For those of us who dug Rob McKittrick’s recent comedy Waiting…, Just Friends offers up some good news: Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris are together again as a dysfunctional couple. He’s a slick music executive named Chris Brander, still traumatized at having gotten the “Let’s just be friends” speech from…
A tale of deception, betrayal, and revenge, this contemporary Greek tragedy — complete with an unwitting Medea — becomes so overwrought in the last act that it’s sure to lose your sympathies. Three likable and fundamentally decent individuals — a Hollywood studio executive, his wife, and a screenwriter whose script…
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Fox) The pairing of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, both in real life and on celluloid, is so obvious as to be almost cartoonish. So even though both are better actors than they need to be, they perfectly belong in this goofy, explosiony world. Married assassins,…
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Empire) Caterina in the Big City (Empire) CSI: Five-Season Pack (Paramount) Death to the Supermodels (Columbia/Tristar) Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (Columbia/Tristar) Empire (Buena Vista) Family Guy: Volume 3 (Fox) Formula 17 (Strand) The Frighteners: Director’s Cut (Universal) The Hives: Tussles in Brussels (Universal Music)…
Punishment Park (New Yorker Video) This 1971 movie from director Peter Watkins could have been made yesterday, which is no doubt why it finally sees video release long after accruing cult status. Born of the filmmaker’s outrage over the Kent State killings, the war in Vietnam, and other abominations of…
AVP: Alien Vs. Predator — Unrated Collector’s Edition (Fox) Cheaper by the Dozen: Baker’s Dozen Edition (Fox) 8MM 2 (Columbia/Tristar) Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (Buena Vista) The Honeymooners (Paramount) Keane: Strangers (Interscope) King Kong (1976) (Paramount) King Kong: Collector’s Edition (1933) (Warner Bros.) King of the Hill: Season 5 (Fox)…
Ever since its Broadway debut in 1996, Rent has generated a loyal, almost cultlike following. Showered with praise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical touched a nerve among the young, artistic, gay, urban, and alternatively dressed people who identified as outsiders and wondered how they would make their way in the world…
Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) is a big-time attorney in a small-time town looking to make a break for it on Christmas Eve, so he and porn-makin’ partner Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) steal two million dollars from a mob boss. Charlie looks like he’s got his shit together, but he’s merely…
Writer and director Noah Baumbach has made three light films — one so slight (1997’s party-hopping Highball) it didn’t see release until five years after its completion, and even then it snuck onto video-store shelves credited to a pseudonymous writer and director. There was nothing on his filmography — not…
Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Three-Disc Set (Columbia Home Video) The centerpiece of this three-disc boxed set isn’t the classic 1975 album, but the two DVDs that come with it. On one, shot in London in 1975, Bruce and the band tear through most of Born to Run and its…
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Wellspring) The Ed Sullivan Show Rock & Roll Classics Boxed Set (Sofa Entertainment) Fantasy Island: The Complete First Season (Columbia/Tristar) Friends: The Complete Tenth Season (Warner Bros.) Friends: Collector’s Box (Warner Bros.) Greg Behrendt Is Uncool (WEA) Guided by Voices: The Electrifying Conclusion (Plexifilm)…
The part with the dragon is really cool. Might as well cut to the chase, right? It’s not as though you need anybody to tell you the basic premise of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; if you somehow missed the last three, this won’t likely be the one…
About halfway through Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the new movie starring rapper 50 Cent (a.k.a. Curtis Jackson) and loosely based on his life, 50’s character Marcus is in prison, being visited by his girlfriend Charlene (Joy Bryant). Surprised by his inability to communicate with her, she asks the gangsta…
The nasty French villain in Mikael Håfstrom’s thriller, played with obvious relish by Vincent Cassel, is the best thing about this neo-noir rehash of everything from Double Indemnity to Cape Fear to Fatal Attraction. Whether squeezing his victim’s testicles into a knot or exchanging ironic banter with a henchman, Cassel’s…
Richard Gere? That’s the first thought that came to mind upon learning that Mr. Salt-and-Pepper-Sexy-Buddhist-WASP had been cast as Saul Naumann in Bee Season, the film version of Myla Goldberg’s best-selling novel. In the book, Saul is an oppressive and learned Jewish patriarch, a cantor and student of mysticism whose…
You’d think that anyone possessed of the notion that “the Jews” are one monolithic whole that thinks and acts alike need only take a look at, say, wrestler Bill Goldberg, Hollywood hottie Natalie Portman, shock jock Howard Stern, and nebbishy right-wing scold Michael Medved to have that idea instantly dispelled…
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…
As a screenwriter, Shane Black has built a reputation on action movies featuring mismatched partners. Crazy Mel Gibson and aging Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon; sassy Samuel L. Jackson and amnesiac hit woman/housewife Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight; burnout detective Bruce Willis and football player Damon Wayans in…
If ever there were a bit of material not in need of a good dusting, it’s this Jane Austen novel; no more mystery can be wrung from its machinations, after all. Yet what could have been dreary and old-fashioned, this potential montage of bodices and balls sure to glaze the…
Pay attention, Disney: This is how you do a family film right. Neither pandering nor dull, Zathura plays exactly like a no-limits replica of the kind of space adventure that imaginative kids left to their own devices might enact. Assuming there’s no Xbox to distract them, naturally. Loosely based on…
Chicken Little is a groundbreaking movie in more ways than one. Not only is it Disney’s first in-house all-computer-generated feature, but also, on select screens, it will be presented in Disney Digital 3-D, a brand-new system created with the help of George Lucas’s special-effects company Industrial Light & Magic. It’s…
It’s been 85 years since Douglas Fairbanks slashed his way into the top tax bracket as the masked hero Zorro, and Hollywood still can find no reason to shut down the franchise. Technically speaking, The Legend of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the guy with the sword and Catherine Zeta-Jones…
