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…
This is not George Lazenby making his doomed run at James Bond or even Mel Gibson presuming to play Hamlet. This is serious heresy, combined with a touch of felonious assault. It has evidently not occurred to Steve Martin that, just as there is only one Eiffel Tower, there is…
That Curious George existed at all — much less as a franchise, an icon enduring some 65 years — was a result of “happy circumstance,” wrote Houghton Mifflin publisher Anita Silvey with some understatement in 1991, upon the 50th-anniversary publication of The Complete Adventures of Curious George. Silvey and critic…
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. Mega-stereotype…
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 C.I.A…
It happens so often these days. A comedy opens with clever jokes, endearing characters, and an enjoyably brisk pace, all of which put you at ease. This’ll be fun, you think, settling into your chair. Someone trustworthy is driving, so let’s enjoy the ride. And then, just when you thought…
Wallace & 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) The 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) Cote D’Azur (Strand) Daltry Calhoun (Miramax) Doom: Unrated Extended Edition (Universal) Elizabethtown (Paramount) Eros (Warner Bros.) Grounded for Life: Season 1…
January has earned its reputation as the month in which studios unload all their cheapie horror flicks, but February is the month when we invariably get yet another middle-of-the-road black-urban-professional romantic comedy. (It’s both Black History and Valentine’s month, hence the logic.) In that regard, Something New is anything but…
The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Mrs. Henderson Presents are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgiaphiles, theater buffs, and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench, Stephen Frears’ period frolic is this year’s Being Julia, adorned with the…
A 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…
Anthony Hopkins lends style points to any movie in which he appears. The thing may be a dog, but the actor who brought the gruesome psychopath Hannibal Lecter to life and got deep inside a repressed English butler always gives us something fascinating to behold. The depth and gravity of…
Yes, the title’s a problem. Three of Hearts was a 1993 romantic comedy starring Kelly Lynch, Sherilyn Fenn, and William Baldwin, a distasteful clunker that traded on male titillation with lesbians and bisexual women. Worse, the poster for the new Three of Hearts is achingly similar to that of its…
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 through the years. This disc includes…
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 all new things to be afraid of; some fear being prey for terrorists, while others fear the government’s response, but both have…
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 longtime collaborator and life companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished period…
There is evidently no limit to the sacrifices actors will make for their art. If you thought beautiful Charlize Theron went the distance by transforming herself into a bloated, scowling murderess for Monster, just wait till you and the kids get a load of Emma Thompson in the darkly amusing…
No one has ever mistaken Rocky Balboa for an officer and a gentleman, but that’s just about what we get in the numbingly predictable and none-too-stirring Annapolis, an underdog-makes-good boxing movie stuffed inside what amounts to a U.S. Navy recruiting pitch, with a dash of Good Will Hunting tossed in…
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 Lampoon¹s 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…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since… oh, let’s see… Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff since. It’s not difficult to understand…
