Batman Beyond: Season Three (Warner Bros.) The Bridge on the River Kwai (Sony) Burning Annie (Warner Bros.) The Caine Mutiny (Sony) The Care Bears Movie: 25th Anniversary Limited Edition (MGM) Come Early Morning (Weinstein) Eragon (Fox) The Guns of Navarone (Sony) JAG: The Third Season (Paramount) Justice League Unlimited: Season…
American Cousins (BFS) Appetite for Deconstruction: A Punk Rockumentary (MVD) Barbie Fairytopia: Magic of the Rainbow (Universal) Bloody Reunion (Tartan) Blood Trails (Lions Gate) The Ed Wood Collection: A Salute to Incompetence (Passport) Favela Rising (Netflix) Fires on the Plain: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Gene Autry 100th Anniversary Collection…
The space-time continuum smacks the shit out of Sandra Bullock in Premonition, the latest in nonlinear nonsense, but the fun really gets going when she starts to smack back. As Linda Hanson, humdrum mom of Anywhere, U.S.A., Bullock sets things up by doing her thing, effortlessly establishing the girl next…
Let us applaud, on principle, Anthony Minghella’s return to small-scale storytelling. Breaking and Entering marks his first original screenplay since the oddball romcom Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) and a retreat from the jumbo-sized period pieces of his Miramax-to-the-max phase. Overrated as they are, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley,…
Casino Royale (Sony) James Bond gets a stirring shake-up in the best — yeah, Goldfinger fans, the best — film in the series’ 44-year history. Daniel Craig’s 007 has more going on above the neck and below the waist than even Sean Connery’s. He’s a genuinely compelling character — a…
Long ago, there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amid copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly…
Wild Hogs — in which John Travolta, William H. Macy, Tim Allen, and Martin Lawrence play emasculated suburbanites taking a cross-country motorcycle trip to rediscover their masculinity — doesn’t even sound like a real movie when you describe it to people. They give you that yer-shittin’-me stare, as though it…
Revenge of the Nerds: Panty Raid Edition (Fox) Revenge of the Nerds is a great movie. No, really. It’s got a bitching new-wave soundtrack and some truly inspired performances — memorable enough to wreck the careers of Robert Carradine (Lewis) and Curtis Armstrong (Booger). But mostly it’s the mix of…
A Brush With Death (New Light) Buster Crabbe Collection (St. Clair Vision) Captain Horatio Hornblower (Warner Bros.) Care Bears: Friends Forever (Lions Gate) Commissar (Kino) Confetti (Fox) Death Row (Anchor Bay) The Electric Company’s Greatest Hits & Bits (Shout) Fast Food Nation (Fox) The Full Monty: Fully Exposed Edition (Fox)…
When editorial cartoonist turned amateur sleuth Robert Graysmith published Zodiac, his sprawling, meticulously researched account of the eponymous San Francisco serial killer, he wrote that the tale was “the most frightening story I know,” and it was easy to understand why. Graysmith was writing in 1985, some 16 years after…
It may be hard out there for a pimp, but it ain’t too hard for a writer/director to make a movie whose marketing hinges on the lurid spectacle of Samuel L. Jackson pulling a half-naked Christina Ricci around on a chain. This sort of cheap trick is what they used…
Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (New Line) You probably already know where you stand on Tenacious D, the pudgy hard rock comedy duo that made Jack Black famous. And if you haven’t heard of them, this isn’t the place to start: Their DVD of short films and music…
Bratz: Fashion Pixiez (Lions Gate) Conversations With God (Fox) Cool It Carol (Image) Deep Red (Blue Underground) Dreamland (Image) Filmation’s Ghostbusters (Brentwood) George Carlin: Life Is Worth Losing (MPI) Journey to the End of the Night (First Look) Little Einsteins: The Legend of the Golden Pyramid (Disney) Hawaii, Oslo (Film…
The Number 23 grabs hold of one stupid idea and runs so far with it in so many directions to such little purpose that it nearly won me over from sheer berserkoid effort. In a nutshell, this nutso movie observes what happens to a man (Jim Carrey) under the impression…
We Americans complain of Big Brother’s unblinking eye in the post-Patriot Act, corporate e-mail era — as well we should. But, as The Lives of Others makes plain, things could be worse. Set in East Berlin circa 1984, when one in 100 citizens of the German Democratic Republic was a…
Shut Up & Sing (Genius) It’s a shame that one of 2006’s best documentaries is being released without extras; it would have been nice, for instance, to hear feisty Natalie Maines talk with directors Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck about her reaction to the film, in which the Dixie Chicks…
Apartment Zero (Anchor Bay) Babel (Paramount) The Bros. (Lions Gate) Crooked (Lions Gate) Crossover (Sony) Curious George: Zoo Night and Other Animal Stories (Universal) Dark Castle Horror Collection (Warner Bros.) Flushed Away (Paramount) For Your Consideration (Warner Bros.) Gandhi: 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition (Sony) A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints…
You remember Andrew Ridgeley, don’t you? He was the other guy in Wham!, the one who found himself stranded in 1986, after George Michael had faith enough in his own talents to break up the act. Ridgeley went on to record one solo record before CBS Records decided, yeah, no…
In December 2002, ABC’s 20/20 ran a story on Eric O’Neill, an undercover surveillance specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The piece was titled “Spycatcher,” because it was O’Neill who, at a mere 27 years old, helped bring down Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who, for more than two…
Marie Antoinette (Sony) Sofia Coppola’s third feature grabs you by your frilly lapels from the jump, with Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” showering guitar chords all over the credits as Kirsten Dunst nods to the audience as if to say, Hang tight — this thing’s gonna be a…
Alfred Hitchcock: The Early Years of the Master of Suspense (Lions Gate) All Quiet on the Western Front (Universal) Anything but Love: Volume One (Fox) Arabian Nights (Universal) Best Picture: Academy Award Winners Collection (Paramount) Boynton Beach Club (Sony) Charmed: The Complete Seventh Season (Paramount) Cinderella III: A Twist in…
What could be scarier than yet another PG-13 creepfest serving up pasty, staggering ghouls with stringy hair? Why, the same PG-13 creepfest set against the high-tension backdrop of… sunflower farming! Sorry, fear fans — if you were expecting a Ferry-Morse catalog of floral fright from The Messengers, the latest Hollywood…
