Freedomland manages a seemingly impossible feat: It’s both turgid and overwrought, eliciting the shriek that fades into a yawn without anyone ever noticing. It’s a wholly dreary piece of work, yet another dismal entry on the resumé of director Joe Roth, an only-in-Hollywood hack who’s allowed to make movies —…
In Frank Marshall’s inspirational adventure movie, based on a 1983 Japanese blockbuster, a team of intrepid sled dogs marooned in Antarctica struggles to survive winter without benefit of man or Milk-Bone. Beautifully trained, these eight gorgeous huskies upstage the two-legged actors of the piece (notably Into the Blue star Paul…
Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson: Uncensored! (Paramount) This sucker is vulgar — duh — but not shocking in the least bit; Sarah Silverman swears, and Courtney Love drinks and smokes . . . who knew? That said, this roast ranks among the meanest ever televised; why Bea Arthur shows…
Disney Princess Sing Along Songs, Vol. Three: Perfectly Princess (Buena Vista) Emmanuel’s Gift (First Look) The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: The Complete First Three Seasons (Warner Bros.) The Frisco Kid (Warner Bros.) Gimme a Break!: Season One (MCA) Grey’s Anatomy: Season One (Buena Vista) He-Man and the Masters of the…
It is often written of Harrison Ford that he’s the most profitable movie star in history, to the tune of some $3.8 billion in box-office receipts worldwide. Of course, once one subtracts from that total the first three Star Wars movies, the Indiana Jones trilogy, and two outings as CIA…
Let’s get right to the point: If you are the type of person who enjoys seeing attractive naked girls meet a hideously graphic demise, there’s a scene in Final Destination 3 that will wear out the pause and rewind buttons on your DVD remote a few months from now. Megastereotype…
Sporting a prosthetic bulb-nose, a faceful of warts, and a lumpy torso Lon Chaney might envy, the usually elegant Emma Thompson makes for a grotesque presence in this rather dark children’s fantasy — at least until her character’s no-nonsense good works start to score points with the seven unruly brats…
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (DreamWorks) Not since Finding Nemo has there been a movie so easy to recommend for all ages and tastes. But despite having crafted a near-perfect film, directors Nick Park and Steve Box second-guess themselves constantly on their audio commentary, as well as…
Bambi II (Disney) Batman: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) The Best of the Electric Company (Shout!) The Best of Youth (Miramax) The Cary Grant Box Set (Sony) Côte D’Azur (Strand) Daltry Calhoun (Miramax) Doom: Unrated Extended Edition (Universal) Elizabethtown (Paramount) Eros (Warner Bros.) Grounded for Life: Season 1 (Anchor…
Benny Hill: Complete and Unadulterated — The Hill’s Angels Years, Set Four (A&E) Billy Graham Presents: Gift Set (Fox) Bubble (Magnolia) Captains Courageous (1937) (Warner Bros.) Drake & Josh Go Hollywood (Paramount) Extreme Comedy Collection (Team America: World Police, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and Jackass: The Movie) (Paramount) Four…
The best thing about Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) is the way it draws on contemporary fears without ever mentioning them. The War on Terror era has given us new things to be afraid of — being prey for terrorists, the government’s response — and they all make people feel insecure…
Good Woman, Mike Barker’s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere’s Fan, has been gathering dust for some time. It played the Toronto Film Festival in the fall of 2004 before opening in 2005 in every country in the world except this one. Such dawdling doesn’t bode well for…
Anthony Hopkins lends style points to any movie in which he appears. Roger Donaldson’s real-life tale about an eccentric fellow New Zealander, who fulfilled a lifelong dream in 1963 by racing his ancient Indian motorcycle across Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, is a case in point. Donaldson (Thirteen Days, Dante’s Peak)…
Dune: Extended Edition (Universal) On paper it sounds insane: A mammoth sci-fi epic directed by David Lynch, based on an intensely weird Frank Herbert novel about ecology and giant worms. What resulted was a flop that has yet to be remedied by multiple edits over the years. This disc includes…
The diversity is breathtaking. This year’s Miami Jewish Film Festival sprawls with four venues featuring a batch of motion pictures that seem to cover everything Jewish under the sun. Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust and Heaven, klezmer and ska, ambitious masterpieces, family dramas, slapstick comedies, and earnest documentaries add up…
America — and by extension Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes awhile to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized. But…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since Bullets over Broadway. It is not difficult to understand the accolades and affection: It resembles one of his very best movies, 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, down to the plot point in which Martin Landau’s affair with Anjelica Huston…
The Aristocrats (Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians…
Address Unknown (Tartan) Anyone Can Dance: Nightclub Freestyle (Delta) National Lampoon’s Barely Legal (MGM) Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Educating Rita (Sony) Flightplan (Touchstone) The Fog (2005) (Sony) God Save the Queen: A Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hooked (Eclectic) Ludacris: Southern Smoke (Music Video Dist.) My…
Over the centuries, the legend of Tristram and Iseult has fueled the derring-do of King Arthur, aroused Richard Wagner’s operatic thunder, driven poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Edwin Arlington Robinson to the heights of passion, and helped stock the back streets of Manhattan with companies of leaping Jets…
With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant Ivory canon is complete. Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his long-time collaborator and life-companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished period pieces…
This artful and brooding period piece follows John Wilmot (Johnny Depp), a scandalously debauched earl of the English Restoration who apparently was not in contact with feelings of compassion or sympathy. The film opens with an attack — “I am John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, and I do…
