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 Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut (hey, who farted?), all looking great…
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…
These reviews are part of our continuing coverage of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. American Visa. For all of the modern travel conveniences, the distance between two continents can seem as unbridgeable nowadays as it was during the 16th-century Age of Exploration. Bolivian director Juan Carlos Valdivia’s American Visa…
The estranged brothers Whitman have reunited for a journey on board 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),…
AC/DC Grindhouse 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…
Transformers (DreamWorks) No doubt, Michael Bay’s slam-bang action-figure commercial doesn’t play nearly as well on TV, 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. So the first half-hour…
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…
These reviews are part of our continuing coverage of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival: The Wonder of It All. For those of us who are self-proclaimed space-program junkies, the gold standard has long been the Apollo program, which ran from 1961 to 1975 and included six missions that put…
Ang Lee steams up Toronto with Lust, Caution.Sundance signals, for better or worse, the state of American independent filmmaking. Cannes keeps faith, for those who still believe, with the cinema d’auteur. And Toronto? The largest and most important film festival in North America seems to do nearly as many things…
You Kill Me (Genius) Funny thing about seeing Philip Baker Hall in You Kill Me. 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 photo-negative 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 screenwriter of the ice-skating…
Film festivals are tricky. Moviegoers around the world know how hard it is to fill a night with interesting cinema, never mind 37 days. If you’re foolhardy enough to try, you’ve got to be resourceful, cunning, inventive. How else would the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival come up with the…
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: Season One (Animal Planet)Michael Palin: Pole to Pole…
Killer timing! Manda Bala (“Send a Bullet”), Jason Kohn’s vivid, lean-and-hungry documentary about São Paulo’s fatalistic food chain of extreme poverty, violence, unmitigated corruption, and overwhelming wealth arrives just as Vanity Fair’s “Viva Brazil!!” issue hits the stands. Can’t we find a new country to fetishize? Trading once again on…
Caligula: Imperial Edition (Penthouse) (Spoiler alert: fisting!) One day back in the swingin’ ’70s, 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, a 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 possibly suicidal tendencies) who ran away…
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…
Knocked Up (Universal) Apparently, as Judd Apatow was making Knocked Up, he was also prepping for its DVD release, as most of the bonuses here were shot during breaks on location. And they’re no small treats either — finally, here’s a “collector’s edition” worthy of the moniker. Chief among the…
Four decades ago, the American space program was synonymous with the pinnacle of human achievement. Thirty-eight years later, the program that punched a hole in the heavens barely dents the public consciousness. It took a vengeful astronaut in diapers to put NASA back on the nation’s front pages this year…
Director Robert Benton, best-known for his zeitgeisty divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer, has tapped into more than a few current trends in Feast of Love. There are the interlocking ministories, à la Crash; the different color filters for different scenes (happy moments in yellow, sad ones in blue), à la…
As You Like It (HBO) Babel: 2-Disc Collector’s Edition (Paramount Vantage)Broken (Weinstein)The Bronx Is Burning (ESPN)Building Bombs (New Video Group)Chalk (Arts Alliance America)Cinema 16: European Short Films (Warp)Cujo: 25th Anniversary Edition (Lionsgate)Davey and Goliath: The Lost Episodes (Starlight)Drawn Together: Season Two (Paramount)11:59 (Tartan)George Carlin: All My Stuff (MPI)I Like Killing…
Late at night, alone in the woods, a group of film students at work on a no-budget horror film called The Death of Death are interrupted by — the death of death. Reports of animated corpses feeding on human flesh come over the radio and are met with nervous skepticism;…
