large rectangular screen displaying a view of what lies ahead. They gaze at the spectacle as you might marvel at special effects on some ostentatious plasma monitor. A seething orb of gas…
Director Leon Ichaso, already responsible for mucking up a made-for-TV Jimi Hendrix biopic, is back at it with this turgid film about salsa star Hector Lavoe (Marc Anthony), which doesn’t so much go behind the music as beneath it. Focusing almost solely on Lavoe’s addictions (drugs and women, ho and…
The Archie Show: The Complete Series (Genius) Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (Warner Bros.) The Best of the Kids in the Hall: Volume 2 (A&E) Bloodlines (THINKfilm) Creature (MGM) A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (Docurama) Dallas: The Complete Seventh Season (Warner Bros.) Film Noir Classic Collection: Vol. 4 (Warner…
Hard Boiled: Two-Disc Ultimate Edition (Weinstein) The Criterion version of John Woo’s masterpiece, about two cops (the overworked Chow Yun-Fat and the undercover Tony Leung) gunning for the Hong Kong Triads, is still the “ultimate” collection. It has a better commentary track (with Woo and Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary,…
