Angel-A (Sony) The Batman: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Bill Maher: The Decider (HBO) Broken (First Look) Chappelle’s Show: The Series Collection (Paramount) CSI: Crime Scene Investigation The Complete Seventh Season (Paramount) Eric Clapton: Crossroads Guitar Festival 2007 (Rhino) Gene Simmons Family Jewels: The Complete Season 2 (A&E) Hairspray…
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Paramount) At last available on DVD, Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary about her husband’s tumultuous trek downriver remains, easily, the best film ever about the making of a movie and unmaking of a man. Francis Ford Coppola thought he was going to spend 16 weeks…
The Princess Bride: 20th Anniversary Edition (MGM) As far as anniversary-edition DVDs go, The Princess Bride is crushingly disappointing: no Rob Reiner commentary track, no outtakes, no making-of doc, no nothing, save for a lousy game and a few short interviews with Robin Wright Penn, Mandy Patinkin, Christopher Guest, and…
Hold still” — it’s what the hunters say to the hunted in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men. The first time we hear it, it’s the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on…
Midway through the amiable children’s movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium comes a speech that writer-director Zach Helm probably has been saving for use ever since he discovered the Bard. As pop philosophy goes, it’s bracing stuff: Paraphrasing King Lear, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman) — a 243-year-old “toy impresario” with shell-shocked…
This is easily — easily — the worst adaptation of a major novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author. Director Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and writer Ronald Harwood have rendered Gabriel García Márquez’s novel little more than a sudsy telenovela — Lifetime by way of Telemundo…
The Addams Family: The Complete Series (MGM) Amazing Grace (Fox) Annie Duke’s Texas Hold’em Supercourse (Big Vision) Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Close Encounters of the Third Kind: 30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition (Sony) Gilmore Girls: The Complete Seventh Season (Warner Bros.) It’s a Wonderful Life: 2-Disc Collector’s Set (Paramount)…
Back in the day, he was Cassius Clay, a handsome and sharp young boxer with a smart mouth and a knack for showmanship. He had won the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics, but he hungered for a new title — Sonny Liston’s world heavyweight championship, to be…
Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 (Genius) On the heels of the Electric Company box sets, which were at once educational and groovy as all get-out, comes the latest in greatest hits from Sesame Street before the neighborhood was gentrified for Elmo’s protection. Chief among the copious highlights in this…
After making a mint off a series about nothing, Jerry Seinfeld apparently decided his first feature film ought to be about something — in the case of Bee Movie, the enslavement and torture of bees for the pleasure and profit of humans, which is, like, hilarious. It’s rather tempting to…
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs might be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy — and it wasn’t even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The…
In keeping with the series’ preference for the literal over the mythic, Saw IV offers no miraculous, Michael Myers-style resurrection for torture artiste John “Jigsaw” Kramer (Tobin Bell), who went out with a bang at the end of Saw III and makes his first appearance here as the toe-tagged specimen…
The Best of the Colbert Report (Paramount) Blame It on Fidel! (Koch Lorber) Blood Car (TLA) The Crown Prince (Koch) Deck the Halls (Fox) Election (Tartan) Flight of the Conchords: The Complete First Season (HBO) Help!: Deluxe Edition (Capitol) I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (Universal) James Bond Ultimate…
The Amicus Collection (Dark Sky) Angel: Complete Series Collector’s Set (Fox) Beastie Boys: The Complete Story (Video Music) Benny Hill: The Complete Megaset (A&E) A Christmas Story (Warner Bros.) CSI Miami: The Fifth Season (Paramount) The Cup (Festival Media) Day Watch (Fox) Dear Jesse (Sovereign) The Devil Came on Horseback…
No End in Sight (Magnolia) Charles Ferguson’s debut doc, easily the most important in a year full of notable fact-gathering films, assembles some of the key players behind the invasion and occupation of Iraq and seems to ask them but one question: “What went wrong?” In short: everything. But Ferguson’s…
American Gangster is a movie with obvious gravitas and a familiar argument: Organized crime is outsider capitalism. As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott’s would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson…
John Cusack, who more or less began his career sneaking a peek at Molly Ringwald’s panties in Sixteen Candles, has finally become an onscreen daddy — only took, what, 23 years? Except he’s not exactly the most fortunate family man on film: First, in Martian Child he plays a widower…
An irresistible subject for a documentary: the charming celebrity of Marla Olmstead, an artist from upstate New York whose talent for impossibly confident abstractions triggered a media frenzy and five-figure price tags. Unveiled at a local coffee shop, Marla’s middling AbEx doodles might not have inspired more than a glance…
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 Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut (hey, who farted?),…
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…
I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pablum that hopscotches among the points of view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad, and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run…
Kenneth Branagh’s ferociously arty, vacuous remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1972 screen version of Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 stage play pares the action down to a slim two-hander in which a famous English writer (Michael Caine) plays cat’s paw with his wife’s lover, a cocky arriviste played by that other Alfie,…
