Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia) This 30-track compilation from the old BBC music show is a schizophrenic beast, beginning with the likes of Loggins & Messina and winding up with the Style Council and the Pogues. Which isn’t to say it’s not enjoyable — who doesn’t like…
Adventures of Superman: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Asylum (Paramount) Casino (MCA) Celebrity Mix (TLA) Final Destination: Scared 2 Death Pack (New Line) Gendernauts (First Run) Ghost in the Machine (Anchor Bay) Industrial Strength Keaton (Mackinac Media) Jamie Foxx Presents Laffapalooza! 6 (Image) Junebug (Sony) Lois & Clark: The…
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 a while to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized…
Albert Brooks, the once-funny comic turned filmmaker, plays a once-funny comic turned filmmaker named Albert Brooks in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which he also wrote and directed. It’s the second time Brooks has played himself, more or less; the first was in 1979, when he made Real…
According to Occam’s Razor (Elite Entertainment) Black Books: The First Complete Series (BBC/Warner) The Chumscrubber (DreamWorks) The Constant Gardener (Universal) Dead Poets Society: Special Edition (Touchstone) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Bueller… Bueller… Edition (Paramount) The Flash: The Complete Series (Warner Bros.) The Gambler (Time Life) Hawthorne Heights: This Is Who…
Over the years, moviegoers who double as sports fans have had ample opportunity to pick and choose their favorite miracle — Shoeless Joe Jackson emerging from the tall corn, Rudy suiting up for Notre Dame, Rocky going the distance with Apollo Creed, the U.S. hockey team taking down the Russkies…
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…
When a movie promises that a character played by Queen Latifah may well die during the course of the action, one might hope that the movie in question is Hostel, so that she could be beaten a few times and then dismembered, ideally by someone who sat through The Cookout,…
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…
Sam Peckinpah’s Legendary Westerns Collection (Warner Bros.) At a mere $42 through most websites, this four-film boxed set ranks among the best ever compiled; not only does it contain the restored version of one of the greatest movies of all time (The Wild Bunch), but also three other brilliant westerns…
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…
Broken Flowers (Universal Home Entertainment) Bill Murray, who long ago swapped manic kineticism for melancholy deadpan, is once more mired in a middle-aged funk; what else is new? As Don Johnston, an aging lothario whose latest young girlfriend is walking out as the audience is just settling in, Murray’s on…
All in the Family: The Complete Fifth Season (Columbia/Tristar) Annie Duke’s Beginner’s Guide to Texas Hold ‘Em (Big Vision) As Time Goes By: Reunion Special (PBS) The Cave (Sony) Dumb and Dumber: Unrated (New Line) Football Collection: Radio, Jerry Maguire, and Rudy (Sony) The Gospel (Sony) Green River Killer (Lions…
Hands down the funniest bit from the summer’s raunch smorgasbord The Aristocrats was hearing Sarah Silverman tell the infamously profane family-act joke at the center of Paul Provenza’s documentary. Where Robin Williams, Drew Carey, George Carlin, and a hundred other funny folks were serving up naughty variations in various shades…
For your Heath Ledger holiday-movie options, you have (a) a cowboy in love with another man and (b) history’s most infamous womanizer. Since the name Casanova is synonymous with an unquenchable thirst for straight sex with women (or at least boasting about it), the role might seem to be a…
Ab-Normal Beauty (Tartan) Art of the Devil (Tokyo Shock) Bram Stoker¹s Dracula/Mary Shelley¹s Frankenstein (Sony) Caged Heat (Buena Vista) Dark Water (Buena Vista) Diary of a Mad Black Woman: The Play (Lions Gate) Empire of the Wolves (Sony) 15 Things You¹re Not Supposed to See (Xtreme) Happy Here and Now…
The notion that Wolf Creek is opening nationwide on Christmas Day brings to mind the scene from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas in which a young boy opens his holiday gift and finds a severed head. Wolf Creek is about as diametrically opposed to the concept of “goodwill toward…
Nowhere Man (Image Entertainment) There’s good reason why you’ve never heard of this UPN show from the mid-’90s, which lasted 25 episodes before getting shuttled off to, well, nowhere. It’s a convoluted mind-fuck that owes its existence as much to The Prisoner as The Fugitive, and if you missed one…
It’s impossible to talk about The Ringer, a comedy about someone pretending to be retarded in order to rig the Special Olympics, without mentioning that episode of South Park in which Cartman does the same thing. The Ringer was already in production when that episode was made, and it has…
Serenity (Universal) Joss Whedon’s film version of his TV series Firefly came and went like a lightning bug in October; the predicted phenom stuck around the multiplex just long enough to lose millions. But like Firefly, which sold enough boxed sets to warrant a movie, Serenity’s bound to do well…
Those who will sit around wondering whether Munich is the work of an anti-Israeli or just a self-hating Jew — which is to say, Steven Spielberg, who has been branded both by Israeli officials and newspaper columnists in recent weeks — give the movie and its maker far too much…
One cannot, in good conscience, describe the countless strands of plot and strains of characters skittering through The Family Stone without knowing that description merits at least a snicker… OK, all right, bellowing guffaws. The movie is too overstuffed by half with pointless people and plot lines that dangle like…
